The Needles Campground
2Heads uppark alerts
- Right now
- OpenThe agency lists it open
- A night
- $20From, per site
- Sites
- 2614 of them walk-up
- Season
- Year-roundOpen year-round
The place
the agency’s own description · what’s there
In the agency’s own words
The Needles Campground has 26 individual sites. Nightly camping fee for an individual site is $20. You can reserve some individual sites spring through fall. Other times of the year, individual sites are first-come, first-served. There are toilets, picnic tables, and fire rings in the campground. This park district also has three group campsites described on a separate page.
Facilities
- Toilets
- Flush Toilets - seasonal · Vault Toilets - year round
- Drinking water
- Yes
Around the campground
- Night sky · 24th darkest of 458 in UT
- Bortle 1
- Fall color · reported 7 days ago, 39 km away
- Peak color
Some sites book, the rest walk up
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.
We make nothing when you book. The link goes straight to the government.
Every line of the receipt · 11
What you actually pay
Derived by CAMPANAC: the lowest per-night amount the agency’s fee record states ($20), plus one $8 recreation.gov reservation fee for the booking. A weekend here means Friday and Saturday night, booked once. Optional charges (an extra vehicle, a second tent, a dump-station fee) are listed separately and aren’t in this total.
Who keeps the booking fee
The agency’s own policy text says the reservation fee and the cancellation processing fee are “retained by the reservation service contractor”, and that a campground concessionaire will decline to refund them because “they did not receive these fees”. Recreation.gov is run under contract by Booz Allen Hamilton. What share of your booking fee the contractor keeps isn’t published in any federal dataset we can read, so we print no number for it. Our reporting on the contract →
How we know this receipt · 5
record Aug 24, 2026 · How we know all this
Getting there
the map and the coordinate · the phone number
Where it is
Canyonlands National Park Needles District GROUP CampsitesCanyonlands National Park · 1.1 mi
Canyonlands National Park Needles District CampgroundCanyonlands National Park · 2.7 mi
Hamburger Rock CampgroundBears Ears National Monument · 7.8 mi
Indian Creek Falls Group SiteBears Ears National Monument · 8.0 mi
Creek Pasture Group SiteBears Ears National Monument · 9.3 miThe weather
the next four days · the thirty-year normal
Next four days, and the thirty-year normal
Forecast
NWS forecast for La Sal, UT
Typical weather
Typical October night 38°F, day 70°F.
Coldest month of the year: typical January night 17°F, below freezing. Bring a bag rated colder than that, and expect ice in the water bottle.
Daily high and lowDays with 0.10 in or more
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.
The land, and who answers for it
what threatens it · who answers for it
What threatens this place
You’re camping on ground somebody wants. We track the threats and the comment deadlines.
Who answers for this land
The Needles Campground is in Utah’s 3rd congressional district. Its representative, Mike Kennedy (R), votes on the laws that decide what happens to this land. Public-lands grade so far: F. See every public-lands vote →