CAMPANAC.Powered by public lands intelligenceMore Than Just Parks
The map
U.S. Forest Service · Santa Fe National Forest · NM

Paliza Family Campground

1Heads up1 fire 8.5 mi away
Wildfire
McCauley Springs fire · 8.5 mi away · 712 acres · 100% contained · updated Oct 6, 2026
Fires: NIFC/IRWIN via MTJP wildfire tracker · Oct 6, 2026
The agency doesn’t say how you get a siteIts record carries no access type, so treat it as a place to phone before you drive.
Get directionsWhat it costs, and the rules
Right now
OpenInside the published season, our reading; a database flag says not open
Season
May 1Opens May 1. No closing date published.
Drawn from the record · 6,790 ft · 39% tree cover · water within reach · Bortle 3 sky
6,790 ftElevation
335 ftWater · an unnamed stream
7.6 miNE of Jemez Pueblo, NM
39%Tree cover
Bortle 3Night sky · 121st darkest of 164 in NM
Opens May 1. No closing date published.Today

The place

the agency’s own description · what’s there

In the agency’s own words

Campground is situated in a beautiful Ponderosa Pine forest. Located in Lower Paliza Canyon, the campground has original CCC shelters in some sites. At 6,700 feet please come prepared for warm days and cool nights. Uses: Overnight camping, hiking Facilities: 30 camp sites; five sites have shade shelters. Vault toilets; no dump station available. There is no drinking water available at the campground. Special Instructions: This campground is designated as a reduced impact and recycle campground. Users are required pack out trash during the off-season. Cutting live vegetation is prohibited. Charcoal only in pedestal cooking grills.

Source: USFS Enterprise Data Warehouse · Aug 24, 2026

Facilities

Toilets
Vault Toilets
“…sites; five sites have shade shelters. Vault toilets; no dump station available. There is no drinking…”
Drinking water
None, bring your own
“…toilets; no dump station available. There is no drinking water available at the campground. Special Instructions:…”
Source: read from the agency description, shown above · Sep 12, 2026

Phone before you drive

recreation.gov publishes no availability for a campground you can’t reserve, so there’s no thirty-night reading to draw here. The season bar above is what the agency does publish.

Booking window6 months outBooking opens 6 months ahead; today unlocks arrivals through April 16, 2027. The agency publishes no reservable season in the record we hold, so the window may close earlier than that.recreation.gov
Runs itU.S. Forest Servicethe agency’s record
Directions
Every line of the receipt · 5

What you actually pay

The sign priceU.S. Forest Service
The U.S. Forest Service publishes no per-night rate for this campground that we can read, so there’s no sign price to print. That’s a gap in the record, not a free campground.
For a single unit campsite .$15
Only two (2) vehicles and up to 5 people are permitted at a camp site.
The booking feerecreation.gov
We hold no recreation.gov booking record for this campground, so we can’t say whether a booking fee applies.
What a stay costs
The agency publishes no nightly rate for this campground, so there’s no total to show.
How we know this receipt · 4
Booking fee, change fee, cancellation fee, no-show: Rules and Reservation Policies, Recreation.gov, the published fee schedule, curated by hand into lib/reservation-fee-schedule.json (9 rows, each carrying its own verbatim sentence). The publisher states these policies were last updated September 2019. · Sep 9, 2026
The two totals: Derived by CAMPANAC by adding the agency’s own published nightly rate to recreation.gov’s own published reservation fee. Both components are cited above; the addition is ours and is shown only where every component is known. · Sep 9, 2026
Who keeps the booking fee: Recreation.gov facility policy text, Dead Swede Campground (facility 234221) · Not on the national policy page. This is agency policy text recreation.gov publishes on individual campground pages; this site holds it verbatim on 45 active campgrounds (campground_rules.cancellation_description, scripts/load-facility-rules.mjs). · Sep 9, 2026
The contract: Reservation Gods: Who Stole Our Campsites and Sold Them Back to Us, More Than Just Parks, April 2025 · Apr 1, 2025
Source: USFS Enterprise Data Warehouse · Aug 24, 2026

record Aug 24, 2026 · How we know all this

Seen something wrong here? Tell us.

Getting there

the map and the coordinate
Coordinate35.70447, -106.62698

Where it is

Source: USFS Enterprise Data Warehouse · Aug 24, 2026

The weather

the next four days · the thirty-year normal

Next four days, and the thirty-year normal

Forecast

Tonight33°Mostly Clear
Saturday58°Sunny
Saturday Night41°Partly Cloudy3% rain
Sunday57°Mostly Sunny6% rain

NWS forecast for Ponderosa, NM

Source: National Weather Service, ABQ forecast office · Oct 17, 2026

Typical weather

Typical May night 41°F, day 76°F.

Coldest night of the open season: typical May night 41°F. Bring the bag rated for it.

100°32°10°

Daily high and lowDays with 0.10 in or moreOutside the published season

A normal is the 1991-2020 average for the month, not a forecast: about half of all Julys are colder than the July line. The seven-day forecast above answers the other question.

Measured at: JEMEZ SPRINGS, NM (USC00294369), 6 miles away and 528 ft lower
Source: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, U.S. Climate Normals 1991-2020, monthly normals · Sep 8, 2026

The land, and who answers for it

what threatens it · who answers for it

What threatens this place

Watch
Roadless
Cerro La Jara1,122 acres · 6 mi · inventoried roadless area
Roadless
Virgin Canyon6,068 acres · 7 mi · inventoried roadless area
Roadless
Bearhead Peak8,277 acres · 8 mi · inventoried roadless area

You’re camping on ground somebody wants. We track the threats and the comment deadlines.

Source: MTJP Threatened Lands map · Oct 9, 2026

Who answers for this land

Teresa Leger Fernandez, official portrait

Paliza Family Campground is in New Mexico’s 3rd congressional district. Its representative, Teresa Leger Fernandez (D), votes on the laws that decide what happens to this land. Public-lands grade so far: A+. See every public-lands vote →

Seen something wrong here? Tell us.

Source: U.S. Census district boundaries and the MTJP Congressional Public Lands Score

How we know

every fact on this page, and where it came from
Right now: Today falls inside the season the agency publishes, and it has posted nothing else. That reading is ours. The U.S. Forest Service’s own database, though, flags it not open with no reason or date; the flag is named under How we know all this.
Listed not open: USFS EDW Recreation Opportunities, openstatus field: a not-open flag in a database, with no reason and no date published; read there since Sep 9, 2026. A flag, not a notice, so this page doesn’t call it a closure. · Oct 16, 2026
Season: USFS Enterprise Data Warehouse · Aug 24, 2026
Elevation: USGS 3DEP elevation point query at this campground’s coordinate · Sep 7, 2026
Night sky: VIIRS Day/Night Band annual cloud-free composite, VNL V2 2024 (Earth Observation Group, Colorado School of Mines), read at the published coordinate: 0.21 mcd/m² of artificial all-sky glow, ranked against the 164 rated federal campgrounds in New Mexico · Sep 8, 2026
Sky-glow model: Duriscoe, Anderson, Luginbuhl and Baugh (2018), a simplified model of all-sky artificial sky glow derived from VIIRS Day/Night band data, the National Park Service sky-glow model
Cell signal: the Forest Service’s own campground description, read as text by CAMPANAC. None of this is a measurement. It’s what the land manager published about the place, and phones, carriers and weather all disagree with each other; treat it as a warning, not a promise.
Nearest place of any size: Ponderosa, NM, 1.8 mi NNE (a census designated place). Straight line.
Nearest town: U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line 2024 places, measured by CAMPANAC to the town boundary; population is the ACS 2020-2024 5-year estimate · Sep 9, 2026