CAMPSITE REVIEW: County Road 48, Leadville, CO

CAMPSITE REVIEW:  County Road 48, Leadville, CO

Cost:  Free

Hookups:  None

Dump/Water On-site:  None

Amenities:  None

GPS: 39.248635,-106.370303

We stayed here for a little over two weeks in late July 2019.  Excellent place to stay and explore the Leadville area.  The max stay here is two weeks, but we did end up staying a few extra days to help time our next stop.

Road/Site Condition

The road coming is dirt and gravel.  There is no washboard and it is easy to drive on.  There are two main areas directly off County Road 48.  However, from what I was told, there are many spots throughout the side/back roads to the left.  I believe they can be accessed from the first main area or if you keep driving down 48 and turn left it circles around and they are apparently some spots.  The two main areas are on the left side of the road.  The first one is very close to the paved road and the other is about a mile away.  Both are easy to access.  We ended up staying at the second area.  This area is wide open which was great for our solar.  It was not too crowded when we arrived on a Sunday afternoon, but this is a very popular spot, so you are going to have neighbors.  Most of the better spots were taken, but we were able to park behind a small row of trees on the left and had a great view of the mountains.  There are areas to setup on the right and left side of the entrance “road”.  The area is grassy, but surprisingly level.  We had no trouble leveling.  I would say 5-6 rigs of any size could fit on each side comfortably.  At one point, we had more than that near us, but they were all Xscapers and knew each other.  They graciously let us join their gatherings and we had a great time.  Now we are Xscapers because we joined while staying here!  Even with a large crowd, everyone was respectful and observed “quiet hours.  It helped that most had solar, so generator noise was minimal.   

Scenery

The area is beautiful.  There is a great view of Mt. Elbert.  The town of Leadville is a cute little mountain town.  There are also several lakes and tons of hiking nearby.

Cell/Internet Access

Our cell phones are AT&T and we have AT&T and Verizon hotspots.  We had 2-3 bars of Verizon, but it was unusable for me.  The data was there, but it was very slow.  The booster did not help either.  AT&T was great.  We had 2-3 bars and the data was speedy.  However, the weird thing on AT&T was sporadically, we would lose all signal completely.  It would typically last a few hours (one time was almost an entire day) and would randomly come back.  We found that if we were out at the site, the city of Leadville was also out.  Inconvenient if you have specific times you must work while on the road.  Thankfully, I have a flexible schedule and could work around the issue.  It was somewhat random, but we did notice it mostly went out in the late afternoon and it happened a bit more frequently on the weekends.

Amenity Access

The City of Leadville has an awesome dump/water station at the sanitation station as you come into town.  It is about 5-10 minutes from the site.  It is $5 to dump and $2.50 for water.  There is a self-pay box, or you can pay inside during normal business hours.  Some of the nearby National Park Forest campgrounds have water spigots.  I’m not sure you can get water without camping there, but we did.  Biggest issue was where to dump trash.  All the dumpsters in town we either locked or had no household trash signs.  We ended up dumping trash at the Shell’s car vacuum trash cans (our trash bags are small) a time or two.  We also found a dumpster near the Silver Dollar National Forest campground that did not have a sign on it, so used that a time or two as well.  The town of Leadville has a grocery store, Family Dollar and gas stations that have just about anything you would need while staying.  I would recommend visiting Melanzana on the main strip in town.  Neat, American-made shop.  We did not visit many museums, but there are plenty to choose from.  The lady at the Visitor Bureau was very nice and will give you any information you need on the town.