Crook County RV Park — Hotel in Prineville

I got a good feeling about the campground the moment we entered and pulled up next to the kiosk that currently serves as the office. The whiteboard on the outside of the office listed the reservations coming in that day and which site they were in, and then beneath that a list of available sites for anyone coming in after hours. The office was still open when we arrived, but a sign in the window provides both an after-hours phone number to call and the site numbers of the managers.

The campground has RV 81 sites divided into 4 rows (plus 2 cabins and several tent sites). The first (southern) row has a mix of back-ins and pull-throughs, while the rest of the sites are pull-throughs. The roads are paved and fairly wide. The sites has asphalt pads bordered by thin strips of gravel, but the rest of the site lawn is grass. Our site (66) was not very wide - we parked on the left side of the pad and with our slides out we were pretty close to our neighbor’s picnic table - but lengthwise our 37-foot fifth wheel and 21-foot truck easily fit in the space. Each site in our row had an engraved picnic table on a circular concrete slab and a chest-high BBQ grill at the front of the site. The site was level and all of the hookups were in standard locations.

Most of the amenities are located at the front of the campground. The clubhouse building is located across the entrance road from the office, and it contains a pool table, a soda and a snack vending machine, a laundry room with several machines, and a private bathroom. The covered porch of the clubhouse has a touchscreen system for late arrivals to use to register. There is a large pavilion located between the entrance and exit roads where you can pay for firewood (there’s a number to call) or make use of the grills and sink to host a group cookout: there are a few picnic tables for seating. On one side of the exit road is a dump station that is available to non-campers for a $10 fee, and has a payment station that takes cash or credit cards. On the other side is the trash and recycling area. The only amenity not in the front of the campground is an additional bathhouse in the middle of the park that includes shower facilities.

The northern and southern sides of the campground have dirt and grass areas for walking dogs with dog waste stations, and there is an additional small grassy pet area next to the trash and recycling area. There is no enclosed dog park inside the campground, but there is one attached to the little public park right across the street from the campground.

From within the campground you have nice view of some of the basalt buttes to the south and east of town. Hiking and rock-climbing enthusiasts can visit beautiful Smith Rock State Park by driving 30 minutes west, while the Painted Hills unit of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument is an hour to the east.

In terms of cell service, the best speed I got on my Verizon Jetpack with MIMO antenna was 30Mbps down and 13 up. There were times when it seemed like the bandwidth was congested, but that could have been my hotspot acting up (I was able to correct performance issues by rebooting the hotspot). The best speed I got on my AT&T smartphone was 36Mbps down and 15 up.

We ended up leaving a day early. I went to the office to let them know they could release our site a day early, and they gave us a refund for that night, which I didn’t ask for or expect, which was very nice of them.

We would definitely stay here again if we were...

Well this is a hard review to write because when we first discovered Crook County RV Park in July of 2020 we were thrilled with it but not anymore.

It was by happenstance that we found CCRP or Prineville for that matter, and we were so impressed with how well maintained and attractive this RV park was. In fact, the only thing we thought was a negative was that the spaces are really close together. So when we decided to spend an extended period of time in central Oregon, it was the natural choice, located right in the heart of the quaint little town of Prineville.

Fast forward to the present and we are in shock with how they have mismanaged and poorly maintained what used to be such a beautiful little park. They used to have some standards about the age and condition of the RVs that were allowed to stay there, but not anymore. It is beginning to resemble an old mobile home park full of trailer trash. They allow people to leave all manner of debris and junk around their RV site and it really looks terrible. Children run wild and unsupervised all around the park and through others RV sites, and when the camp host tries to do something about it, he gets shot down by the management. They had a nice pool table in the club house that is now destroyed by children, who By the way are not suppose to be there unsupervised, they have rammed the cue sticks into the table to the point it us unusable. Additionally, there is something terribly wrong with the water supply there. You cannot drink it even if you filter.

It appears they have chosen to cater to out of the area contractors who are working up at the tech companies in the area, and have abandoned their vacationer clientele. We left sooner that we would have wanted to solely because of the appearance of the RVs and the park itself, it no longer feels even safe to be...

Crook County is an older CG with mostly pull-through sites (one row of back-ins/back-to-back sites) with FHU and some mature greenery. Unfortunately most of the spots are narrow (about 8’ of pavement with room for slides over the grass) and unlevel. Our 55’ site should have been long enough for our truck and trailer, but the front end of our 5th wheel was about as low as it could go, so we parked in the overflow spots up front. Sites are quite close together, and there isn’t much privacy. Our utilities worked fine, and I appreciated that there was plenty of space to walk our dog. Bathroom, laundry, and common indoor/outdoor areas are available, but we didn’t use them. There is WiFi (which worked pretty poorly), but our Verizon service worked well without the booster. This was one of the few times in our 3+ years of travel that we needed early check-in, and they were totally fine with that (our site was empty, we could move in). The camphosts were ever present, very nice, and showed us to our site. We stayed here as we were rounding out a long trip through the area, and it’s convenient for reaching Prineville and the nearby Crook County River valley. It’s a bit of a hike to visit Bend or Redmond (45 minutes), but Prineville has all the basics plus a couple taphouses. After spending multiple months in Bend and Redmond, this place was calm respite for us. It’s relatively quiet and has all the beautiful scenery we’ve enjoyed in the area. $40 a night is more than we’d normally pay for this type of accommodation, but it’s a nice spot in a...