Saddle Mountain BLM (Tonopah, AZ)
Reviewed Feb. 23, 2022

Great location. Need good equipment if you need reliable internet for work.

Stayed at the base of Saddle Mountain. Turned left on the dirt road around mile marker 13--as other reviewers stated, the dirt roads closer to you when coming from the east are very rocky--I had to take it VERY slow just driving my high-clearance truck. The dirt road I turned down while towing my 36 ft. 5th wheel was much smoother and allows you to get very close to the base of the mountain. The views are pretty and the mountain is right next to you.

Any indicators of good cell service is deceptive--yes, you have "a lot of bars," but bars are not necessarily a good determiner of signal strength. I use both ATT and T-Mobile sim cards in an LTE router/modem combo. The cell towers closest to the campsites are to the NW, right on I-10, and they have VERY high latency. Even if you have good download/upload speeds, you can't do any streaming/video calls with latency in the 300+ millisecond range and Jitter in the 2k millisecond range. Unless you have a high dB LTE directional antenna to point toward a better tower to the NE (which I do, thankfully), closer to Buckeye/Phoenix, you will be out of luck if you need reliable LTE internet for remote work. 

This is the only reason I didn't give the site 5 stars, since cell phones, tablets, and omni-directional antennas will always gravitate to the tower with the strongest signal, which is the one with high latency, in this case. If you don't need reliable internet to work on the road, this might not mean much to you, but if you do, keep this in mind.

Month of VisitFebruary
  • Settling in at Saddle Mountain
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