FR-302 Dispersed Camping - Rabbit Ears Pass

Very nice spot close to Steamboat Springs. (Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest) We arrived a little before noon on a Saturday in July. The road in was fine and very manageable with the OP 15 and a 1/2 ton truck. We found a beautiful spot 1.9 miles in on the East (left) side of the road. We saw 6-7 other campers set up on the way in… Mostly tent campers and a van or two. (Later in the weekend we did see some fairly sizable rigs occupying some “spots” along the 1.9 mile route to our spot) There may have been a place or two open that we could have chosen on the way in, but I’m glad that we kept going and settled in this spot. We had a beautiful view and the weather was perfect. Only downfall was the mosquitos. They were pretty bad this time of the year. Bring bug spray, or better yet, a misquote tent. We bought one in Steamboat Springs on our second day here and it was well worth the money! Verizon service was good and we had 2-3 bars all of the time. There was a little traffic on FR 302 but only about 1 car every 4-6 hours or so. Overall… Highly recommend!

We are full-timers and have a 36 ft Class A with a Cherokee Trailhawk tow and had scouted the area a day before arriving with the RV. There are several sites along FR-302, which is actually in pretty decent shape, one about 1/2 mile in, several about a mile in at FR-3021B, which is where we stayed(to the left), and then a few more about another mile in or so. We found a nice site(40.3749046,-106.6699622) and stayed for 5 days(late June). It took a bit of jockeying to get our motorhome into the site, but with a little perseverance, we prevailed. This site was surprisingly level too, almost didn’t need to level at all. There was one beautiful site in a meadow about 1/4 past the one we chose, but the stretch of dirt road between them was deeply rutted and potholed, with a couple of sections that were fairly steeply pitched from side to side, so we decided not to risk it. They were also predicting rain, which it did for a couple days, and didn’t want to get stuck in the mud holes. There is a nice little stream that runs from the meadow along the road. There is little traffic on FR-302, which was nice, though you could hear some traffic on US-40 when it was otherwise quiet. We walked our dog on FR-302 a fair bit and only once encountered a vehicle on the road. There are a number of hiking trails off of US-40 in the surrounding area, but due to the weather, we didn’t get to hike them as much as we would have liked. AT&T coverage was poor without a booster, with 0-2 Bars of 3G service, but nearly no data throughput. With our weboost, it got a little better with 1-3 bars of 3G and speeds up to about 0.4 MB/s, but the speed varied considerably. T-Mobile service was nonexistent. We were able to get DISH coverage on all three western satellites at our site. There were also no OTA channels to be had with our fixed omni antenna.