White Tank Campground

This is your typical NPS campground, with limited service. That's OK, it's not expensive ($15, 50% off with the geezer pass). It's clean, there are great views of rock formations, and many of the camp sites are tucked into rock formations. However, most of the sites on the east side of the campground back up to a short hiking trail. If you camp at one of these sites, you will have gapers walking thru your site all day. You will also have tourists park their car in front of your site, blocking you in..cause god help them if they have to walk an extra 100 yards before they hike!
It's an otherwise nice place.
Oh, there is also zero cell service, FYI.

White Tank is reminiscent of its well loved next door neighbor, Belle Campground, in that the sites are tucked into Joshua Tree's famous rock formations. The campground is small, best for tents, camper vans and truck campers. Anything bigger will have a hard time squeezing into a site and leveling.

The problem with White Tank is the trailhead. There's a small trail that leaves from the campground and climbs around on those famous rocks. The trail goes straight through the campground, which means people will be tromping through your campsite at all hours. It's noisy and busy. There's a lot of traffic from visitors trying to squeeze "one more car" into the limited parking. Some will give up and simply park in front of your site instead.

There are much better options in the park. White Tank is pretty, but too busy for my taste.

We got to the park around 8:30 am on Thursday to grab a spot in November, Belle was already completely full, but we managed to get one of two spots left at White Tank and the spot we got (10) was fantastic. It’s tucked off the main circle some and surrounded by boulders so despite the fact that there were people around us we couldn’t see any of them.

Cell service is non existent here, although with some extra height added to our weboost our hotspot was able to pick up 1 bar of LTE which allowed for messaging but mot speeds fast enough for even web browsing.

There is a hike and trailhead located right in the campground for easy exploring and we enjoyed just climbing all over the boulders.

Picnic tables, fire pits and grills at each campsite. Vault toilets and dumpsters/recycling on premises. No water available, no hook ups.

Great spot for a night with boulders to create shade during the heat of the day. Picnic table, fire pit, and drop toilets. We took some nice star pics. Personally I thought it was prettier than Belle, but I haven’t checked out any of the other campsites in the park.

I arrived at approx 4p on a Monday in October and there were about 5 open spots but everyone was taken that night. It’s quite crowded and hikers climb over every rock, no matter how close they are to your site. It’s breathtaking beautiful but it was pretty loud until about 11p.

Small sites with pit toilets. The most beautiful peaceful scenery ever.

Arrived before a holiday weekend and had to do some hunting for a spot; for super luckily and found a spot. After that I rarely saw a vacated spot.
Gorgeous rocks, killer sunsets and sunrises, very peaceful. If you have solar try to nab one of the spots towards the end of the loop; less shade from rocks Starlink worked perfectly out here, even in peak hours.
Next time I am lucky enough to nab a spot I will make sure I’m stocked up for two weeks.

joshua tree is such an amazing place we were fortunate to find a campsite early saturday morning. campsite was full we got lucky a couple was breaking camp when we arrived. we camped at campsite 7 which is located on the main road of the campground only complain is there was no privacy from the passing cars and people walking by. besides that this campground is so beautiful, surrounded by rock formations and joshua trees. arch rock and heart rock are a short hike away. definitely will come back to this campground not so much the campsite

Perhaps even better than jumbo rocks.

A little bothersome with all the traffic in and out looking for camp sites; however, overall we throughly enjoyed camping 3 nights at white tank. I think we probably lucked out and got the best site there snuggled up against a big rock- definitely look for site #8. We managed to get our 22 ft trailer in, but it could be tight for some units.