Bisti Badlands Parking Access

I decided not to drive down this road in the freshly applied gravel in my little sedan/low clearance/prius, but it should be fine for most.

Instead, I parked at the other entrance to the badlands, just to the north on road 7295 (by the sign "Bisti Wilderness Church").

I intermittently got 1 bar of signal at the edge of the badlands.

Good location and beautiful place. No restrooms or shade.

We are full-timers in a 36 ft Class A with a Cherokee Trailhawk tow. We were here for a few days in mid April. The gravel road is rougher than it appears to the eye. We camped in the large open area on the West side of the road a short distance from the trailhead. It was very windy the day we arrived, with wind speeds of 28 mph and gusts of 45 mph.

AT&T coverage showed 1-2 Bars of LTE service, but I was unable to get a connection without a booster. We had an unobstructed view of the sky and so we were able to receive all 3 SW Dish satellites and Starlink had up to 12 MB/s. We didn’t try to load any OTA channels.

The gravel road is fairly short and in good condition, there is a vault toilet but we didn’t use it so not sure what condition it was in. It started to rain just after we got there and while it stopped after about an hour we could tell from watching others that the trails were too muddy to enjoy hiking on. The parking lot gets a lot more traffic than I expected for being so far away from town but there were no problems from anyone. There were four different vehicles spending the night.

We stayed at Bisti on our way to Mesa Verde. Free, parking lot is level, the road in is gravel, not too bad- able to drive 20mph in 24 foot RV. Very hot in July, some people began hiking the badlands at 7pm, returning to parking lot at sunset-- we had marvelous sunset to enjoy. We hiked the badlands 8-10am and it was getting pretty warm when we were done. Great hiking out among the hoodoos and other rock formations. Vault toilet was clean.

We stayed here for one night and a day as an overnight stop. The access road was in decent shape with only minor washboarding, we could drive 12mph with the trailer comfortably. You'll likely want to come in from the south road rather than the north as there's a large dip right to the north of the main parking lot that would bottom some rigs out.

The parking lot had some traffic during the day from day use hikers. I wish we had longer to explore the area. There was some trash in the parking lot but nothing unexpected. A vault toilet is available along with picnic tables under a shade structure. The stars were phenomenal and the noise level was nil.

ATT connection with a roof mounted Pepwave antenna was 15mbps down and 0.5 up. TMobile wasn't usuable. We used Starlink instead.