Louis Lake Dispersed Camping

This area starts about 1/2 mile after you cross over the cattle guard which is mile marker (mm) 26, That is the spot GPS brings you to. You have ATT and T Mobile here. I camped there and it was fine. However the next day I took my Jeep to Lake Louise and discovered there are about 5 miles of excellent camping just ahead. Just past the metal winter closure gate there is a large meadow with lots of spots. Then at mm25 is Slate Creek, another Big Meadow. Between mm 23 and 24 no spots. AT mm24 another nice meadow with couple of roads. Between 23 and 24 probably 6+ roads to camp on. At mm22 +- You lose ATT and TMobile coverage. There is NO Verizon anywhere, At mm21 is Grannier Meadows with several roads again, and after that it is a few miles down hill to the Lake with no sites. The pay for campsite at Lake is okay if you want bear boxes and vault toilet, but I would stay at one of the three free spots by the boat ramp on the water. There is even a vault toilet there. The road from ramp to CG is a doable, but potholed. The entire 9 mile trip is okay, but areas have washboard. It would be a 15,mph road for me in a RV towing a Jeep, but some people go faster, Be sure to visit the nearby state park, South Pass. Very interesting with 15 restored building you can browse.

We came for 3 nights and stayed for 6 days. We followed the well maintained gravel road in at least a couple of miles with every visible site occupied. Got to a wide area where we could pull over and unhitch the jeep for deeper scouting. While unhitching a truck was loading up his ATV and packing up so we simply moved in once he was gone. That was lucky. Then we get leveled and open up the camper and discover the LTE router has found AT&T signal, so we pop the antenna up and have decent data rates. Lucky #2. Great weather mid July 2022, light breeze = low bugs, shade yet enough sun for solar to fully top off daily, trails to explore and we spent an afternoon driving the Scenic Loop over the pass, visiting the various lakes, and traversing Red Canyon Road (South of Lander) on the return to camp trip. All sites are well off the main road and there were many further back. One review stated the side roads were too rutted and high clearance is needed. Not necessarily true but there were a few that had deep ruts for a sedan. Out site and the ones near us were very easy to access from the main road. We also spent an afternoon in Lander for dinner out and groceries. Not super close but close enough for a weekly supply run if you're staying up to the max 16 days. Very clean area. Every lake had an established campground, boat access, pit toilet if that's more your speed.

Ok, we did not actually stay but we tried. We took the car back several miles of the today to look for a spot. Based on the previous reviews, I expected several options and even some close to the highway.

The main gravel road has a lot of washboard areas. It’s passable but definitely give me pause. The turn outs for camping sites, which seem few and far between, are dirt rutted rocky roads.

There is one large area on the left, not too far from the parking area. There were three or four campers there already. If this area looks overgrown and not my idea of a great but barely ok.

Unfortunately, my advise, skip this one unless you have high clearance vehicles.

ATT cell only at the beginning.

The roads are nice and wide for a big rig. Plenty of areas all over. I was near mile marker 22. Low temp overnight hit 14 degrees.
Lots of bear scat. Big bear scat at that.
I can confirm up to mile marker 22 that you will have no problem turning around.

The only downside is the wind. I had gusts up to 40 MPH

No Verizon service.
Not even 1X

We stayed here in order to ride the Loop Rd on our BMW GS motorcycle up to Lander and go see South Pass City ghost town. The Loop road is awesome and well worth the drive/ride. It's very suitable in a car also. South Pass was a cool town to see and the mine tour is at 2pm Thurs-Sun from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It's well worth seeing and exploring the old town. They have done a lot of work to preserve and restore this old town.

There are many options for boondocking spots well away from others on this road with pretty easy access to most although we grabbed the first one one on the left near where this marker is which kept our drive in short, but also meant we heard a lot of the traffic that went by. In all fairness, it was a busy weekend we were there. Many of the boondocking spots further in sit well back off the road. We are in a 42' 5th wheel with a HDT and had no issues getting to our spot which had very easy access. We only had 1 neighbor just a bit above us. The further in you go, the less cell signal until you go up in elevation, then you might get some back.

There is a lot of options for riding in this area with quite a few FS roads and trails to go explore with motorcycles, ATV's and side by sides. The 4x4 road to Christina Lake is actually pretty challenging on a large adventure bike. I made it about half way of the 9 miles before I was running out of time and had to turn around. I need to go back on a smaller bike to conquer it. This would be an awesome trip for the family in Jeep, 4x4 or ATV.

The only negative for me in this area was the cellular was very challenging. This was on a Fri-Sun and it was pretty busy so maybe it's better at other times. We had nothing on our Verizon phones although we didn't try the booster. AT&T has full bars on 4G (not LTE) (I wish they wouldn't combine those on the rating since LTE is usually a ton faster than just 4G. Although we had excellent signal, many times throughout the day the cellular was unusable. I think AT&T has a partner agreement here and the speeds during most of the day were less than 1mb and many times less than that. I also definitely saw myself being network managed also on one of my devices that was over the 22gb limit, so I tried to rely on the other one that wasn't at that point, but it still was a struggle. The only time I saw really good speeds (8-9mb) was late in the evening when everyone was in bed. T-mobile was roaming, probably on the same towers so the speed wasn't any better.