Yucca Campground

Stayed in the Yucca campground area with electric because it was hot! Nightly rate is $14 or $4 with New Mexico Annual camping permit. This campground area has a shelter over the picnic table for each site and has varied degrees of privacy. New shower/restroom in this area of the campground. Not real crowded as it was Sunday evening but gets busy during the weekend. Probably still don't need reservations unless you want a specific site. Water levels way down, but Q-dog got in a little swim.

No cell service with Verizon.

Same review as others. Nice spots, electric. Ramadas in some spots, close to lake.
Boat launch available.

This is a nice park for an overnight stay. I did learn the hard way staying close the ranger station will not prevent loud car sound system and party type noises from the trailer park at 1am located closest to the ranger station as you enter the park. There is also a lot of wind, biting/stinging insects (once the wind dies down) and noxious weeds with ball shaped thorny seed pods that get stuck in my dogs feet pads, they are hard to avoid but very common in this area. On the upside there are flush and vault restrooms through out the park, a large dump station as you exit the park, most sites have water+electric and are spaced enough so moderate noise from other guests cannot be easily heard. Mobile phone coverage is great and free wifi in the park. Very mild temps in mid October, I would stay here again.

Great choice - beautiful location!

Coming from CA where you dry camp near water for $50/night, this place was pretty incredible. $14/night, barely anyone else here, and beautiful views of the Ute Reservoir lake.

We were looking for a place to stay the night once we passed Albuquerque heading East. Ute State Park is about 25 minutes from the highway and cell coverage maps indicated this would be a good place to do some remote work.

The North Camground is made up of several subdivided camping areas, including Yucca. Yucca is definitely the best one of them if you have a camper or RV. Each site has water and electric hookups, and I saw at least two sites with sewer as well (though I think those were reserved for the camp hosts).

Proximity to the lake was nice, but no real “beach” per se. If you want wanted to launch a kayak or something were at least two places to easily do that.

The Verizon cell signal was 1 bar of 3G, but the ATT signal was about 2-3 bars of LTE. Unboosted with my iPhone X I got about 90 Mbps down (yes, 90, not a typo). My 5 year old ATT hotspot didn’t do as well but still pulled in a respectable 15 Mbps with the Netgear MIMO antenna. The campground itself also had WiFi, which is pretty rare for a state park, and it was just OK... about 3 Mbps down.

It was also very windy when we were here, not sure if that’s a regular occurrence or not.

We arrived on a weekday without reservation and chose a beautiful site in the second row at Yucca Campground (first row sites are only by reservation). All sites are spacious pull-throughs (easily fit a large rig, car & boat) and some sites have trees in between them, so you have even more privacy and shade in the summer. Bathrooms and showers were clean and ok for a state park. A big plus is also the parks wifi, a little slow but still ok for some work and watching a movie. Oh, and not to forget the camp hosts, who are just awesome and always on top of things.

Great large sites, nice camp host and so inexpensive! We practically had the park to ourselves, the restroom house is clean, saw wild turkeys and the lake views are fantastic!

We were grateful when NM State Parks opened on Oct. 1 but only to residents of NM. We purchased an annual camping pass which allows us to use a campsite with electricity for $4.00. However the Reserve America fees still apply. Campers must have made a reservation with Reserve American in advance, no drop-ins. Only 1 campground is open right now, and it's by far the least attractive. We looked a some of the closed campgrounds, and they appear to be a lot nicer. This campground is basically a huge parking lot with a few trees, and very long pull throughs with electricity, water, and covered picnic tables. The bathrooms were extremely filthy! There was no one to check us in, and we never saw any rangers patrolling. Out of 147 campsites, only 5 were occupied. We thought the lake was a fantastic place for kayaking and fishing, so enjoyed our stay at this beautiful lake very much. While we camped at the North Campground, we went up to the Logan Park area to launch the kayaks. The campsites up here looked very nice.

We made reservations at three different New Mexico State Parks and spent a total of $56 dollars through Reserve America this fall. We had planned to stay at three different parks during the month of October, and made our reservations in mid-July. We made these reservations in good faith, and found out later the State had closed Parks to out of state visitors, with an order that was eventually extended affected our reservations. The State of New Mexico canceled our reservations (we had no intention of cancelling) and ended up charging us a 50% cancellation fee and refunding the remaining $28. There reason for withholding 50% is due to a Reserve America transaction fee. But Reserve America is serving as New Mexico’s agent so its the same as the State Parks taking the money. $28 isn’t much money, neither is the $56 dollars but its the principle of it. Through no fault of ours, New Mexico has collected $28 dollars from us for doing absolutely nothing. No credit issued, no apology. We love NM State Parks but will certainly think twice before ever planning to stay in one again since they seem more interested in our money than developing long term relationships

Stayed here in early March 2020 on our way from Yuma to Chicago. Not much going on while we were here as there wasn't very many campers here. Too bad we paid an $8 reservation fee, but since the NM State Park we were coming from a week early was completely full and we were super lucky the camp host there was able to get us a spot, we figured we'd need to have a reservation. Wrong!
The area around the lake is home to several different campgrounds. At this one, the area is wide open and set up as super-long pull thrus, each with a concrete pad with a covered picnic table.
Though we didn't paddle while we were here, it looks like this would be a good place to do some fishing and kayaking.