Sahara Creek Horse Camp

This campground is free (with Discover Pass). It is operated by Washington Department of Natural Resources. There are no hook-ups but there are vault toilets, a few covered picnic areas.

We visited this campground in December 2019. We used it as a base camp for a couple days of exploring Mt. Rainer and the town of Elbe to include the Polar Express. The campground was practically empty the entire time we were there.

It is a horse camp, so the sites are large enough to accommodate horse trailers, many of them are pull through. All the sites we saw in the loop that was open were shaded by trees.

In the summer, I suspect this campground will be busy on the weekends with horse groups as there are many horse trails starting from this campground.

Bring Leveling blocks, all the sites are dirt and few are level. We were able to pick a site that was level, but i suspect these few sites go quickly in the busy season.

If you are looking to spend a few days around Mt. Rainier and want a low cost place to stay this is it if you are prepared to boondock.

Cell coverage in the site was minimal. We had maybe 1 bar of LTE on our Verizon phones while outside but there was plenty of times they said no service. Our Cellular Modem in the trailer with an external antenna however had 3 bars of AT&T and enough bandwidth to get a consistent 5-8meg download. Enough to stream a movie, and so forth.