Mazama Campground

If you are a hiker or bicyclist and want to explore Crater Lake NP, the location is great! If you are in/on a motor vehicle, however, there are much better campgrounds within a 30 mile radius and the extra drive is well worth it to avoid the pitfalls of this campground.

The concessions vendor for this campground (Aramark) is horrible. They will only let you check in for 1 day at a time! You have to wait in line at noon every day to check in for you next night's stay. So that severely limits your sightseeing time. When we came back after our first night's stay about 11:30 am to pick up our trailer and go somewhere much, much better, we observed a line around the building waiting to check in.

We checked Thursday evening about 4:00 PM and there was no wait. I told the counter person we had a 20' travel trailer. He assigned us a pull through spot (and I believe all the spots there are pull through), but it was on the left side of the road! Now, I should have spotted this error by looking on the map, but if you are familiar with travel trailers at all you would know that this would put your door facing the road and your campsite on the backside of your trailer! The loop was tight, and we ended up with trees just inches from the right side of our trailer....the side where you awning extends and your door is.

This campground has a horrible black dirt/pine needle ground covering that sticks to EVERYTHING! And if it rains, like during our visit, the rain will kick this messy stuff up to cover EVERYTHING within a foot of the ground. We put down a welcome mat and within 3 or 4 trips in and out of the trailer, the mat was completely saturated with the black goo and it was invading the trailer. I have a 5 gallon collapsible water bag that I use to fill the trailer's fresh water tank and setting it down on the ground to connect the hose resulted in about 3/4 of the water bag getting covered in the black dirk/pine needle mixture.

I have no idea about the cleanliness of the bathrooms/showers. The black dirt made us not want to step foot outside our trailer. There was one item of trash left in our camping spot from the previous camper that I picked up and disposed of.

The pros:
*Close to the loop drive around Crater Lake rim. But so is Lost Creek campground on The Pinnacles Road, and if you were tent camping, I would suggest there. If you are sightseeing in a motor vehicle, stay about 30 miles away at Diamond Lake. You won't have to go back at noon to check in every day.
*Quiet. Very Quiet. Almost silent. Especially about 11 AM when everyone has to leave to go check in for the next night!

Cons:
Tiny campsites.
The dirt. The dirt. The dirt. EVERYWHERE and on EVERYTHING!
Horrible management.

One last thing. Quiet hours are from 10 PM to 7 AM (as usual). But don't run your nearly silent suitcase generator past 8 PM. You'll get a banging on your door about 8:20 PM and open it to find the National Park Service SWAT team there (2 SUVs, 2 park rangers each, with blaring lights on the lead SUV) to tell you that you are piratically a felon for running your generator past 8 PM! She even insisted on collecting my driver's license to run a check on me! Yes, I know (now) it is in the written regulations, no generators between 8 and 8. But I would think a simple knock and a friendly reminder of the regulations would have been more in order rather a full-blown felony type police action.

Let me start by saying this is a nice enough campground. The sites are close, but not stacked right on top of each other. It is convenient to the main attraction, only 7 miles from the lake and accompanying visitor center. The problem is, the new concessionaire is completely incompetent who has unnecessarily complicated which should normally be a simple procedure. First, don't bother even trying to book a site online, the link provided is ONLY for reserving a room at the inn. You have to call. When you do, you get a site, but you can't pick one. It will be assigned to you when you check in. And, you can't book a site with hookups. You can request one when you check in, and hope that one is still available.
As for "walk-ins" here is where it gets REALLY frustrating. What is normally a simple process at a park service location becomes a maddeningly frustrating experience! When you arrive, you get in a line at the side door, and wait. And wait. AND wait some more. They claim they start processing people at noon, but it was more like 12:45. Campers are processed two at a time, explained the regulations and procedures, and assigned a site based upon their particular needs. There are three choices; tent sites, 28 or 55 foot rv sites. No hookups are allowed to walk-ins. When they run out of tent sites, tent campers take rv sites. You can only get the site for ONE night. If you plan on staying more, you must repeat the ordeal again (and again, and again). One reason is, although the website SAYS 25% of sites are kept for walk-ins (LIKE EVERY OTHER NATIONAL PARK CAMPGROUND). this is false. So I got there on Thursday, got a site, but on Friday (labor day weekend) they only had 18 sites available. I was #19 in line. It took them TWO and a HALF HOURS to process 18 people !! They told me there were several alternative campgrounds just outside the park, but they were out of the printed handouts showing where they are. Even more frustrating, they invited me to come back on Saturday and try again, when they had...…...SIX sites available !!!! Didn't bother. As I had spent 26 hours in the campground (four of them standing in line in the 90 degree sunshine) I had had enough. I went up to Rim Village to see the crater and the museum, went down the East Rim Drive to an overlook and a waterfall, stopped at the lower visitor center to hike a short trail and see a video (nothing else to do there, it is basically a gift shop), and headed out. The Williamson River Forest Service Campground down on 97 was less than half full, was actually nicer than Mazama (without flush toilets, of course) for $5 a night ! Aramark should stick to selling $8 hot dogs to drunks at Fenway Park, they don't have a clue about campgrounds management.

Decent campground with clean restrooms. We stayed in a primitive site since we camp out of our SUV. The campsites are close to each other but most have trees between that offer some privacy. Each site has a picnic table, bear box and a fire pit. A primitive site was $22 a night. We stayed Sept 23, 2018 and they were changing over catering the next day and potentially closing for a while. ?? I’m not sure the full story but you may want to give them a call if planning to camp here soon. No AT&T service in or around the park. A sign coming in says that bears are in the campground so be sure to follow regulations and use the bear boxes. There’s a laundry mat by the store and a fill station for drinking water. This campground is inside the national park and there’s a $25 entrance fee. Rim Valley is 7 miles from the campground and has food options and more restrooms.

We staying in the middle section of the "C Loop" and the cell service was very spotty to say the least. The dirt is very dirty, fine dirt that seems to stick to everything!! The only showers that we could find were in the "F Loop". Besides all that, the sites are spread apart and not too close together. We loved the little hiking trail loop that is located just behind our campsite that goes down to the river.

There is no cell service in the entire park or even close by, its all forest, but we did find pockets of coverage in this campground (primarily in F and G = East side of the campground in the overlook of Annie Creek)

WiFi at the restaurants is $4/hour and all 3 of the restaurants weren’t very appealing.

Better yet, don’t plan on having cell when you go to Crater Lake and you won’t be searching for it.

National Park Campgrounds are the best, don’t miss the opportunity to stay at this one.

1/3 of the spots are walkins. We didn’t have a problem getting a walk-in spot

My experience is the sites are pretty jammed together, signal is terrible but the camp store is the bomb. We stayed right behind the store.

My advice is when going to Crater Lake be prepared for anything. During our stay all water was turned off except the water at the camp store, dump station was closed. Laundry was closed. Water was in short supply they told us. We filled gallon jugs over and over to fill our tank for 3 days.

It's Crater Lake. Nothing really matters except being at the rim experiencing the awesomeness anyhow. I love Crater Lake.

Our rate reflects the 50% senior discount. This is a great location for exploring the rim by car or bike. 4 miles to the visitor center. The sites are very nice, with large trees, picnic tables and fire pits. However, the F loop electric sites are not paved, but are dirt. I have actually rarely been in a site where all of our mats and shoes got so dirty. I guess that was the trade off for electricity! There are only 3 showers that we could find, and they were in the F loop. Bathrooms were clean. FYI - ATT emails and texts will pop in just before the summit of Scott Mountain.

As others have mentioned, F9 is the best spot for cell reception and lots of sun for solar. We work online during the week and need a good connection to get it done. There is zero cell service or wifi throughout the park, except for the Crater Lake lodge and the one magical spot by F9. You can buy wifi at the lodge for $4 an hour or $10 for 24 hours. I purchased wifi there a couple of times and it wasn't great for video conferencing but anything else it would be fine.

You can make reservations online but each spot is first come, first served. We notice people don't seem to spend more 2 or 3 days here. We were told by more than one employee that they'd never seen anyone spend more than a week here. So if you see a spot you like but it's occupied, chances are you can get it if you just wait a day or two.

The first couple of nights we stayed in F23 which is an electric site but had zero cell service on either Verizon or AT&T. After 2 days, we were able to move over the spot we wanted and using our booster we were able to get 4 bars of Verizon LTE on our jetpack and 2 bars of AT&T LTE. The spot was very large and had views of the canyon and Annie Spring creek. We had full sun most of the day so we were able to fully charge our batteries with our new solar setup.

There are water connections throughout the loops but no water hookups at the sites themselves. We had a water spigot right across from our site so it wasn't too difficult filling our large water containers and filling our tank. I did notice there were 3 sites right by the dump station with water/electric hook-ups, if you don't mind being near a potentially smelly dump station, of course.

There is a gas station at the campground store but unleaded only so if you need diesel prepare to drive at least 45 minutes to get it or try to fill your tank before getting to the park. Same with groceries. Make sure you're fully stocked up as the campground store and towns nearby are more like convenience stores than grocery stores. We were forced to drive to Medford (90 minutes away) to get groceries but it is a beautiful drive if you're up for it.

The restrooms were clean and there was a line every morning and evening for the showers. I used our shower but my husband said that if you waited too long in the morning the water was Luke warm at best. The best time to shower is middle of the day. There are only 3 showers in loop F and 3 showers by the campground office. So it was very busy.

The laundry had 3 washers and 2 dryers for the whole campground. So be prepared to wait. The washers were $1 a load and the dryers were $1.25. The cheapest I've seen, actually.

There's a cafe and gift shop in the same area as the campground office/laundry/store. We had dinner one night at the cafe and it was just ok. There's a much nicer, but more expensive, restaurant at the lodge. If you get to the lodge in the morning you can get some free coffee or pay for a nice espresso drink. I had a latte and it was delicious and no more expensive than Starbucks. Plus you can drink your coffee and sit in one of many rocking chairs overlooking Crater Lake. Score.

Beware if you're taking the west rim drive into the park beware the road is under construction and some of the sections we drove were very washboard and bumpy. Just take it real slow and or take the East Rim road which takes longer but a much more pleasant and just as scenic.

Overall, we really enjoyed our stay at the campground. There are lots of trails from easy to strenuous. Hike that take you to waterfalls and picnic areas by steams. We'll definitely be back.

(We used a booster to get Verizon 4G/LTE but you can get a couple of bars of 3G without one at site F9.)

We loved Crater Lake!
At first, we weren't sure what to expect, because we couldn't find anything online on how to camp there, but these spots are pretty easy to get on a first come first serve basis. Just go during the week and you will be fine.
Here are some tips:

• First, we paid $15.50 (because the nice person at the kiosk gave us a "military discount" which was actually a senior discount, so if you're over 65 yrs old, it's only $15.50 :)
• Sites are color coded: We have a 30ft Airstream and it only fits in the red spaces.
• Some spaces have electric hook ups, but they are mainly for shorter rigs, with the rare red space here and there.
• There are 2 red spaces (for larger rigs) with electric and water hook ups, but they are right next to the dump station. So if you can stand the smell, I guess you get rewarded! ;)
• The early check in starts at 8am at the kiosk desk.
• You have to check in every morning to stay another day in your spot.
• There is no guarantee that you will get another day so get there early to reserve your spot again. Here's the catch: The kiosk will only have the numbers from the day before, because they don't check the sites until 11am. So if you are trying to stay another day and you don't get an extension on your spot at 8am, just come back around 11am and there will probably be more spots available.
• When you first get to Crater lake and register at 8am, you're going to find very few spots available when you drive around. If you find a spot, get it, but don't unhook yet. Ride your bikes around in a couple hours and you will most definitely find a better spot. It will also allow you to see the spots with electric hook ups.
• There are a ton of spots, so just get there during the week (Thursday at the latest) and you are almost guaranteed a spot with first come first serve.
  • Good luck!

Our spot (F9) had an amazing view and there are very few spots that have cell service, but this one had good verizon cell service! No electric hook ups and our 30ft Airstream barely fit. You definitely can not drive forward out of it, so make sure you have some sick backing up skills before you park there ;) I got out fine.

Crater Lake itself was amazing! My son got his Junior Ranger badge and there was even an interactive junior ranger program that gets you a patch! The kids had to guess "which rocks float".

Be careful of rainy days, they suck and you can't see down in to crater lake when it's foggy. We got one good day and the rest was rainy. Fortunately we had a good signal (without a booster) to get some netflix during the rain.

the verizon coverage is only 1 bar, it works well... you just got to find the right spot.

Okay so we were here on a cold spell in June and half the sites were still snow covered so our experience may be a bit different. We arrived on a Thursday afternoon and had our pick of spots. We were told the F loop had electric so we went there. Sites F15-29 do have electric but site F9 is THE SPOT. F9 is huge with views of a waterfall. The bonus - this is the only place in the campground with cell service. A lady let us in on this fact as we were driving looking for a spot. You don't need a booster but it helps...otherwise you may go in and out of LTE. With a booster we had consistent 3-4 bar 4G. We also got the local NBC TV station which seemed kind of crazy with our antenna. The camping park staff did seem pretty clueless at check-in but that might have been new staff at the beginning of the season. There is a dump station.