South Sulphur Campground

Cooper Lake State Park – South Sulphur Unit

This is a very nice state park located north of Sulphur Springs, Texas. The park was clean and very well kept and the Park Hosts and Park Rangers were very friendly and helpful. This is a very large park with screened shelters, cabins both with and without bathrooms, an equestrian area and several RV and Tent camping sites. Its only drawback is the fact that all of the RV spots are water and electric only, there is no sewer hookup. It does have a dump station close to the RV camping loop. The park was clean and quiet but some of the spots were a little close together but site 25 was nice and level.

We will stay at the park again next time we are in the area.

We have now stay at both the Doctors Creek unit and the South Sulphur unit of Cooper's Lake State Park. Both are great, but this review is for the South Sulphur unit.

We arrived after hours (around 7:30pm). Campground maps were available to help guide us, but we (read that as I) still made one wrong turn. So advice is. . . if it's your first time visiting, try to get there before dark.

The campground is very nice and will become one of our regular visits. The staff is very friendly. The site are wooded, mostly spread out and separated to provide privacy. There are a few sites close together which would satisfy family and friends that want the closeness.

We were in site 012. While this is a very nice site right on the water, it is fairly unlevel. So much so that my coaches leveling system could not correct the out of levelness. Eventually got the "Excess Slope" error on the control panel, and the system shut itself down. So we spent the weekend listing like a sailboat to one side.

The other problem (and this applies to most sites) is the site pad is very narrow. I was like trying to back onto a golf cart path. Not only was the site very narrow, the dirt on the downhill side was washed away creating a significant drop off from the concrete to the dirt below. So if my wife was standing on the ground at the door, the first entry step was mid thigh high. This even with the front suspension as low as it would go. Recommend bringing a portable step. Maybe two!

Campground got a little noisy on Saturday night with people playing their music a bit loud, but everything was quiet by 9:00pm. Very tolerable.

Only other place where this park was a bit tight was getting in and out of the dump station. Getting in was tight. Getting out was no problem. I only mention this for others who might want to go to this park with a 42+ foot coach. Eventually you'll need to visit the dump station as there are no sewers at the sites.

In all, this is an excellent state park. It will become one of our regular visits when we just want to get away for the weekend. In fact, we've already booked our next stay.

Arrival - Couldn't have been easier with online check reservation and check-in.

Tips - Pick your site wisely based on your length and site location. Taking the TX-19 in from College Station was a really nice drive. Pay attention to the speed limit signs, roads are very narrow and winding.

Favorites - Beautiful park, lush and green full of oak and pine. Camp sites are clean, spacious, and well spaced to next neighbor. Dark sky location. Enough of a clearing above the 5ver for sufficient StarLink visibility (50 - 75Mbps down).

Negatives - Site 006 is painfully un-level, the nose of the 5ver is 2" off the ground, and difficult to get into for a 42' 5ver located on a curve; there were plenty of other sites open that would have been easier to navigate into.

This was a great place to kick back and relax. Sites we very private and quiet. Beautiful trees inbetween each site and lots of deer and armadillos to see in the morning . We have a larger rig and had trouble getting into a pull through spot which are quite curved but this was easily fixed . Back in sites were very long flat and straight.
Park staff was very nice as well. Bathrooms were very clean and had nice showers.
Roads into this park are country roads and narrow at times but doable.
Cell service was spotty but our TMobile hotspot worked very well here.

I have no idea why/how this place has so many flies. There are thousands and it looks like the ground is moving as they are everywhere. We hung fly traps and they will fill up in minutes but there aren’t enough traps in the world to curb the number of flies they had. It was a rough 3 days of camping.

I would also avoid 15. It’s a pull through but has a steep drop off and I couldn’t angle my truck and 5th wheel to get on the site. Ended up going across the street as we booked multiple sites.

Texas SP don’t allow on-line reservations within 24 hours of your planned stay. However, on site rangers at the park’s hq are very accommodating and helpful in locating the perfect last minute site. Ours was #68 (back in with w/e) with no neighbors to our right and a short stroll to the lake shore. This is a huge SP with segregated units for tents, 50 and 30 amp units. Concrete pads are level; sites are spotless and cell service allows for streaming. This is a do again. FYI: an annual $70 Texas park pass allows for unlimited visits to any park in the lone star state.

We stayed 3 nights in November and were 1 of only a handful of people there on Mon-Thu. Deer Haven campground lived up to it’s name. We probably saw 10+ deer everyday. Sites were large and clean. Bathrooms were also very clean. Overall the area almost seemed very new. Nothing seemed worn out or run down. Good ATT cell service. We were able to stream video to our phones with no issues. Would stay again.

This is another well managed Texas state park with big sites, good power and water, fairly level concrete site pads, and friendly helpful rangers and hosts. Site 13 is right on the lake. We could launch our kayaks from our site and then just leave them by the water until we wanted to use them again. Lots of nice hiking trails of varying difficulty. We stayed here 10 days and enjoyed the peace and quiet - even on the weekends when it was full. Almost no one here during the week in November. Verizon coverage is spotty, but good at the campsite.

I was a little concerned at first on Thursday when I set up my trailer that the next spot over was right on top of mine. The fire rings were only 10 feet apart. My view was mainly the neighboring picnic table. Soon later a park host came around to flip the adjoining site flag to "reserved". He said that unless both sites are reserved by the same party, the other site was marked as taken. So I had 2 sites to myself all weekend. It rained most of Thursday and Friday so the park was not very full. If they had been packed, I may have had no privacy at all.
I saw several deer, but they quickly pranced away.