Lone Pine Campground

Easily the most beautiful campground I’ve been to in months. Well spaced sites positioned on steep banks high above a small, fingery lake. Hardwood forest, possibly old-growth, but trees including beeches that don’t appear to have blight yet.

Verizon is just about useless. Nobody else here at all on a Wednesday night in March. Maybe I wouldn’t be so in love if other people were here. A couple of sites were really close to one another but most were spread out, with tall beech and oak trees everywhere, lush mossy ground, geese and blue heron around. The road to get here from points South was just a winding, gorgeous joy ride. The type of road motorcycles were invented for.

Toilets were fine, garbage located in each of the two loops. Signage up front now clearly says to register and pay at the visitors center if you arrive before 5pm, otherwise do so in the morning. I would’ve stayed much longer but the weather dropped 20° overnight and a high of 52° isn’t exactly where it’s at for me after t-shirt weather in the Southeast.

All public campgrounds should look to this place for a model. It’s like a very special episode of Blossom where we all learn valuable lesson about how life should be.

This is our first experience in Arkansas, and if it’s an indication of what’s to come, I’m like a kid who just picked up his first Spider-man comic for all that’s to come.

The campsite itself was nice and clean with footpaths to the nearby lake. Bathrooms on site(stinky), no showers, and no water or electric, of course.

In the heat of Arkansas summer the primitive campgrounds were fairly empty even on a Friday night. Although, i will say, the campsites are very close together. The nearby RV ground was very busy however, and we could hear people partying across the lake from our campsite. No big deal, the frogs and bugs were definitely louder haha.

We stopped by the free swimming beach about 5 min. from our site to cool off at sunset (no dogs allowed) and it was nice and empty.

The only problem we had with this campground was disorganization. The park map says there is a self-pay box at this campground, but there is not. Rather than leave and further put off our dinner, we opted to leave a note and stop by the visitor center the next morning to pay. This (of course) resulted in a friendly stop from local park enforcement at 10pm. No fine, but took our license to ensure payment the next morning, and woke us up :/ Not fun. Park needs to update maps or add pay boxes to prevent confusion.