What is Buckboard Campground?
Monticello sits at 7,000 feet at the foot of the Abajo Mountains, and the paved Blue Mountain road climbs west out of town through oak and then aspen to Buckboard, the forest’s highest campground, at about 8,900 feet. It is small: 10 single sites with tables and fire rings on gravel spurs, and two group sites for up to 50 people each, tent-only, with their own tables, fire rings and parking, plus two vault toilets and seasonal water spigots. The aspens give partial shade and a lot of noise in the wind; the oak turns red in late September.
The elevation is the amenity. When Moab and Blanding are in the 90s, Buckboard is 75 to 85 by day and 50 to 60 at night, which is why Four Corners families book the group sites a year ahead for reunions. Robertson Pasture and Spring Creek trails leave from nearby for hikers and mountain bikers, Monticello Lake and Foy Lake on the road up hold trout, and the gravel Abajo Loop continues over the mountain to Nizhoni and Blanding. Mule deer, turkeys and black bears all use the campground when people do not.
What you get is a cool, dark, quiet aspen camp with water and a toilet, a paved road to the gate and the Needles and Bears Ears country an hour away. What you do not get is hookups, a dump station, a store, or a season that reliably starts before mid-June. For a Scottsdale visitor it is seven hours away and worth it only as part of a Four Corners trip, which is exactly how most people use it.
How to camp Buckboard right
Reserve, especially the group sites. $20 single, $50 group, on recreation.gov through September 30, or first come, first served for unreserved singles. The two group sites, North and South, hold 50 people each and book a year ahead for July and August weekends; set an alarm for the day the window opens. Season May 1 to September 30, snow permitting. Fourteen-day limit.
Get there. I-17 north to Flagstaff, US 89 north to US 160, US 160 east through Tuba City to Kayenta, US 163 north through Monument Valley and Mexican Hat to Bluff, US 191 north through Blanding to Monticello. About 6 hours 35 minutes to town. At the center of Monticello turn west on 200 West / Abajo Drive, which becomes Forest Road 105 (the Forest Service also labels it County Road 101 and FR 49 in places; it is one paved road up the mountain), and drive 6 miles; the campground is on the left, 1.5 miles past Dalton Springs. Call it 6 hours 55 minutes in all, paved the whole way. Monticello has a grocery, gas and the ranger station at 435-587-2041, where staff will tell you honestly whether the Abajo Loop is clear.
Pick a site for shade. The singles on the uphill side sit under the aspens and look down to Monticello; the lower ones are oak and sun. RVs and trailers fit the gravel spurs with no posted limit; the group sites are tent-only, and the Abajo Loop beyond the campground is gravel and not for big rigs.
Water. Seasonal spigots, late to start at this altitude and shut off for winter as of October 2, 2026. Bring your own at either end of the season; the water may not be on until Memorial Day.
Fire and firewood. Fire rings at every site; gathering dead wood in and around the campground is allowed. Do not haul firewood from Arizona; buy or gather it here.
Bears. Present. Food, coolers and trash in the vehicle or a bear box, never in the tent. Deer and turkeys walk through camp at dusk.
Weather. Frost in any month, afternoon lightning in July and August, snow possible in May and late September. Pack for cold even in July. The nights are the darkest you will sleep under all year; see the stargazing guide for what to look for.
Dogs. Leashed, as in any Forest Service campground, and fine on the trails.
Skip it if you need an early start to the season or more than ten sites. Devils Canyon is 20 minutes down the hill on the highway with more room and a lower, earlier season; Dalton Springs is the first-come alternative on the same road; and Comb Wash is the free desert option in the Bears Ears country an hour south.
The mountain above the uranium town
The Abajos are a laccolith, a blister of igneous rock pushed up under the Colorado Plateau’s sandstone between 22 and 29 million years ago and uncovered by erosion into a cool green island, with Abajo Peak at 11,368 feet. Spanish travelers in the 1700s named them Abajo, low, presumably by comparison with the La Sals to the north; everyone in San Juan County calls them the Blue Mountains. They were the summer range of the Ute, the Weeminuche bands in particular, and the Navajo lived to the south across the San Juan; the canyons below the campground hold Ancestral Puebloan ruins by the thousand, which is why most of the ranger district is now inside a national monument.
The town came late and hard. Latter-day Saint families sent north from the failing San Juan River settlement at Bluff camped at Verdure, on the south fork of Montezuma Creek, on March 11, 1887, planted crops and laid out a townsite that summer, and in the spring of 1888 moved to the present site and named it Monticello after Jefferson’s estate. The first year brought conflict with the Carlisle cattle company’s cowboys and with the Utes over the mountain’s water, which all three needed. Monticello became the county seat in 1895 and incorporated in 1910; it had about 1,100 people when the war came.
The federal forest arrived in the same generation. The Manti Forest Reserve was set aside in 1903 and the La Sal reserve, which took in the Abajos, in 1906; they were combined as the Manti-La Sal National Forest on August 28, 1950, with Monticello as its southern ranger district. The Blue Mountain road up to the lakes and the aspen benches was a ranch and timber track long before it was a recreation road.
What made it a recreation road was uranium. The Vanadium Corporation of America began building a mill on the east edge of Monticello in 1941 and by 1943 was shipping uranium-vanadium sludge to the Manhattan Engineer District. The government bought the mill in 1948, reopened it in 1949 as the Cold War’s demand for ore exploded across the Colorado Plateau, and ran it until January 1, 1960. Monticello’s population more than doubled, from 1,172 in 1950 to 1,845 in 1960, and the Forest Service built for the new town the way it built everywhere in the 1950s and 1960s: a string of campgrounds up the mountain road, Dalton Springs, Buckboard and, over the summit, Nizhoni, with Buckboard at the top getting the group sites that have made it the Four Corners’ reunion ground ever since. The Forest Service publishes no construction date for Buckboard, and we have not found one; it belongs to that boom-era build-out and no earlier.
The mill left a longer shadow than the campgrounds. Its tailings had been spread around town as fill, and the Department of Energy’s cleanup ran from 1989 to 2004; the Hideout golf course now sits on reclaimed ground. Then, on December 28, 2016, President Obama proclaimed Bears Ears National Monument, 1.35 million acres that take in most of the Monticello Ranger District and the Dark Canyon Wilderness south and west of the campground. The monument’s boundaries have been cut, restored and argued over in every administration since, which is a local matter in Monticello in a way that is hard to convey from Arizona, and a reason the town’s campgrounds now fill with people who came for the canyons and discovered the mountain.
Why it matters
Buckboard is what a Forest Service campground was for in the uranium decade: a cool place above a hot boom town where the mill families could spend a Sunday, built for station wagons and reunions, and never upgraded into anything else. That it is now a base for Bears Ears and the Needles is an accident of geography the planners could not have imagined. It also explains the Four Corners to an Arizonan: the same Mormon settlement wave, the same federal forest, the same atomic-age money, playing out on a mountain nobody in Phoenix has heard of. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: do not drive seven hours for ten sites, but if you are already in Monument Valley or Moab in July, a night in the aspens at 8,900 feet with water and a toilet for $20 is the coolest bed in the Four Corners, and the group site is the best place in Utah to park fifty relatives.