What is Nizhoni Campground?
The Abajo Mountains are an island of laccolithic peaks rising to 11,360 feet out of the canyon country of southeastern Utah, and the Manti-La Sal National Forest has four campgrounds on them. Nizhoni is the one on the Blanding side, 21 single sites and two group sites for 50 people each, spread through Gambel oak and ponderosa at about 7,800 feet on a gravel loop with picnic tables, fire rings, vault toilets and seasonal water spigots. There are no hookups, and the sites are big enough for trailers but the road up is not built for anything long. A single site is $20 on recreation.gov, a group site $50, and the season is May 15 to September 30.
What it offers is temperature. When Cedar Mesa, Comb Wash and Natural Bridges are at 100 degrees, Nizhoni is in the 80s by day and the 50s at night, with ponderosa shade and a south-facing view across Comb Ridge toward Monument Valley that looks the way the Four Corners is supposed to look. Trailheads for Shay Ridge, Aspen Flat and Red Ledges leave from the road nearby, and the Abajo Loop scenic backway continues over the mountain to Monticello. It is rarely full. Nights are dark enough that the stargazing guide reads like an understatement here.
What you get is a plain, cool, half-empty Forest Service loop with water and a view. What you do not get is anything in the campground itself worth the seven-hour drive; the point is what lies below it, and this is where you sleep between days in the canyons.
How to camp Nizhoni right
Reserve, but do not panic. $20 single, $50 group, on recreation.gov through the end of September; a few singles are held first come, first served. Unlike the canyon campgrounds below, Nizhoni rarely sells out; book a few weeks ahead for a summer weekend and the day before for midweek. 14-day limit.
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 to Bluff, US 191 north to Blanding. About 6 hours 20 minutes to town. From the north end of Blanding, continue on US 191 about 2 miles, turn left on County Road 2191 (East Pinion Ridge Road) for three-quarters of a mile to a stop sign, then right on Forest Road 079 for about 10 miles; the campground is on the right. The road is paved at first and good graded gravel after, slow but fine for a car when dry and not recommended for large RVs. Call it 6 hours 50 minutes in all. Blanding is dry and closes early; shop before you climb.
Pick the window. The second half of June, after the water is on and the snowbanks are gone from the upper loop, and all of September. July and August bring afternoon thunderstorms to the ridge most days; a cold front can bring frost in September. Snow lingers on the upper Abajo Loop into June, and the loop road to Monticello, 35 gravel miles through aspen and meadow, is closed until early summer; ask the host.
Water. On in season from spigots; off for winter as of October 2, 2026. Bring your own at the edges of the season, and treat anything from the creeks.
Fire. Fire rings at every site, and you may gather dead and down wood nearby; buy or gather it here rather than hauling it from home, because the forest is fighting tree-killing pests. Restrictions apply in dry summers.
Use the days. Natural Bridges is about an hour, Mule Canyon and the Comb Wash camping area 40 minutes, Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding 20. Everything down there is Ancestral Puebloan country: look, do not touch, do not climb on walls, leave every potsherd where it lies, and follow the Leave No Trace rules more strictly than you would anywhere in Arizona.
Dogs. Leashed in the campground, as in any Forest Service campground, and fine on the mountain trails. Keep them out of the ruins.
Skip it if you want hookups or a shorter drive from the highway: Devils Canyon sits right on US 191. For higher and cooler, Buckboard and Dalton Springs are on the Monticello side. For sleeping in the canyons themselves, Comb Wash is free and hot.
The mountains the monument left out
The Abajos are younger than almost everything around them. Between 22 and 29 million years ago magma rose under the Colorado Plateau’s sandstones and stalled a few kilometers down, swelling into laccoliths of hornblende diorite; the cover eroded away and left a cluster of peaks topping out at Abajo Peak, standing more than 4,500 feet above the mesas. Spanish travelers in the 1700s called them Abajo, “low,” because they sit below the La Sals to the north, and the people who have lived here since call them the Blue Mountains, which from Cedar Mesa on a summer evening is the obvious name.
The people came long before the Spanish. The canyons and mesas below the mountains hold one of the densest concentrations of Ancestral Puebloan sites in the country, and the Hopi and Zuni count the builders among their ancestors; the Ute hunted the high meadows, and the Navajo, who call the range Dził Ditł’ooí, settled the land to the south. The Mormon settlement came last. Walter C. Lyman founded the town on the bench below the mountains in 1905 and called it Grayson, after a settler’s wife; in 1914 a wealthy easterner named Thomas Bicknell offered a thousand-volume library to any Utah town that would take his name, Grayson and a rival town both bid, and Grayson became Blanding, Bicknell’s wife’s maiden name, for a share of 500 books. The Forest Service had arrived first: the La Sal National Forest was proclaimed on January 25, 1906, and the Abajos came under it, then under the merged Manti-La Sal when La Sal was folded into the Manti forest on November 11, 1949 and the combined forest was renamed on August 28, 1950.
The campgrounds followed the roads. The Forest Service built Nizhoni, Devils Canyon, Dalton Springs and Buckboard as its Abajo campgrounds in the decades after the war; I could not pin Nizhoni’s construction year, and the forest does not publish one. What is certain is that the Blanding-side campground took a Navajo name, Nizhoni, “beautiful,” at a time when the town below was still arguing about whether the people who used that word belonged there. The Abajo Loop backway, which runs past the campground and over the mountain to Monticello, is the old wagon and logging road graded for cars.
The last decade turned the quiet side of the Abajos into a border. On December 28, 2016, President Obama proclaimed Bears Ears National Monument, 1.35 million acres that took in most of the Monticello Ranger District and the canyon country Nizhoni overlooks, at the request of a coalition of the Hopi, Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Uintah and Ouray Ute and Zuni. The coalition had asked for the Abajos too, and they were left out, so the campground has sat just outside the line through everything since: the December 4, 2017 reduction by 85 percent, the October 8, 2021 restoration to roughly 1.36 million acres, and the July 13, 2026 proclamation that cut the monument to 121,100 acres. The campground has not changed through any of it. The country below it has been managed under four different sets of rules in ten years, and the people who come up the hill to sleep are increasingly the ones who spent the day arguing about them.
Why it matters
Nizhoni is a place to sleep, and the reason it is a good one is the same reason the land around it is contested: it is the cool, watered high ground above the richest archaeological landscape in the United States, and everyone who has lived here, Puebloan, Ute, Navajo, Mormon, has wanted the mountain for the same things. The campground is Forest Service land with Forest Service rules, outside every version of Bears Ears, and that stability is worth something when the boundary below moves with each administration. For a Scottsdale visitor it is seven hours away and worth it only as a base. Reserve a site on the outer edge, go in late June or September, shop in Blanding before you climb, and spend your days in the canyons and your nights where it is 55 degrees.