Joshua Tree North Dispersed Camping

Do not come here if there is any rain in the forecast. The entire lake bed flooded... 4 inches of water surrounding our entire RV. It’s an absolute nightmare. The entire lake bed turns to soupy mud making it almost impossible to drive through.. we got stuck even with 4 wheel drive.

It’s a decent spot if there’s no rain... nothing fancy but conveniently located to Joshua Tree National Park, the camping area is huge so you have endless parking options and it’s all level. Good Verizon cell phone signal.

We were a bit apprehensive about coming here because of the recent reviews. We boondock exclusively, and have stayed across our fair share of locations. Honestly this place isn't that bad, but that largely depends on where you decided to take up camp. Yes, there are people shooting guns. It lasted for hours yesterday, but it’s off at the foothills of the larger mountains backing to the Northeast. Yes, there are people riding ATV’s. A lot of them. There are people shooting off model rockets, and folks flying model RC planes. There are cars and trucks doing donuts. Everyone here is having a good time.

This seems to die off completely at night, save for some lunatic riding a dirt bike at 4:30 A.M.

We came in on a Wednesday and the place was nearly empty. The weekend (Holiday weekend) has definitely seen an increase in people, but we still aren’t crowded. We are far enough out that I would consider this a mostly private location.

34.180345, -116.221690

Past reviews indicated that the place is trashy. There’s no trash anywhere that we can see.

Plan your stay around rain if possible. The road in is very bad and rutted. It rained while we were here, about an inch, but the ground dried out within 24 hours. It can also get really windy, but never enough to dismantle our outdoor gazeebo.

We dumped, got water, and offloaded trash at Joshua Tree Lake RV & Campground, just a few miles down the road. Fair warning, it was $23 for dump and water.

Glad this was only 20 minutes outside of the 29 Palms JT entrance, it was convenient for park access. As the previous reviewer mentioned (we were there at the same time!) there was a lot of rude behavior from people hauling through the dust in their big trucks or off road vehicles and stirring up TONS of dust clouds really close to campers and RVs which was really annoying. There was also a lot of college aged kids there who rolled in on the weekend, thankfully they weren’t too loud for us. There’s zero privacy here & it can get really hot! Again, it’s convenient though. We didn’t see any trash which was nice! Unlike previous reviewers mentioned.

This is a vast lake bed of dried mud, with room for hundreds of RVs. Come in on Sunfair Road (which Garmin GPS misnames as Coyote Valley Road) and Sunflower Road. Sunfair is paved, and Sunflower is good, two-lane dirt most of the way, but becomes rutted towards the end. You can use East Broadway (which is paved) instead of Sunflower, but the dirt road after Broadway is terrible. The BLM land begins east of the power lines. The people camping along Sunflower are on private property with clearly marked "No trespassing" signs.

The surface was dried mud, which created dust whenever there were wind gusts. Most days there were a few dirt bikes on the dirt roads within the camping area, but on Saturday, a group of pickup trucks came in and raced about among the campers, doing tight circles to spin their back wheels and kick up enormous clouds of dust that enveloped some of the RVs. This disgraceful behavior, by people who were obviously locals, clearly had no other purpose than to aggravate the campers. I wish now that I had called the police.

This land is next to the Marine Corps' live-fire training base - the largest Marine Corp base in the USA - so there were periods of automatic gunfire, some explosions, and helicopters and V22 Ospreys passing overhead a few times each day.

Verizon 4G was 4 bars, -92 dB, 6 Mbps down and 6 up.

We didn’t know what to expect but had a good time. Once maps told us that we we’re there we decided to check it all out before we settled. I have a Subaru Outback so we didn’t have trouble getting around the back parts of the camp grounds (some soft spots on the roads). We took some trails and found a little site in the hills, we were the only people until later that night. They were a good distance away but bigger groups of people. I had checked to see if we could bring our fire ring and parks.gov said we just needed a fire permit from cal fire so we did that! Would come back again and try to find a more secluded spot. There was also some type of dance rave party going on further away but it didn’t bother us much. This place is huge.