la paz county rv park
Spent the past week camping at La Paz County Park Campground, 8 miles north of Parker, AZ along the Colorado River. This was a hidden gem (at least for us)! Within that campground is another campground, The Pirates Den Resort, which includes The Black Pearl Restaurant and the Thirsty Pirate Beach Bar right on the water. The Emerald Canyon Golf Course is right across the street. Cell service is pretty bad (Verizon) and we got zero OTA channels. And since the time zone change follows the Colorado River in this area, our phones got confused and kept switching between Mountain time and Pacific time, so we were never quite sure what the real time was. I then learned that I could manually set it to stay at Mountain time. Problem solved!
We stumbled upon dry camping sites along the water, right across the lagoon from the restaurant. And even though it looks like it would be part of the Pirates Den Resort, it’s actually part of the county park. The only caveat was that we needed to move out of the spot from 3PM on Friday until after 4PM on Saturday to make room for the Saturday Swap Meet. Yes, that’s a little inconvenient but worth it to be near the grass and water. They have another large dry-camping area available, so we moved into that for the night. That’s just a big gravel parking lot and the day we stopped in to ask about sites, the office only mentioned the gravel lot for dry camping. We discovered the waterfront sites simply by asking someone who was already parked there. And during our stay there, we had several people stop and ask how we got that site.
