Walton Peak Dispersed Camping

So if you go to the end of the road, top of the hill, you can overlook the tree lines and see some pretty breathtaking views. It was very windy at the top of the hill so tent campers, beware... not much shade or trees at the top of the hill near the fire pit but enough nearby to find some reprieve from the sun during the day if there are no clouds. Would totally come back and camp here again!

Views are amazing at the top! If you can get the one coveted spot you are going to love it even more. If you're a group you can get several in that area.

You never now if the cell service is what the bars say. I was at a spot last month with 4 bars and could not get any work done. Here the service is excellent! Verizon 5 bars. That being said, it's the service you get at the very top. It's not very good lower down the road.

Awesome, free spot with beautiful views. My spot wasn’t too close to the stream but could walk a short way to get water. Cell signal is great. I have a signal booster which helps- with booster I get ping 50, download 9.6mbps, upload 5.3mbps on Verizon. The mosquitos are BAD though. Mid-July and I’ve only had company nearby on the weekends. Otherwise it’s just me, the mosquitos, and the deer. Steamboat is a 30 minute drive from here.

I drove in about 2.6 miles to a spot off on the left. The spots before this one were all taken but this spot turned out to be beautiful! It was a nice hike to the very top of the hill where the tower is and a beautiful panoramic view. The bugs were pretty bad in early August, but that's the wilderness!

The road in was totally doable at a slower pace in my 24' class c. The last couple spots above where I was at were more for tent campers though as the turnoffs weren't very driveable.

The service was definitely spotty at best. I sometimes had 1 or maybe 2 bars of AT&T 3G and sometimes no service at all. Definitely not enough to pull anything up on my laptop.

We had scouted this place out back in June and were able to find a prime location, far enough from 40 to barely hear it, but close enough to have reasonable cell phone service.

The road gets pretty rutted the further up you go. So we knew we wanted to be in one of the flatter sections nearer the entrance.

I just checked in here for the night. Reception was best down near the highway, then dropped out entirely, and kicked back in as I climbed the road to the top. Overall, proximity to water was surrounded by overgrown (well, its the wilderness, so, just "grown") tall grasses, making for lots of bugs. The road up was bumpy, but doable. There is 1 prime spot at the top, with a pretty incredible view. But there's no water access up there. And somebody else was in that spot, so I pulled off beside them... not so level and no views to speak of.

Worked fine for a night, but was happy to hit the road in the morning too. The campsite was overall pretty nice, but the very limited reception was a key limitation for me. No single site could bring together all the desirable amenities: water access, reception, views, level pad. But, the price is right!

Stayed at the end of the road at the top of the mountain. There were 2 sites up top, one at the very end and one right before that. I chose the one before as the top site, while it had great views, was very open with no tree cover and it was a little windy. Very quiet. The road up was mostly fine, but as you start to ascend, there were a couple of spots that still had some snow and were a little bumpy. Would definitely come back here. No amenities so you need to bring whatever you need and pack it all out. Sites were very clean though. No trash. My site had ants though. There was a huge ant nest near one of the trees.

We are full-timers and have a 36 ft Class A with a Cherokee Trailhawk tow and had scouted the area a day before arriving with the RV. There are several sites along FR-302, which is actually in pretty decent shape, one about 1/2 mile in, several about a mile in at FR-3021B, which is where we stayed (to the left), and then a few more about another mile in or so. We found a nice site (40.3749046, -106.6699622) and stayed for 5 days (late June). It took a bit of jockeying to get our motorhome into the site, but with a little perseverance, we prevailed. This site was surprisingly level too, almost didn’t need to level at all. There was one beautiful site in a meadow about 1/4 past the one we chose, but the stretch of dirt road between them was deeply rutted and potholed, with a couple of sections that were fairly steeply pitched from side to side, so we decided not to risk it. They were also predicting rain, which it did for a couple days, and didn’t want to get stuck in the mud holes. There is a nice little stream that runs from the meadow along the road. There is little traffic on FR-302, which was nice, though you could hear some traffic on US-40 when it was otherwise quiet. We walked our dog on FR-302 a fair bit and only once encountered a vehicle on the road. There are a number of hiking trails off of US-40 in the surrounding area, but due to the weather, we didn’t get to hike them as much as we would have liked. AT&T coverage was poor without a booster, with 0-2 Bars of 3G service, but nearly no data throughput. With our weboost, it got a little better with 1-3 bars of 3G and speeds up to about 0.4 MB/s, but the speed varied considerably. T-Mobile service was nonexistent. We were able to get DISH coverage on all three western satellites at our site. There were also no OTA channels to be had with our fixed omni antenna.

First you have to get up on Rabbit Ears Pass (a 3000+ foot gain over Steamboat Springs), then you need to navigate 3.5 miles of dirt/gravel road (2WD just fine) to get to the end of County Road 302. And finally, another 1/8 mile of nasty, mean, rutted, rocky, dangerous path and you are rewarded - if you do not damage anything - with one of the most amazing spots in all of Colorado.

There is only room for a few rigs up here, and only one gets the commanding scenic view, but it is worth it no matter what. Considering how far out you have to travel to get here, you can still hear some of the highway noise at night.

PS - there are other spots along the road leading in as well.

OK so we were looking to find a place where we can enjoy our stay with a really nice view for us and our family.

So we did a little research on campsites especially those that were free until I ran into this website and read reviews about this place.

It was our first campsite to check out and we went around the Steamboat area -for about four hours- to obviously find everything was full, so we decided to come back to this place and I can say that by far one of the most amazing view, just breathtaking to watch the sunrise in the morning and to see the stars at night while you're camping next to the campfire 🔥.