Best RV Parks & Resorts near Joshua Tree National Park

The is a beautiful Thousand Trails RV Resort in Palm Springs, California! The park is large, very spacious and so clean! The gorgeous Palm trees are a little bit of a parking hazard, but they were here before we were! 😊 And besides, they are so beautiful to look at every day. The park feels like a day on beach with white sand to park on in most spaces, towering Palm trees, and brightly colored tropical flowers. What a treat in the winter! We are here in November and December and daytime high’s are in the low 80’s. The park is split in half with one side 30 amp FHU and the other half 50 amp FHU. For TT members, there is not an additional charge for 50 amp. Quite a deal! There is plenty of room to get out and walk in this park, along with a nice dog park, playground, billiards room, swimming pool and spa, horseshoes, 8 pickle ball courts, many laundry rooms and restrooms, and community recreation room. The surrounding mountains ranges are pretty amazing, too. This park is close to it all in the Palm Springs area and everything is within a short drive. Joshua Tree National Park and the Salton Sea is just over a half hour away. The Thousand Trails Palm Springs RV Resort is perfect and we will definitely be visiting again!

For videos on this park and others, check out our YouTube channel: Jeff & Steff’s Excellent Adventure.

I really liked this campground. It’s one of the campground inside Joshua Tree NP and reservable through Recreation.gov. The sites are very private but they are small. Both the pull through and back in sites are small so this is definitely not for big rigs. We had A19 which is a pull through on the right side of the road and we had to go into the gravel part of the site so we would be in enough to open our driver side slide out. And we ended up pretty slanted as a result, but it fit. There are flush toilets that are very clean. This side of the park is very nice but most of the action is north of here and so we’re an hour drive to a lot of the hikes we want to do. No cell service at all.

Campground review

Similar to all campgrounds in Joshua Tree National Park, it's hard to get a camp site, unless you come midweek or come off-season when it gets hot (mid-may through September). The availability is the reason for not rating this site with a full 5 stars. Otherwise this campground is great. Each site comes with a picnic table and fire pit. There are vault toilets but no running water. This campground is the only one in the park that has a an emergency phone line, which is necessary given lack of cell service. Payment of sites is self service with envelopes at campground board. This campground is extremely convenient for the nearby classic trad routes. There are also many bouldering problems in the campground itself, and many more just a short walk away.

Gear review

One of the great parts of being a Ranger for The Dyrt is testing awesome new products from time to time - on this trip I was testing Boost Oxygen. I'd never used sports oxygen before trying this product, so I'm playing around with all the different potential uses. I ordered the flavorless kind and all three flavors in order to try them all. My personal favorite is the menthol-eucalyptus. My friends and I were using Boost throughout our climbing trip. At first assessment: they're fun. We weren't sure what to expect in terms of effects, but we got a major kick out these canisters. We found every opportunity to boost some extra Oxygen - before bed for recovery during sleep, to wake up in the morning, after running around, in between climbs, etc. The flavors really add to the experience. I found the effects to be more noticeable in the immediate sense, like getting a shot of alertness when groggily waking up in the morning or when feeling winded right after exercise. Sometimes I experienced it as a very subtle and brief tingling after taking a few bursts of Boost. Long term effects were less obvious to me, and I didn't notice any clear muscle recovery effects. One final nice feature is that the canisters are extremely light weight - because it's oxygen! So it doesn't add any weight to day packs, which is especially nice if you want to bring some for long hikes, especially at high altitudes. Check it out: https://www.boostoxygen.com

There are no bathrooms or water here, but you have cell service and a convenience store very close by. This is a great spot to find a free camping site and still be somewhat in your own seclusion. The sky is really nice here at night. You can see the freeway a bit of a distance out from this location and it takes about 45mins or so get back into Joshua tree National park from here. The fire pits are in the ground so you might have to rebuild the walls above ground if they’ve been knocked down. Overall a very cool spot to check out that’s right outside of Joshua tree National park with beautiful sunset views. This is BLM land