Shade abounds in this small campground in a lovely little canyon full of ponderosa pine and oak trees, next to a rocky creek bed. Each campsite has a bearproof locker for your food/toiletries/trash. The Forest Service does a good job keeping the toilets clean and stocked, no bad smell. It's one of my favorite spots and we drove there on the weekend following Memorial Day weekend, hoping it wouldn't be too crowded. We arrived on Friday afternoon and all the sites were taken except for one. Monica E. nailed it when she said this campground attracts "degenerates" and that's a polite word for them. To say the campground was crowded and loud would be the understatement of the year. Multiple families had crammed themselves into half the sites, well over the 10-people-per-site limit. Vehicles were similarly crammed into all the parking spots, straddling the lines so they could get in more than the allotted slots allowed for. Enormous, sprawling tents and shade canopies had sprouted everywhere like weeds. Strings of party lights hung from each tree branch, tent and canopy, in addition to the super-bright lanterns perched on each and every pole. When I say bright, I mean searchlight bright. And they stayed on all night. Instead of a campsite bathed in the gentle light of the moon and the mottled shade patterns of ponderosa pine branches, we were camped on the freakin' sun. Also assaulting the senses were pounding, raucous music; dogs barking endlessly; and shrieking kids. Now, I expect there to be noisy kids running around a campground. They're kids and it's a campground. These were ill-behaved, unsupervised little terrors who yelled, whined, squealed, howled, threw temper tantrums, peeled bark, broke tree branches, and prowled the campground slowly releasing air from party balloons to make the most God-awful screeching sound late into the night. The poor whippoorwills calling out to each other along the creek bed never stood a chance. We should have figured out from the start that this was going to be a bad experience. While unloading our car we were approached by two men who informed us we were in "their" space. There are no assigned spaces in this campground and we said as much. They pointed to their campsite and insisted that we were in "their" space because it was closest to their campsite (in fact, it wasn't). My friend asked where their car was in that case, and they said their buddy had gone to buy cigarettes but would be back any minute. These were big guys with a big dog who all kept creeping steadily closer to us as they talked. They were ready for a fight. We were two women, sans dog. Fit women, but still. After a quick assessment of what might be done to our car while we're asleep and how fun it would be to have four flat tires in the middle of nowhere, I made the decision to appease them. I told them we were just unloading and we'd move in a few minutes (we're primarily backpackers so we don't bring a lot of gear). They seemed to relax a little and backed off but kept a watch on us. Their friend turned up in a pickup just as we were unloading our last bags. He parked in the handicapped spot and came barreling over to us but one of his buddies shouted to him that we were just unloading so he stopped. He folded his arms across his chest, leaned against his truck, and glared at us until we left. By this time there was only one parking space left and it was out of sight of the camp sites, in a little parking lot next to Catalina highway. It made me nervous as heck to leave our car overnight where we couldn't see it. I checked on it once during the night but no one had messed with it that I could tell. On my way through the parking areas I noticed very few of the parked vehicles had the forest service receipt (that shows you paid) hanging from their rear view mirrors. Also, the loud people had left their food and trash sitting out overnight, ignoring the bearproof food lockers. Sigh. The next morning all but three of the gargantuan family tents had been summarily removed and most of the vehicles had conveniently vanished, so when the sheriff's SUV cruised through around 9:00 A.M. it appeared that that was all that had been there overnight. We had planned on staying the weekend but not with that crowd there, so we repacked our car and left. By then all of the sites had been evacuated - except for the loud people. We spent the day in Summerhaven and headed back down the mountain just before dusk. We had to pass the campground on our way so out of curiosity we drove through it and sure enough, the enormous family tents, vehicles, lights, people, and noise were all back in full force. It truly saddens me that so many of our nation's campgrounds have become the domain of the lowlifes who have no concept of courtesy or safety. The whole experience reminded me why I'm a hiker and not a campground camper. read more