Forest Road 413 Dispersed Camping

We needed a quick destination from Congress to escape the heat and this was close by. Be aware there are length limits on 89 from Congress to Prescott (You can go around through Skull Valley) and then again on 89A through Jerome. It's very twisty, narrow, and tight roads to get here, but overall pretty easy in a smaller RV. We brought our truck campers up here.

The road is paved most of the way up and only turns to gravel at the FS413. It's a very easy gravel road in the beginning. If you go straight on 104, it turns to gravel soon after.

Most sites are pretty close the road and most are pretty rutted and rocky from people going in and out when wet. We found a site on the left that sat back a little but further and a little bit larger. The road is overall pretty quiet during the week, but probably can get busy on the weekends.

Great AT&T 4G LTE service
Great T-Mobile 5G service
Okay Verizon 4G LTE
Good Starlink if you can find a clear view

Thought the road into this area was pretty good. Even saw a few low clearance sport cars driving the road and no one got stuck. The turnouts are pretty well spaces so you don't really see each other, but getting into some of them could be dicey as they can be quite ruddy. The spot I got was very clean; not even one piece of trash. It even had two nicely built rock fire rings.

Got one of the spot right before the trail head and only got 1 bar with Verizon and T-Mobile. Other than annoying latency, speeds were good enough for streaming video.

If you mountain bike, the trails here are insanely fun to descend. Flowy and rowdy with technical rock gardens nicely spread throughout. Definitely coming back just to ride these trails again. It's the three Yeager trails.

The area is beautify. But I would highly caution bigger rigs and even larger SUV's. The entrance of the camping area is a steeper dirt road that can get muddy or slippery during winter. The first about 2-3 miles roads 413 are even, but dirt and narrow with very few turn offs for a larger vehicle. But we did see some middle sized RVs in the earlier part of that road. Whatever you do, I do not recommend heading up forest road 132. It starts out rutted and narrow, but eventually as you climb up is very washboard with jagged rocks, even for our higher clearance SUV. There are not many sites up there anyhow and its much hotter up on the top of the mtn as the fauna changes to smaller brush and mesquite bushes and a few scattered ponderosa. We scratched up our Tahoe on the sides from the brushes scraping against it (not a huge deal but its a newer vehicle, could do without the love taps). So if you dont mind that, its a fun offroad type of road to explore. If you have a higher clearance vehicle, like a Jeep or Side by Side, this would be a fun road to explore all the way down to the town of Cherry. Some of the campsites where not as clean as we would love to see. We respect our free lands and it sad to see glass, bottle and diapers, toilet paper left about. Also no place close by to purchase water, so definitely bring your own. It also depends on who your neighbors are. For the first days we where there it was quiet, but come the weekend we had super large group with side by sides and quads zipping by all day long into the night with music blaring. Again, lack of consideration for others.

After spending hours trying to find a spot in prescott, we gave up and started driving back home to Phoenix. Then I ran across this place. It was pretty packed, but it was Memorial Day weekend. We kept driving and finally found a beautiful spot with a ton of shade. Our closest neighbor was about 3/4 mile away. It was clean and very quiet. We drove to Jerome (25 min away) and spent the day there. Mingus lake is about 1.5 miles away, but we didn’t get a chance to go. No vault toilets or tables, but there are fire pits. We will definitely return!