The Dalles Campground

General: Really nice little campground. We met the camp host, he was awesome. Asked about our stay, if there was anything he could do, etc. Big old growth trees. Half the sites are close to the road, shoot for the riverside ones, if you can.

Location: The location is fantastic. It's about 15 minutes to the entrance to the National Park and the Crystal Mountain road. About one hour down to Paradise or Sunrise. About two hours back to Seattle via Rt 167 and I-5.

RV specific: All dry spots, no water or electricity, no dump station on site. The solar panel on our camper picked up some power for our batteries, despite the heavy tree cover. Most of the sites are not very deep, so if you have a huge RV/trailer it might be tight. Ours is a 22' r-pod and it fit, but we had to sort of parallel park the tow vehicle in front of it to fit. There's water spigots around, so despite the dry spot we were able to run a hose from our site to a spigot to fill our fresh tank.

Would definitely stay there again.

This campground is a little slice of heaven, located just outside the entrance to Mt. Rainier NP. The sites are large and treed, providing adequate shade. There's no electricity, but you are allowed to use a generator. Water spigots are throughout the park, so no worries there. If given a choice, choose a site on the river...it's much quieter. We stayed along the highway side, but still had an enjoyable time.

This was a very nice campground and the location was excellent. Nice jumping off point to head into Mt. Rainier NP and into the National Forest trails either on foot or on the service roads. We ended up with a highway side site and would agree with the other reviews that it was quite noisy with the road traffic passing by. The other side of the loop near the river the traffic sounds were almost non-existent. I would definitely recommend trying to determine site logistics if you can prior to reserving. We have a 28 ft. travel trailer and our site specified a 45 ft back-in drive. It was definitely not 45 ft. and we barely fit as it was also a very tight area to back in. There were quite a few other sites that would have been more than adequate and when I went back to look on recreation.gov they were actually listed as shorter than out site. But now we know and we would definitely head back here in the future. I noted that we had no AT&T service. We didn't at our site and through most of the campground but there was a pocket of service on the interpretive trail near the picnic area for AT&T.

The sites are heavily wooded and spaced far enough apart for a lot of privacy. Try to stay as close to the river as possible to drown out the highway noise. About half of the campsites are reservable and the other half are walkup. Read the dates carefully on the reserved sites as you may be able to squeeze in 1-2 nights on a normally reservable site. I stayed on a Wed-Fri in July. Campground was full by 5 pm on Thur night so arrive early. Did not fill up Wed night. Camp host was very accommodating. Firewood for sale on site. If into mountain biking try taking The Dalles River Trail to connect to the forest road to the Skookum River Trail. It will keep you off the highway.

The trees here are monstrous beauty’s. The spots are fairly spaced out too. Very easy to get to, plus it’s close to Mount Rainier NP. My site wasn’t on the water ($2 premium) but it wasn’t at the road either. If you stayed on the water, I’m sure the river noise would drown out the road noise. Overall, not a bad site. I had 1 bar of LTE if I was lucky. If you need to send a mess safe, just walk around a little bit and you’ll pick up enough to do what you need to do.

Th Dalles campground was wonderful! It was right off 410 and had a smaller loop with campsites in the inside and outside of the loop. Campsites had a good Amount of space in between them so you didn’t feel like you were on top of your neighbor!half of the spots on the outside of the loop were right next to the highway.. the other half were right next to the river. There was a cool trail you could hike as well! No hook ups, no cell service. Only noise was the cars driving by, which we didn’t mind!

We were cheating on our spot over at La Wis Wis as the Lady and I snuck away from the rest of the family to spend a night with some friends from Seattle. We'd initially hoped to stay in White River, but showing up on a Saturday is like trying to eat bacon with invisible chop sticks, so we hiked around awhile and started heading north in search of some national forest.

It took us three or four campgrounds before we found the last spot at Dalles. In a previous review of La Wis Wis, I spoke of big old growth trees. That is nothing compared to this place. Nearly every Douglas-fir here is a few hundred years old.

The highway runs very near the non-river spots, which were--as usual--the best, but aside from the noise of everyone racing back and forth from civilization to Mt. Rainier, this place would be a real winner.

Take a few beers or a picnic down to the water and watch the sun set over the White River, or just marvel at the size of the trees as you toss a frisbee around, whatever you want to do man, it's your weekend.

As you enter the park there's a sign for a 9.5' diameter Doug-fir. A 1,000 year old tree.

We were all eager to check it out...and then sadder than a kitten with no tail to see that it had been felled.

Some human, some forest service manager who decided that it would be better to cut down something that had survived fire and logging and wind for a century than to simply close a couple of campsites, well, he won out the day in destroying one of the few remaining trees of this size and age. I'm sure he thought it was for a good reason. Keeping people safe. Keeping the campground open.

Whatever the thought process, it's a true tragedy and I would rather see a few families find another place to camp than to have put this tree to the ground just so we could score the last spot on a Saturday.

If you don't care as much about such things, though, you may find it incredibly enjoyable, particularly if none of Mt. Rainier proper is available.

No service here, either, FYI.