Foot Bridge Road Dispersed Camping

There are 2 large sites and 3 smaller ones on the top of the bluff. I had the 4th spot from the road. 25' trailer fit perfectly and level. View of the San Juan River was great. Across the river is a cliff dwelling. Very cool.
There is also 1 site down the bluff towards the river.
Quiet, peaceful, 4 of the nights I was the only one there.

We picked this place to stay a few days while working from our class A motorhome. Access was good, cellphone signal was sufficient, barely any other people around, and yet close to Monument Valley and alll other attractions in the area.
Note this is on the north shore of the San Juan River, along Hwy. 162 about 3 miles east of Bluff.

We were in New Mexico and heading north to Idaho, and needed a way-stop along the way. My husband found this on Campendium but it had no reviews so we had absolutely no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

WOW, WHAT A FIND!

First off, not the easiest place in the world to find, but not the hardest, either. You're going to turn off 162 and head north on the nicest paved road you've been on for a very long time (at least if you're coming from New Mexico!) Eventually, this turns to a dirt road, but it's still a *very* nice dirt road – not potted or gutted at all. Eventually, this turns into an awful dirt road that shakes your insides apart. Weeeeeee!!!

The rutted dirt road will lead you down into a canyon with gorgeous sandstone walls on both sides. Drive down that road until you see the old falling-down shack on the right hand side (see my pictures for a pic of this shack). After that shack, you're going to come to a Y in the road. Turn right and you'll go over a cattle guard. Follow that road until you come to the next Y in the road. Turn right again.

Warning: At this second Y, GoogleMaps will want you to go straight – DON'T BELIEVE IT! The road looks perfectly fine until it goes around a corner and then ruts show up in the road that are so deep, you could lose a VW Bug in them and never find the car again.

So at both Y's, go right. Simple. :)

After the second Y, the road leads down to a nice turnaround area where you can set up camp. There's a second spot off to the side where a smaller camper could fit without a problem, and there's enough room in the turnaround area to fit 2 campers or so, so you could probably end up with three rigs down here if you really wanted to.

Just feet from the turnaround area is a lovely beach right on a river – shallow, no jagged rocks or places for kids to hurt themselves, so this'd be a GREAT spot for families with small children or people who want to fish.

There are wild turkeys EVERYWHERE – we got to watch a mating dance of a tom this morning that was just amazing.

AT&T is blazing fast; Verizon is almost nonexistent.

There are no signs saying that you're in a BLM area – no stay limit signs, no trash cans, no outhouses – absolutely nothing. The only reason we knew this existed was because of Campendium. (Thank you, Campendium!)

The easy river access and wildlife and awesome internet and terrific price (FREE!) would already make this a great find, but then we went exploring in the largest cavern that you can easily see from the campsite (probably about a mile away so we drove there because there's private farm ground between the campsite and the cavern, so it would've been several miles of walking on a dusty dirt road in the heat to get there otherwise).

In that cavern, HOLY COW SO COOL!!! You can see in the pics that I've uploaded, but there are Native American dwellings built into the cavern itself, way up on a ledge. We had to scramble like mountain goats to get up there, but wow, absolutely amazing. Pictographs and petroglyphs galore. Amazing view. The acoustics were fun to play with. Shockingly, very little trash or graffiti around. (Also true of the BLM site – I can't believe how clean it is out here!) Absolutely stunning, and totally worth the effort to get here. We felt like explorers, since we didn't know any of this existed and just stumbled upon it by accident.

You might be wondering why only the four-star review, then. Well, three things:

1) Our cell phones are on Verizon, so having no Verizon access out here has made phone calls hard. (Our hotspot is through AT&T).
2) The road in is atrocious right at the end, not to mention that after a rainstorm, it'd probably be impassable. Don't attempt this place if there's been a massive rainstorm in the last 72 hours!!!!
3) It's BLM land, so there's LLOOOTTTSSS of cow droppings everywhere, and so of course, lots of flies and ants, etc. We're here at the end of April of 2019, and it's already pushing 80 during the day. I can't imagine how hot and miserable it'll be here in August. (I hate being hot!) So think about that before coming here.

The wildlife, the great AT&T internet, the river, the cave...all together, this is an amazing spot. We'd totally come here again (but not during the heat of the summer!)