Box Elder Campground

We spent one night in Box Elder, and it was fine for a night. The location was quite close to Mantua and other small cities, and we heard more city noises than I expected into the late evening, but things eventually quieted down. The biggest drawback was that the restroom in loop A was apparently severely damaged (by a falling tree?) some time ago, and has not been repaired. Port-a-potties were on hand and were somewhat clean, but even vault toilets as found in other forest service campgrounds would be preferable. Ideally, the restroom with flush toilets would be repaired.

Would love for the description for this campground to not include flush toilets anymore. It has clearly been a very long time since that building was up and running, and also doesn’t look like there is plans anytime soon to fix it. There are porta potties instead. The noise from the highway kept us up most of the night. Ended up leaving after the first night, even though we paid for 2.

Not a bad site, there is some road noise but not bad. However they should have an alert that the (Seasonal) Flushing toilets are now portable toilets and the building has mostly collapsed.

A couple of takeaways. First, the location is great, even though the camp is just a few miles off the interstate and toward a busy commuting route, it was still surprisingly quiet. Second, the cell service was good. However, on the lower loop the vault toilets had a police “do not cross” tape around them. It looks like it has been like that for a long time, maybe several years based on the deterioration of the building. In place of the vault were 4 porta-potties. They were in terrible shape. To be fair, they were cleaned once a week but we were there before the cleaning and they were horrible.

Beautiful and shady. We were in sites 18 and 19. Our spots didn't have very large tent spots that were a comfortable distance from the fire pits. Camp hosts were very friendly.
Porta potties were a week old so they became quite unbearable the last day we were there. We drove to the other loop once and another time I was tempted to go in the woods. I hope they can rebuild the bathrooms soon.

Campsite area was great, neighboring campsite had dog's running around loose in the campgrounds the whole time which scared the grandkids.

We could not locate our site or our loop A. Stopped at the campground manager/ranger and no one answered. After 9 hours of driving, we were tired. Called KOA and got a site there. Never again. You might be kind to people who have not been to this campground, Put up a map of the loops and sites.

The temporary outhouses were disgusting and were not cleaned/emptied as they should have been. The bathroom needs to be rebuilt. Camp hosts passed us by four times and didn’t even say hello or ask for a tag. There is significant highway noise, although the campsites are shaded and a wonderful creek is nearby.

The campground is beautiful and so shady! I think every spot I saw had ample shade. Spot 10 had lots of room for our 2 tents and a tree my kids climbed constantly. No creek access but it wasn't too far away. The only downside is I picked the spot I did because of how close it was to the flush toilets.... And there were no flush toilets! The roof of the building had collapsed. So hopefully they fix that soon, but it looks like there is no immediate plan to fix that.

We love the camping spot but sadly the bathrooms were burned down so they had porta pottys that were disgusting. Not emptied(full) and not cleaned the 3 nights we were there. The sanitizer ran out and Spiderwebs and active spiders crawling in them every day. Scared the kids. The last day we couldn't stand the conditions not to mention the heat and smell. So we had to drive to other bathrooms. Very inconvenient. Also we had a family member visit us there and because they were there over 30 min they had to pay 10$ extra cash to the camp host. That seemed excessive.