What is Dalton Springs Campground?
Dalton Springs is the lower of the two Forest Service campgrounds on the paved road that climbs west out of Monticello into the Abajo Mountains, which everyone in town calls the Blue Mountains. It is 16 sites in a grove of aspen and Gambel oak at about 8,200 feet, each with a table and a fire ring, with vault toilets and seasonal water spigots, a gravel loop, and no reservations, hookups or group areas. The spring it is named for keeps the grove green into September.
It is the plainest campground on the mountain and the easiest to use: 4.5 miles and ten minutes from a grocery store, a gas station and the Monticello ranger station, first come, first served, $20 a night. The trails and roads around it are open to hikers, bikes, horses and OHVs; the Abajo Loop continues up past Buckboard and over to Blanding; and the big draws of the region, Newspaper Rock and the Needles district of Canyonlands, are 40 minutes north on US 191 and UT 211. Mule deer graze through camp at dusk, and the forest reminds you that black bears do too.
What you get is the easiest cool night’s sleep in San Juan County, 15 to 20 degrees below the canyon floor you spent the day on, with water, a toilet and a town at the bottom of the hill. What you do not get is a reservation, a view, a shower, or a site if you arrive after dinner on a summer Friday.
How to camp it right
Pay at the post, arrive early. $20 a night, first come, first served, paid on site. No reservations. Fourteen-day limit. Pull in before 6 p.m. on a Friday from late June through Labor Day; 16 unreservable sites five minutes from a town on the Moab-to-Four Corners route go by dinnertime. Midweek you will have the grove nearly to yourself. The upper sites are deeper in the aspens and cooler; the lower ones catch the sun earlier on a 40-degree morning.
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. In the center of Monticello turn west on 200 West, which becomes Abajo Drive and then Forest Road 49 as it climbs (the signs also say County Road 101); the campground is on the left after 4.5 miles. Paved all the way, about 6 hours 50 minutes in all. Buy firewood and groceries in Monticello on the way through; the market closes early and the town is quiet on Sundays. The ranger station on Main Street has the free motor vehicle use map.
Pick the season. The season opens May 15. Days in the 70s and low 80s in summer, nights in the 40s, afternoon thunderstorms in July and August, frost and possible snow at either end. June and September are the weeks.
Water. Seasonal, from spigots, off for the winter as of October 2, 2026; bring your own in May and late September.
Fire. Fire rings at every site. Buy wood in Monticello or gather dead wood nearby; do not haul it from Arizona, because the forest is fighting tree-killing insects.
Bears. Store everything in the vehicle. Do not rely on finding a bear box.
Dogs. Leashed, as in any Forest Service campground; fine on the trails and roads around it.
Use the hill. Do Newspaper Rock in the morning light on the way to the Needles, Edge of the Cedars in Blanding on a hot afternoon, and come back up to sleep. For the Bears Ears country south of the mountain, Comb Wash is the free base and Nizhoni the developed one above Blanding.
Skip it if you need a guarantee. Book Buckboard up the hill or Devils Canyon on the highway; if you are willing to arrive by late afternoon, this is the one.
The mountain the cattle companies and the Mormons both wanted
The Abajos are a small, high island, 11,000 feet of laccolith standing over the canyon country, and for most of history they were summer range: for the Ute bands who hunted them, for the Ancestral Puebloan farmers whose towers and granaries fill the drainages running south toward Cedar Mesa, and later for the Navajo moving up from the San Juan. The Spanish surveyors who named them Abajo, below, were looking at them from the higher La Sals. The settlers who came in the 1880s looked up at them from the desert and called them blue, and Blue Mountain is what Monticello still says.
Cattle got there first. In the 1880s the Kansas and New Mexico Cattle and Land Company, run by the brothers Edmund and Harold Carlisle, grazed the mountain’s north slope from a headquarters a few miles north of today’s town, part of a wave of big outfits that pushed into southeastern Utah after the railroad reached Colorado. The Mormons came second and on purpose. Farming at Bluff on the San Juan had proved nearly impossible, and in March 1886 Stake President Francis Hammond sent scouts to find land at the mountain’s springs. Settlers camped at Verdure, six miles south of today’s town, on March 11, 1887, planted crops and surveyed an irrigation ditch that July, and in 1888 moved north to North Montezuma Creek and began building; Hammond named the place Monticello after Jefferson’s house. The next decade was disputes over water and grass with the Carlisle cowboys and with the Utes, who had not agreed to any of it. Monticello became county seat in 1895 and a city in 1910.
The federal government arrived on paper. On February 6, 1907 Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the Monticello Forest Reserve, 214,270 acres covering Blue Mountain and Elk Ridge, to put the grazing under rules; it became a national forest on March 4 and on July 1, 1908 was merged into the La Sal National Forest, which the Manti absorbed in 1949 to make the Manti-La Sal on August 28, 1950. The spring on the north slope that waters the aspen grove already carried the Dalton name when the forest took it over, and the Forest Service built the campground there in the postwar years when the Blue Mountain road was improved; it has not published a date, and the simple loop with no group sites suggests the 1950s or 1960s, but that is an inference, not a record.
The town below changed more than the mountain. In 1941 the Vanadium Corporation of America began building a mill at Monticello, and from 1943 it fed uranium-vanadium sludge to the Manhattan Project; the federal government bought it in 1948, ran it from 1949 through the uranium boom, and closed it for good on January 1, 1960. The cleanup took decades and the health effects are still argued in town. The ski hill on the northeast side of Abajo Peak opened and failed for lack of profit. What kept Monticello going was the road: US 191 between Moab and the Four Corners, and the campers on it.
The latest chapter is the monument. On December 28, 2016 the Bears Ears proclamation took in most of the Monticello Ranger District south of the mountain, and the Abajo campgrounds, outside the boundary and cheap, became the default base for everyone coming to see it. The boundary has moved three times since, most recently in July 2026; Dalton Springs has not.
Why it matters
Dalton Springs is where the three claims on southeastern Utah, the Utes’, the cattlemen’s and the Mormons’, met at a spring, and where the federal government stepped in with a forest reserve to referee. It explains why Monticello exists where it does, why the mountain above it is national forest and the canyons below are a monument, and why a town of 1,800 has a uranium Superfund site. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is practical: on the long loop through Monument Valley and Bears Ears, this is the cheapest cool night in the county, and the only rule that matters is to be in the grove before dinner.