Mammoth Cave Campground

I love off-season camping, lots fewer people and without leaves on the trees, I was able to get enough power using my solar panels. Summer would be impossible to get charged.

Sites are pretty large and have nice separation. The showers are adequate, it takes what seems like a minute of your time for them to get warm. Flush toilets, lots of pull-through sites. During the off season there is a loop closed, I think it was called D loop it has 40 sites.

I was able to find a hole in the trees for decent Starlink connection. I had no cellular connection with Google FI, T-Mobile. Our site was close enough to the camp store that I could get a connection from the park wi-fi, though it dropped alot, but sufficient to do email.

The park is amazing, lots of good hiking from the campground. Camp sites are half off with the Lifetime Senior Pass and it also gives you half off of cave tours for one person. With a family, it would get expensie quickly doing the cave tours. We did the Heritage cave tour and it was great! The cave is incredible, not like any cave I have been in before, but still beautiful.

The big drawback is the generator usage. My opinion is everyone ought to figure out a way to function for at least 24 hours without running a generator. Also people lack respect for the generator hours and there was no enforcement of the hours, which are from 8 to 8. First morning, the guy across the street started his up at 6 am!

All in all a great stop.

This campsite is very close to the visitors center, and close to a park convenience store for the basics. This campground has coin op showers as well as flushing toilets. There is also a place to fill water jugs. Our campsite had a fire pit and picnic table, as well as a good place to put a tent.

Some sights are more private than others. Luckily ours only had one neighbor. We saw deer roaming the campsite and woods every morning.

We opted to stay at the Mammoth Cave campground instead of Houchin Ferry at the last minute - we generally try to find less crowded options, but despite being nearly full, this campground was very peaceful and didn't feel crowded, and we had 9am tours booked so it was nice to be close to the visitor center. All booking after 4:30 has to happen via recreation.gov, so you may want to do that while you have cell service if coming in late afternoon. Site 64 is level, although not one of the longer pads (we have a truck camper, plenty of room for that). Concrete picnic table, walking distance to a very clean and upgraded bathroom and we walked back and forth to the campstore and the visitor center for tours, although less walky types might opt to drive. Showers at the campstore were not bad, 4.5 minutes for $1.50. There is also laundry. Decent enough cell service (Google Fi).

The tours of the cave are great, definitely worth the time and $$. But book ahead! Even being there in October, they were sold out by 9:00am. We did the Historic Tour and loved it. Also check out coming in or leaving via the Green River ferry if you don't have an RV or trailer. Truck campers and cars allowed, and although it's a very short ride, it's pretty cool and a lovely drive up the other side out of the park (no fee to ride).

I spent a few days there in September. The campground is in a heavily wooded area with no hookups for RVs. Hiking trails start on the camp store side of the park. The caves are by the visitor center, within walking distance. You're probably better off if you purchase your tickets online. Internet is very slow or non-existent, Verizon worked the best in the area, but even that was slow. Closer to the camp store you may be able to access the campground wifi but not too far and not always working well. If you have solar panels they won't work much because it's so heavily wooded. Basically, you have to run your generator which is not so noisy, and stinky. Starlink for the Internet also won't work for the same reason.

The site with the most open sky is 51 if you want to stay longer and don't mind dry camping. This might work the best for both solar and Starlink. If you are a weekend camper and like to be cut off the Internet, don't mind smelling generator exhaust and noise around you, besides the usual campfire smoke this might be a great campground for you. There is one loop that is only for tents. If you are an RVer, you will be surrounded by generator noise and smell during a busy weekend. The sites seem pretty level you might need some leveling but manageable. The park itself is easy to access, it works for bigger rigs. They have a dump site and you can fill your water in the park. I did not use the bathrooms and showers, so I comment on that.

We were so excited to get to check another National Park off our bucket list. The campground was so nice! The sites are very well maintained. You can walk to the Visitor's Center from the campground. There is a camp store with anything you could need. There is a great bike trail (it's not like a greenway, it's gravel, so be careful). Lots and lots of history in this area. On our way up, we stopped by Sgt. York's Home (it's a State Park) and one day drove up to Lincoln's Birthplace National Historical Park. It was a great 3 day trip.
We never used the bathroom facilities, so can't comment on that. There was no electricity, but there was water in the campground.

It's a busy campground. I was here during local spring break so that may have added some number. The strange thing is that most of the sites are pull-through. I think they could have more sites if during the busier seasons there were split to create two pull-in. sites. If you plan on going on any of the tours make sure you either get a reservation early. Or if your group is small enough 1 or 2 people. Some of the tours have cancellations so show up early when the visitor's center opens. If you aren't in the caves there are many miles of hiking trails. Also there is a gravel bike trail that you could take all the way down to the closets town.

There is some cell phone signal in the campground, almost none in the park itself.

Stopped here on 4/8/22 on the way to Nashville. We didn't need any hook-ups so we were good there. It had been a little cold and rainy when were were there, so it was a bit muddy, but the pull-through site itself was paved and dry. We were in the area for a week in mid-March of 2020 and our cave tour was cancelled due to everything shutting down. We were able to book the same tour again for 4/9 and it was great. Our tour was mid-afternoon, so we were able to just check out of the site by 11 and move to the oversize area of the visitors center parking like about a block away. The only down-side wasn't with the campground, but the campers in our site after us. They didn't know what time zone they were in, were 2 1/2 hours early for check-in, and tried to rush out out of the site. Oh well. Takes all kinds I guess.

We arrived just after check-in time on a Thursday. We stayed in Site 90, which was a pull-through site. By the time we booked our site there weren't a lot of options, but we chose Site 90 because it looked like there would be a decent amount of sun. I also tried to take some video of the two electric/water sites from my vantage point at the dump station when we left, but you can't really tell from the video.

Campground: We like our privacy and it felt like the sites were fairly close together, yet spacious. We can't give any review of how easy/hard it was to maneuver through the campground since we have a truck camper. Our site was fairly level--we added blocks under the front wheels of our truck and that was all we needed to get level. It was cold (and the second day we were there it was wet) so we didn't walk around and look at other sites or the layout of the loop. We would not have wanted to stay in the water/electric sites due to how close they were to the convenience store and dump station. Our site was located at the end of the loop road by the Stop sign. Across the street there was a bathroom, dumpster and recycling bins. Once the trees fill in I don't think it would have hidden any of those from view. Overall we felt it was very quiet at the campground. We had two bars with Verizon and streamed the Masters while it was raining.

Solar: We were there in early April, so the trees had not filled in yet. On our second day, it rained most of the day. Despite the rain and the early morning dusting of snow on the day we left, we still managed to pull about 80 watts to charge our batteries with the solar.

Activities: The trails nearby were well maintained. At times it was so quiet on the trail, which made for a very peaceful walk. We took the Historic Tour of the caves, and almost wished we had booked a few different tours so we could have seen different things. We booked our tour when we reserved our site a few weeks before our trip. Tours were sold out while we were there, so all the warnings about sell outs are right.