Idyllwild County Park

The family wanted to go camping over Memorial day weekend and I was only able to get one night at this wonderful campground. I ended up reserving campsite 5, which I don’t recommend if you do mind going up a steep hill with camping gear back and forth from your car.
Please note the following is based on my observation and opinion. I was able to observe that campsites 3, 4, 5, and 6 were good size campsites that can easily fit two large tents. The campsites were also the closest to the trail to the nature center, the restrooms and the creek for kids to explore. Campsites 4 and 6 had the least amount of going up a steep hill from your car. Campsite 2 was at level to the car but the smallest campsite in my opinion. The firepit was too close to the picnic table.
I really enjoyed that they had activities for the kids with a storytelling at 7pm and things to do at the nature center. I also enjoyed how clean the bathrooms were but I recommend for you to bring your own toilet paper. They keep it locked and it’s very thin, not manageable.
After we packed up, we decided to drive through the whole campground. We noticed how few bathrooms there were. Campsites 53 and 55 had boulders nearby, that seemed cool for the kids to explore. Campsites 34, 35, 43, and 27 seemed cool and close by to the showers/​bathrooms, but far from the hike trail to the nature center.
I will definitely be back. I really enjoyed how close of a drive from LA it was and it felt as we were in another state. The town was very nice to explore on the way out, people were friendly. Tip: bring lots of bug repellent.

Had an amazing time last weekend camping here with my boyfriend! The grounds keeper Joe was very nice and extremely helpful. The hiking was incredible with beautiful views, the bathrooms were clean, the campgrounds were nicely kept up. Highly recommended and the town of Idyllwild is beautiful as well, we eat lunch there before we left and loved all the little shops and restaurants!

It reminded me a lot of camping in the Yosemite. The only thing i could not bare was the bathrooms. No flushing. No lights. Just added onto everyones business. The smell was unbearable. Considered the bushes honestly. The hiking trails were GREAT though. Also great spot for fishing.

My favorite camping in this area by far. Love that town in just a short drive away so we can do things during the day, like go see a movie and do evening hiking with a campfire.
Tent pads are better than most campgrounds and though it can get very noisy during the day the park rangers do enforce the quite hours rule so it gets nice and peaceful after 10pm. They have showers too if so inclined.
Friendly warning, the crows and squirrels are not terribly afraid of people and don’t shy away from attacking an unguarded chip bag. Be warned.
Booking website easy to use and unlike lots of other campgrounds this one doesn’t seem to fill up too far in advance. Have fun.

Awesome spot to go camping. It is an easy drive up from LA and feels like you are thousands of miles away from the city. There were tons of great hiking trails in the area of all levels/​distances.
Idyllwild County Park made everything really easy for us. We reserved our site online for $ 20/​night + $ 7 fee. It was a holiday weekend so they ended up opening up the whole park, usually this time of year they only have the front part open. We had site 47 and it was super great. We easily fit 2 cars, 6 people and 3 tents. The tent spots were nice and flat. Some of the campsites are closer to each other, but ours had quite a bit of space between us and the next group.
The fire pit included a grill top which came in super handy for our campfire meals. We bought wood before we headed up the mountain and then again in town for the second night. They do ask that all firewood is purchased in county so be mindful of that.
Bathrooms were centrally located and pretty clean. They did run out of hand soap, so I’d recommend bringing some of your own just in case. Water spickets were plentiful throughout the campground.

After a good snowfall we travelled to Idyllwild from Coachella Valley hoping to do some sledding. If you are trying to do the same, avoid the roadside temptation and go to this little park.
The staff was ready for the rush and managed the limited parking very well. They were friendly and pointed out where to sled.
There are bathrooms, picnic tables, and also campsites. It was perfect for our needs, and less hectic than the more public spaces. It was worth the nominal fee per person.

Camped here last weekend. Surprisingly was full so make sure you reserve in advance! Our sites were great with depth behind it. We hiked up a boulder behind our site to look at the stars. We had a spot by the bathroom so the doors slamming woke us up (site ³⁷⁄₃₈). The bathrooms were not stocked so bring your own paper. Overall, had a great experience. Friendly staff too.

Beautiful area with many tall trees, lots of shade, granite boulders. Each site has a fire ring with grill. We camped with a tent camper at site #28. The picnic table and fire ring is a few feet higher than our parking spot for the camper. The site has a great view of the surrounding areas and we enjoyed being a bit elevated while warming near the campfire at night.
Heard a pack of coyotes both nights we stayed and it was a memory we’ll have forever. Sounded like a group of crazies attacking the campground :)
The only downside was the many Yellow Jacket wasps our camp cooking attracted. I am highly allergic to their sting and carry and epipen just in case. Think we will return in the colder months so I can better enjoy our stay and do some hiking.

Absolute perfection. Camping, hiking, art, music. Beautiful mountain air. Ahhh!!! :-)

This place. lOl… Well we went here on aug 6 – 7 and what to say. First off, this place was little hard to find since all the places were either named «idyllwild» which was sort of confusing and place to get to the main site was little difficult to find. Place had nice bathroom that was actually clean and you are able to shower with 50cent. However, there is absolutely nothing to do here except to breath in the nature air LOL… No lakes, not even little of streams. If you just want to eat and sleep, then this is the place for ya. Lastly, it gets super cold at night so be prepared to pack some warm clothes (sleeping bag wont work up here)!! Overall, we had relaxing time since we just sat around making bonfire and eating our favorite bbq. Oh and ranger was pretty chill here, so there’s that. Lastly, make sure you BUYYY all the charcoals and all that stuff everything is super expensive at the local markets! Bunch of hillbilly WORKERS rip you off so bad! :/​Thats about all i can think of, i will upload more info if i know anything else.

Really nice campground, and dogs are allowed! A perfect LA getaway. We reserved online ($ 27) picked site #96, which was a large area with a shady tree. It was just down the hill from a bathroom so it wasn’t too noisy. It also only neighbored one other site, so there was some privacy.
We didn’t explore any of the park trails but ended up taking the Deer Spring Trail to Suicide Rock which was really nice. We started from town and walked up Hwy 243 so roundtrip it was probably 8 miles.

Love this place, lady at the front office was very friendly and helpful. $ 20 a night is very reasonable and the restrooms are clean and they have hot shower 50 cents for 3 minutes. I stayed here for 2 nights, I will be back again.

Perfection! I absolutely LOVE this campground. The lady at the front (I wish I got her name) was beyond friendly and so helpful. The site that I originally picked (#41) was not what I expected, so I asked if I could change it. She gave me a map and marked which sites were still available.
After driving around, I fell in love with #60 (a corner lot, facing the trees, with a water spigot right at your site). I arrived on Mother’s Day, so the place was pretty deserted. I had the entire section all to myself and it was perfect — no neighbors in sight.
You can tell that they really take pride in their campground. It’s very clean and the staff is so friendly. She even called me by name two days after checking in. Very impressive!
As soon as I got home, I booked a return trip for September. I couldn’t book #60 (I swear that has to be the best site), but I did get #47, which looks pretty private.
I cannot recommend this place enough!!!

Stayed here two nights, August 23 & 24^th. We got there late on Friday night and I was surprised that the guard station was still open. We weren’t sure if we’d stay two nights so we paid for one night and were assigned a spot near the entrance. I think it was site #6. It was a decent enough spot but we had about 12 stairs leading from the parking spot to the tent pad. The restrooms were about a 3 minute walk. The other sites had restrooms very close but I also noticed they had little privacy between the neighbors.
You’ll probably want to scout out your own campsite to make sure you’re getting what you want. The picnic table provided was nice. There are pine trees throughout the campground so you shouldn’t have a problem finding shade somewhere.
If you’re into bouldering, there are several boulders across from the pictograph (fenced-​in) boulder that you can climb.

$ 20 a night. The sites are kind of close together but we were there when it was completely dead so we had plenty of space to stretch out in. We chose to camp out here because it was close to town, so that we could easily make food runs as we didn’t pack our camp cooking gear. At night you can hear the kids at the nearby school cheering if they are hosting an event. They sounded like ghostly banshees.
The area also has some decent bouldering so we chose site 74 for ease to the climber’s trail. There is running water in the restrooms and lights come on for night time use. Nice little campground with trees all around. Perfect for a city escape without completely roughing it.

There aren’t many things in this country I dislike doing more than camping. So when the friend who I was staying with in San Diego told me that she had already agreed to an overnight camping retreat on the weekend in the middle of my stay I was pretty clearly unenthused. She was giving me a bed for two weeks though in my favorite city in the U.S., so my margin for complaints was pretty thin. I sucked it up, went along for the ride to Idyllwild, and actually found it a very nice, quiet, and scenic place to get away not far from the city… in spite of all the disastrously annoying things that happened on the trip.
The last time Elle and I went camping it was with Michelle and Alex, and the only animal around was the debatable canine Meeko (note: this does not mean I argued with him, rather I’m not sure he’s not some type of rodent). This had little impact on me, other than Michelle periodically shouting when he would stray off. This time however Elle had to bring her two dogs, Miso and Droopy, along because she couldn’t find a sitter. I’m allergic to dogs, and they’re very old and quite smelly, so you can imagine how unenjoyable the otherwise serene 2+ hour drive up north into the woods was.
By the time we arrived, me in desperate need of air, having skipped lunch because we were told there would be food waiting for us, it was quite late into the day and suffice to say I was quite grumpy. There was technically food at the campsite, however what we could find was not really appealing and someone had hidden the bread we would be using in order to make sandwiches. My frustration level increased more and more with each passing moment, and we had to pass on the big hike the group took because we literally had not eaten since the time we woke up and were getting a bit delirious.
Eventually the mongoloid who sabotaged the sandwich operation returned and we were able to have some crappy filler food that in most other situations would be reserved for the aforementioned dogs. Once I had some energy I got the fun experience of setting up my little clown tent. I don’t use that term jokingly either, I’m fairly certain this was a child’s tent designed to look like a circus. Since sleeping in a tent with Elle’s two dogs just wasn’t going to happen I had to resort to the back-​up options, this little laugh of a living structure. I cannot properly put into words just how uncomfortable I was in this tent, or the amount of swearing that went on under my breath, but I don’t recall any other time in my life where I have been less pleased with my sleeping situation.
None of this was made any better by the folks I shared the campsite with, not that they were themselves bad people, but they were just having significantly more fun than I was. I wasn’t drinking at all because I had a massive headache and I knew I was already in for a hellish night, so their level of misbehavior just annoyed me more. Even worse it annoyed the campgrounds manager more, who was nice enough to warn them multiple times (yet surprisingly they never realized that when you WHISPER LIKE THIS it’s still incredibly audible).
One of the few drawbacks of this campground is that there is no soap in any of the bathrooms, a bit of a dilemma for an OCD freak like myself, but thankfully we had plenty of dish detergent (?) to substitute. Other than that the grounds are very spacious with plenty of separation between each area, and the views of the stars are truly magnificent. There are some pretty great rocks if you like to go climbing or repelling and although many signs warn you of bears or mountain lions we didn’t spot any unusual wildlife.

I loved this campground! I go camping almost every month all over southern CA, and I have to say this was one of my favorites.
My family and I went for 3 days last week. We had 5 adults and 4 kids ages 6 – 9. We were in sites 29 & 30– which were pretty close together and at the top of a hill. All the other campsites were down hill from us so I felt a little sense of privacy (as private as one can get while camping).
Pros: The staff was friendly, bathrooms were clean, hot water for showers (50 cents for 3 min), trails were fantastic, the main road coming in and out was concrete, but the loops were dirt (great for kids because cars drive much slower on dirt). Potable water spigots conveniently located all over the place
2 things I ALWAYS expect when I go camping: bugs, and noise from other campers. Screen house and ear plugs fixes those issues for me.
Cons: pretty hilly so kids may have a hard time playing with a ball, or riding bikes/​scooters.
Most campsites you have to use
or
. For Idyllwild you have to use
.
My family and I will definitely go back to visit again.

Went to Idyllwild County Park last weekend for a short camping trip with friends. The campground was really nice, there were plenty of water faucets so you didn’t have go all the way to the bathrooms to clean your dishes, the bathrooms were clean (as far as campground bathrooms go), we had cell phone service, and the weather was perfect!
I appreciate any campground where you can bring your dog! The also have a perimeter trail that is dog friends. Several people were out with their dog so our little guy got a lot of interaction which he enjoyed. As others have mentioned there are tons of boulders which makes this the idea place to go if you enjoy bouldering. There is a 10pm «quiet time» which people tended to respect.
The two things we really disliked about Idyllwild: 1) the campsites really lacked privacy, there are some trees and our campsite wasn’t that bad but some of the other sites seems like they were on top of each other and 2) the address on their page is incorrect so we put that address into our GPS and we ended up totally lost. Luckily some friends of our had already made it to the camp and (since we had cell service) they were able to drop a pin on google maps and send us the address which took us straight to the main gate (that address is 54 000 Riverside County Playground in Idyllwild, Ca)

Dear Idyllwild tourism board,
If you are hiring, call me.
I have been raving about your little mountain town for days now. A stay at the Idyllwild County Park paired with some hiking and climbing of suicide rock, has made me your biggest fan.

Idyllwild County Park is the perfect spot for a relaxing and rejuvenating escape from San Diego. Don’t get me wrong, San Diego is not the type of city you need to «escape» from (LA is a different story), but if you want a change of scenery the pine trees, campsites next to a creek, and the fact that there are bathrooms as well as warm showers so you can sit under a mind-​blowing amount of stars without really roughing it, makes this the perfect spot to do so.
Campsites are only $ 20 which is well worth it to experience the wonder of these woods. My only advice is to be mindful of the site you choose. Some lack flat space which can make sharing a tent with someone you don’t know well, a little awkward.

Camped here overnight… And then a full day of Boldering!
Tons of Bolders !!
Camp site cost us $ 20 for the night.
Remember NO GATHERING WOOD !
Check out time is 1 pm
$ 5 bundles of wood sold at the front gate.
Camp Site 56 has a GIANT BOLDER 5 feet from the fire pit :)
AWESOM PLACE