Bombo's Pond

If it’s free, I generally give 5 stars because I didn’t pay money for any services. But this is also a nice clean spot to stop right off the road. Traffic noise dies down overnight. I was here alone, except for a dude fishing off his kayak in the pond. Later a family in a 5th Wheel pulled up and we had a quiet night. Some fire rings, some churned up soil here and there but very easy to get level.

Nice level area on the far side of the pond from the road. You have to drive along the edge of the pond to get to it, but I had no issue with my rig. A lot of locals come to the pond to fish for the stocked trout, but otherwise pretty quiet. Beatty is just a couple of miles and Rhyolite ghost town just s few miles past that.
The local burros that hang out there are entertaining, but almost overly friendly. They're probably used to being fed by visitors.
Road noise was surprisingly minimal being not far off the highway. I slept with my windows open and enjoyed the bullfrog chorus from the pond at night.
While I had good signal on both Verizon and AT&T data was a bit slow though I was able to stream video with some buffering.

We're on our way to Death Valley and found this spot about 10 miles from the park. Spending 2 nights so as to explore the ghost town Rhyolite.
There was 1 other camper the 1st night. They left early the next day.
The spot is very close to the highway, but the noise was minimal.
Don't drive up the hill on Vanderbilt Road. We did with our 23 ft travel trailer. Almost a mile up this dirt road is a locked gate and a sign indicating private property. There is NO place to turn around and I had to back the entire way down the hill. Not really much fun.
The pond is nice. Not large but pretty deep and actually has trout.
Overall a nice 2 night stay. We will stay again sometime.

We arrived before sunset, thank goodness! The area wasn’t marked, but there were a number of other campers there. The problem we had was our length and the sort of wash out gully in the gravel to get in. And the area isn’t very level. But for overnight and we were already there! The pond itself is very pretty, but we couldn’t navigate our 40’ dp around where some smaller units were.

Great little stop. Close-ish to Death Valley NP, ghost town rhyolite is a few miles away with cool art installations. Beatty for food gas and wild burro watching. We were there on a Saturday and there were quite a few ohv campers, all quiet and Courteous. We’ve been a few times and love it here. Definitely worth the stop. A bit sandy/gravel in the camping area.

Vanderbilt Pond/Bombo's Pond is one of our go-to stopovers in southern Nevada. Finding a level-enough-to-work-with spot can be a little challenge. Clientele is hit-or-miss. We've never had huge issues but there's often trash left behind (particularly in fire rings) by less-considerate campers. Largely our experience is everyone leaves appropriate space and honors the invisible boundaries but (like everywhere, unfortunately) we did have issues with off-leash dogs encroaching on our leashed dog's space and causing some strife.

If you can score the concrete pad up the hill from the pond, you're golden. We've gotten lucky on that once and it was great. Just watch for the rebar sticking out of the edges. Folks have piled rocks around as indicators but definitely do your own recon before pulling in and out.

Also, remember this is Nevada. It gets really, really windy. Be prepared to hunker down inside your rig if need be.

Decent enough AT&T and Verizon cell service to get some work done.

Road Noise: There can be significant road noise in the main camping area closer to the road which gets a lot of traffic. Up on the concrete pad it tends to be a low hum. As my partner says though, 'If you close your eyes, you can pretend it's the sound of the ocean."