What is Devils Canyon Campground?
Devils Canyon is the campground you pass on US 191 between Blanding and Monticello, a signed turn and a quarter mile of pavement into pinyon, juniper and scattered ponderosa at about 7,400 feet. It has 42 single sites in two loops, each with a table, a fire ring and a paved spur, vault toilets, and spigots that run from roughly June to September. Fourteen of the sites are built accessible. There are no hookups, shade is thin in places, and you can hear the highway at night.
It is the practical choice in a corner of Utah where the alternatives are gravel roads up the mountain or dirt roads into the canyons. From here the Needles district of Canyonlands and Newspaper Rock are an hour north, Natural Bridges an hour west, the Bears Ears country and Cedar Mesa 40 minutes southwest, and Blanding’s Edge of the Cedars museum 10 minutes south. The Abajo Mountains behind it, the Blue Mountains to everyone who lives here, rise to 11,368 feet at Abajo Peak and hold the three cooler, prettier campgrounds this one serves as overflow for.
Everything about it says “arrive late, leave early,” and that is what it is for. What you get is a paved, reservable, watered site any vehicle can reach in any weather, in the middle of the densest archaeology in the United States. What you do not get is a view, quiet, shade you can count on, or a reason to stay a second night.
How to camp it right
Reserve for summer weekends. $20 a night on recreation.gov through September 30, half price with a Senior or Access pass, or first come, first served for whatever is open. The season is April through September 30, with a fourteen-day limit. From Memorial Day to Labor Day this is where every RV headed to the Needles lands when Canyonlands is full, so book; in September, when the water is still on and the aspens up the mountain are turning, the campground empties midweek and you can simply arrive before dark.
Get there. I-17 north to Flagstaff, US 89 north to the US 160 junction, US 160 east through Tuba City to Kayenta, US 163 north through Monument Valley and Mexican Hat to Bluff, then US 191 north through Blanding. Nine miles past Blanding, the campground sign is on the left; the entrance road is paved. About 6 hours 30 minutes and 385 miles, all on pavement, which is the point. It is a two-day drive from Scottsdale for most people; the day trips guide covers the places to break it. Blanding has gas, groceries and showers; Monticello, 13 miles on, has the ranger station.
Water. June through September from spigots, off for the winter as of October 2, 2026. Bring your own in April, May and any week the Forest Service’s page says the system is down.
Pick the loop. The South loop, and the sites farthest from the entrance, are the ones you cannot hear the trucks from. Sites 1 through 5 and 8 through 16 are the accessible ones, with paved spurs and toilets close by. Spurs are paved and there is no posted length limit; the only RV warning the Forest Service gives is for the gravel Abajo Loop farther up the mountain, which you do not need.
Fire. Fire rings at every site; firewood on the ground is scarce, so buy a bundle in Blanding and burn it here rather than hauling wood across the state line and whatever is living in it.
Weather. Warm afternoons in July, thunderstorms in July and August, frost possible in April and late September. Snow can close the season at either end. It is the lowest and most exposed of the four Abajo campgrounds, which is why it is open longest and why the mountain ones are cooler.
Go to the museum first. Blanding’s Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum holds the best pottery collection in the Four Corners and a restored kiva you can climb into; it is the right first stop before you go looking at ruins on your own, and the rules about touching, pocketing and climbing are the same here as in any Arizona monument. The Bears Ears country around the campground is dense with unmarked sites, and the 2009 federal raids in Blanding for looting are recent memory.
Dogs. Leashed, as in any Forest Service campground.
Skip it if you have the vehicle and the daylight for the mountain. Nizhoni on the Blanding side and Dalton Springs and Buckboard above Monticello are prettier and cooler for the same $20; Comb Wash is the free, dirt-road alternative in the canyons. If you are pulling in at 9 p.m. with a 30-foot trailer, Devils Canyon is the right answer.
The convenient camp in the middle of the oldest neighborhood in Utah
The Abajos are a laccolith, a blister of igneous rock intruded between 22 and 29 million years ago and exposed as the sandstone around it wore away, and the canyons that drain them, Devils Canyon included, were farmed for centuries before anyone drove a car up US 191. Ancestral Puebloan families built villages, granaries and kivas on every bench with water from roughly the first century into the 1200s, when the whole region emptied southward toward the Hopi mesas and the Rio Grande. The pueblo preserved at Edge of the Cedars in Blanding is one of thousands. After the Puebloans left, the Ute held the mountains and the Navajo the country south of the San Juan, and the Old Spanish Trail between Santa Fe and Los Angeles passed through the Monticello country from 1829 into the 1850s, the first regular traffic over the plateau in six hundred years.
Mormon settlement came from the south and late. The San Juan Mission reached Bluff on April 6, 1880; in March 1886 the stake president sent scouts north to find water on the east slope of the Blue Mountains, and on March 11, 1887, four families made camp at Verdure, a few miles south of the present campground. Monticello was settled that July and named the next year for Jefferson’s estate. The conflicts with the Ute over water and land began at once, and Blanding, first called Grayson, followed in 1905, nine miles south of Devils Canyon, renaming itself in 1914 to win a library. The mountain the settlers grazed became federal land in pieces: the Manti Forest Reserve on May 29, 1903, the La Sal in 1906, and the two merged as the Manti-La Sal National Forest on August 28, 1950, which is when the Abajos’ Monticello Ranger District took its present shape.
The campground belongs to the uranium years. Monticello’s uranium-vanadium mill, begun in 1941, produced from 1943, was bought by the federal government in 1948 and ran until January 1, 1960; its cleanup took from 1989 to 2004. The postwar boom in trucks, trailers and highway travel that the mill brought to San Juan County is the era in which the Forest Service built its paved-spur campgrounds along US 191, and Devils Canyon, with its two loops and its easy access, is the one designed for the traffic rather than the mountain. The Forest Service’s own page does not give a construction year, and this guide does not invent one.
What changed the meaning of the ground around it was archaeology turning into law. Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum opened in Blanding in 1978 and became the repository for everything excavated on public land in southeast Utah, which is most of the county. In June 2009 federal agents arrested sixteen Blanding residents in raids on artifact trafficking, a wound the town has not finished arguing about. And on December 28, 2016, President Obama proclaimed the 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument, which took in most of the Monticello Ranger District, including the forest around Devils Canyon; the boundaries were cut by one administration, restored by the next and litigated through the decade since. The campground sits inside that argument, a Forest Service loop on a highway through a monument whose shape is still in court.
Why it matters
Devils Canyon is the least remarkable campground in one of the most remarkable landscapes in North America, and that is its use. It is where you sleep the night you arrive, with water and a paved spur, before you understand where you are: a mountain the Ute still claim, canyons the Puebloans farmed for a thousand years, a county built on uranium and a monument whose boundaries are a national fight. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is practical. It is the right first night of a Four Corners loop and the wrong place to spend a week. Book it, use Blanding’s museum and showers, then move up the mountain or into the canyons in the morning.