Sahara Creek Horse Camp

Brand new fire rings. We were the first to use ours. We came in a Tuesday and the place was empty. Only one other camper. Lots of spots and a few pull thrus. There are water spigots throughout the campground. There is a little road noise but otherwise just the sound of birds. There are a few vault toilets. Great free spot 7 miles from Mt. Rainier.

This campground is free if you have a Washington State Discovery Pass. If you don’t have a pass you can’t stay here as there is no way to pay onsite. The annual pass is $30 so it pays for itself quickly. I think you can get them at several different places but we picked ours up at a Safeway grocery store.

The campground is very nice. Almost every site has a lot of tree coverage which is nice for seclusion but not so nice on solar power generation.

No services to speak of other than a few drop toilets. Still, for the money or lack thereof, this is a great spot.

We were here last Autumn and spent several nights here with very few other campers coming in. The area is a great free base camp for Mount Rainier NP.

The Verizon signal was spotty at best but T-mobile was great with 2-bars of LTE. We did use our WeBoost to sure up the signal from time to time but all in all one of the best places remotely near the park to pick up a cell signal and get some work done throughout the week.

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.