Thursday, March 13, 2014

Campground Review: Cave Creek Regional Park, Cave Creek, AZ

Cave Creek Regional Park is located in a pretty Sonoran desert setting in the foothills at the edge of the Northernmost communities of the Phoenix metropolitan area. There are 38 water/electric hookup sites, each with a picnic table and BBQ. Roads and sites are paved, sites are spacious and well separated. There are restrooms with showers (not very good shower heads though), a playground and a dump station.

The Regional Park offers 11 miles of trails, lots of picnic sites, a Nature Center and a playground. Horseback riding is also available and two of the campsites have small corrals if you want to bring your own horse.

We had site #17. This site is adjacent to the restroom, which faces away from our site. It was a nice, big site, the only drawback being there was no shade and we got the afternoon sun. Since the other side of the rig was right on the road, we weren't able to sit outside in the afternoons when it was hot unless we wanted to sit in the street. We had a decent Verizon signal during our stay.

Since it's such a small campground and far from the local highway it is very quiet here day and night.

Many of the sites here, though large and well separated from the neighbors, seemed wide open and not too private. This may be because the shrubs are smaller and lower to the ground here and there are fewer trees in the campground compared to our last stop at Lost Dutchman.  I thought the best sites were 2, 4, 6, and 8. These four sites had afternoon shade and trees closer to the site for a more private feel. Take a good look at a satellite map when making your reservation because a couple of pairs of sites have adjacent sitting areas making them ideal for folks camping with other people, but no privacy if you want to be alone.


Site #17, That's the restroom building behind us.

Site #17 from the other direction.
Our sitting area was huge but had no shade until the sun was almost down.

Rosie casts a late afternoon shadow.



5 comments:

  1. Cave Creek is our least favorite of the Maricopa parks, both due to the sites and the number of horses and poop on the trails!

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    1. Agreed. Though when we hiked the trails it looked as though the horse poop was swept off the trail after it dries. I bet there were a lot of complaints about excessive horse poop on the trails!

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  2. We liked Cave Creek although I agree with that the sites are spacious yet you are actually exposed. It seems the park is weirdly designed. We were there in January last year so we did not have the shade issue and less crowd too.
    The accessibility of the hike trails made this park one of our favorites, no horse poops on trails when we were there.

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    1. Yeah, our sunny site would have been quite nice last year when it was so cold!

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  3. I hope we are headed that way when we leave Tucson next month...thanks for the review! Gay

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