Golden Horn Designated Camping Area

This is the second time I’ve camped here and I absolutely love it! It has pristine scenery, tucked in a valley of towering mountains on a flowing stream directly outside Silverton. Seriously, this is one of the best free campsites I’ve stayed at.

It’s about 10 minutes outside Silverton, so it gets pretty packed during the high season. There are a ton of open spots, especially for tent campers, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a spot. The only thing is that the further down the road you go, the less cell service there is.

We arrived here on August 2nd (on a Sunday afternoon) and although there were still a lot of other campers here, we were able to find a spot in the trees in the back. Most of the spots, however, are out in the open and campers are parked right next to each other. A bit too crowded for my taste, but it is so beautiful here I don't care how many other campers there are. There are no crazy partiers or anyone being disrespectful towards other campers. And to my surprise .... THERE IS A BATHROOM HERE. You may need to bring your own toilet paper.
The campground is about 200 yards from South Mineral Creek. It is a shallow, but nice moving clear creek.
This is by far one of the best camping locations we have been to yet.

We took our RTT on our 4WD truck to camp here right after the 4th of July. Arrived on a Monday and it was PACKED. Tons of dispersed sites along the road with a few campgrounds at the start of the road as well as at the Ice Lakes trailhead. Everything was taken. We drove past the final campground (South Mineral) and the road got rougher but the end of the road has some great dispersed camping. We got the last spot. On a MONDAY. This was a bit of a surprise to us, but likely due to the 4th of July weekend. Crowds did thin out a bit afterwards. I think it's possible you'd be out of luck if you tried to find a spot here on a weekend this year.

You need to be comfortable driving single lane rough rocky terrain if you're going to go past South Mineral Campground to dry camp. Also, a lot of the dispersed sites were tent only (park your truck and walk a bit to a site). I would strongly discourage taking a trailer or anything larger than a truck past South Mineral. The dry camping on this road (especially past the campground) is much more suited for tents and SUVs than RVs and trailers. That being said, it's one of the most beautiful spots I've camped so far this year and I'd go back in a heartbeat.

What more can you ask for? Up in the mountains for summer days to be nice & cool, with a creek to provide white noise to hide whatever sound your neighbors make and for dogs to dip their paws in, and we even got two bars of Verizon 4G/LTE without boosting. Data did get slower when more people showed up, though.

Based on the number of fire rings, this place is way too packed on typical mid-summer weekends.

The forest road there can be rocky & there's a few bumps you want to drive around, but it's very much doable with any vehicle. The entrance road to the actual camping area is hard to notice and the sign is way at the bottom, so pay attention to your GPS map. We saw an under-40 foot class A and a few travel trailers while we were here.

"Hey man, you local?" he asked me, approaching our little corner of this large open, free camping area that I couldn't understand why was still available. A ton of other campers, from tenters to decent sized travel trailers, were all squeezed in right next to one another, back into the forest and all through the large dirt circle.

"Sure," I replied, because for the moment, I was.

"Think anyone would mind if we backed four big motorhomes in here?" If they did, it would take up every last inch of space except what would be needed for those of us already there to pull out.

"I don't see why not," I remarked. It's a free country and all.

"I just don't know if people would be mad," he continued.

"I don't know either man, but I'm up here," I smiled and pointed to my pristine little corner far away from it all.

I've never seen such big rigs squeeze into such a small spot.

The views here, and I imagine particularly more so when it's not 4th of July, are stunning. Absolutely smashing. The river is cold, and flows like gravity is late for a meeting with the bottom of the valley.

As nightfall fell in, the river sort of made a puddle just behind our van, and I realized why everyone else was afraid to come on down to the pristine little spot we chose.

PS. There is ample camping all along this road. People were just pulled to the side and setting up tents wherever a flat space was available, and while another camper told us this was something you could get a ticket for, it certainly wasn't preventing anyone from doing it and no rangers were kicking them out.