Fry Creek Campground & Trail

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About Fry Creek Campground

Fry Creek Campground is one of several camping options on Palomar Mountain. It is right down the road from the Palomar Observatory and right across from the Observatory Campground and hiking trail!.

Just like every inch of Palomar Mountain, this campsite was beautiful, lush and green!  There is a loop trail that takes you around the perimeter of the campsite which we checked out.  It had truly stunning landscape and what appears to be seasonal waterfalls (will be coming back in winter to confirm).

I saw multiple trailheads to begin the hike.  There was a trailhead right above our campsite, and we were site #10. My only gripe with our experience were all the flies!!  They were everywhere and an extreme nuisance. I felt especially bad for my pup! I am pretty sure they are a seasonal issue though, because I’ve camped here once in late November and we did not witness any flies.

I love that the campsite is dog-friendly.  Aside from one glamping experience, this was my dog’s first *real* camping trip!  And trip she did!  She kept me up pretty much the entire night with moving around, whimpering and growling at God knows what.  I wonder what she heard out there!

I have been here twice, once in the summer and once after a good snowfall in the winter so these photos are from both of those trips.

We decided to check out the trail at the campsite.  It was beautiful but soooo many flies!! 

Sage was NOT feeling the flies.  You can see it on her face.

I ended up returning to Fry Creek Campground a few years later after a nice snowfall in hopes of finding what I thought was a potential waterfall.  Whether or not that area turns into a waterfall I still do not know because we lost the trail pretty quickly.  I would not recommend hiking this in the snow because the trail completely disappears.

We did end up finding a lot of interesting stuff including a homestead pretty deep in there.  We could have walked forever it felt and most likely found a bunch of interesting stuff but the sun was starting to go down.  We followed our footsteps back and safely got back to our car!

As you can see, the trail started off dirt so we were optimistic.  That quickly changed: