Highland Ridge Campground

Campsites are built into the slopes of a forest providing dense shade but also a favorable environment for mosquitoes. Many of the sites on the right side of the street have a significant slope with a drop-off at the back. Our site, on the inside of the loop was fairly level and deep. The campground is well away from busy highways and railroads so evenings are very quiet. Sites are electric hookup only.

Restrooms are clean and spacious but be aware the lights are on a motion-detector timer so if you happen to be there alone, be quick in the shower. Speaking from experience, waving your towel in the air is not sufficient to reset the timer. There are multiple water spigots to fill jugs and water bottles are available around the campground as well as fresh water and rinse water spigots, with threaded connections, at the dump station.

Walking trails are accessible from the campground but access to the swimming area in the day-use area a short drive away. A day-use area pass is provided by the friendly and informative campground hosts or park rangers.

We enjoyed our stay for 3 nights except for neighbors on the group site who woke us up early each morning with screaming (yup) kids. Good shelter from the intense sun made the stay bearable temperature-wise. We swam at the beach, hiked a few trails, crossed the dam and visited sites nearby. Cady Cheese has fantastic curds. Park staff had to be called about the facilities where toilet paper was depleted but they dealt with that. Camp hosts were great. Pretty poor cellular coverage on Google Fi.

For firewood, see the "wheelbarrow man" just north of the park entrance. $20/wheelbarrow. Ours was not very full, but other days we saw a good supply.

Park Rangers came through a couple of times a day, as did the camp host.

We LOVE this park. This is probably our favorite COE park so far. So many trees, great space between sites. You feel like you are camping all alone in the woods but with 50A electric!

We had water nearby enough that we could use a 100 ft hose to refill our fresh water tank from the site. 22 is a great site for the tall trees, the perception of being alone, the magical sense of being deep in a forest and the location near the water connection. There's a walking trail nearby that leads to a lookout point, dumpsters are not far and the bath houses also are not far.

Because of all the trees plus just the area where this park is, the cell service was not stellar. Data on AT&T was strongest with around 15-65 down/1-6 up pretty consistently over the entire time. Data on Tmobile 5G/Calyx hotspot was less consistent but workable with 1-8 down/ .3-2 up throughout our time here. Verizon has been 1-2 down/ .08-.4 up. Nearly unusable on Verizon data, but the other two have been workable. Some of it depends on the modem itself in the hotspot. We also have a non-5G Calyx/Tmobile hotspot that has a simple cat4 modem (versus the cat23 in the 5g hotspot, basically that means it can reach signals that are further away). The old school 4g/cat4 modem rarely was able to connect at all to Tmobile, zero signal 95% of the time. So some of this will depend on how modern your tech/hotspot modem is. Our AT&T hotspot is a Netgear MR1100 with a relatively modern CAT16 but still 4G LTE modem inside. The speeds are very variable from one site to another in this park, probably to do with the heavy trees, which are what make this park so wonderful. Site 22 worked well enough for us for Teams Calls, working all day (we road work) and streaming 2 TVs at once in the evening watching Netflix/Youtube (when no one is working).

When it rains here you barely notice it because of the heavy tree cover. It's also always a few degrees cooler in here than the surrounding areas. The shade makes a big difference. Satellite and solar are not going to work in here but it is a magical place with beautiful trees, nice gravel sites and good electricity. Our site was not all that level but when we rearranged a bit and resituated the RV we ended up mostly level with minor corrections.

I highly recommend this beautiful park. It's a great place. We will be back here, for sure.

We love this park.

Site #34 had a decent slope but we were able to fit in and level our 23' camper. We found it very quiet and were able to sleep with our windows open without being woken up by other campers. The pit toilets were available to us on our loop, so I chose to forgo them and walk the 0.5 mile to the main bathroom with decent showers, which were kept nice and clean.

There are a couple of nice, short trails that are wooded (we liked as it was in the 90's the weekend we visited). The nearby reservoir wasn't too interesting to us, but plenty of small boats on it.

Sites have decent privacy. The site we had was not exactly level, had to jack trailer a good 6” on one side to level out side to side. Campendium shows electric as 20A but our site has 20A, 30A and 50A so lots of flexibility there. Dump station was clean but kinda small so big rigs might have an issue. T-Mobile serve was 2bars but a slow 2bars.

I made my reservation on recreation.gov and I paid $24/night. Site 8 is spacious and level for my 22.5' trailer. As mentioned, some sites are small and have a slope. We were here on a Tuesday and Wednesday night in July and campground was .maybe half full. Bathrooms and showers were clean. There is 1 dump site and fresh water is available at 2 locations. Quiet and relaxing, would come again!

The previous review sums it up pretty well. The price noted reflects the senior discount. I gave site quality a three because there were quite a few sloped sites, but our site was nice and level. We enjoyed the hiking, and even though the trails are not very well marked we had no trouble finding our way. Also I would note that the shower drains in the ladies showers were not well designed and water spread to the floor of the other shower and to the changing area. That could prove to be a real mess when the campground is full and more people are using it. Otherwise it was spotless and there was plenty of pressure and hot water. All in all it was a lovely, peaceful stay.