Sakatah Lake State Park

Lake Sakatah State park is right on the lake and has a 39 mile paved bike trail that goes straight through the park. A one mile walk/ride into nearby Waterville brings you directly to a charming coffee/ice cream shop. There is a check in office with gift/supplies/maps. Staff is very friendly. Sites are a little on the rustic side, but spaced apart nicely and offer some privacy. They are not the most level, and not big rig friendly as the roads can be narrow and there are lots of trees. Bathhouse and water sources are not turned on until May 5th. We visited April 15th, but the front office had a frost free spigot available and they allowed us to fill up our potable tank.

We showed up for our 3 day stay, and were swarmed by hundreds of mosquitoes. That was just outside the camp office. When I backed into our site we couldn't even get out of the vehicle. While driving to our site we saw 1 camper, and they were covered head to toe with a hoody pulled tight around their face. It was 84 degrees.
We called the park service and they moved us another state park 56 miles away, and it was fine. We shortened our trip by a day, and had to shuffle some other stays.
The pictures don't really show how dark and unkempt this campground is.

Less than one hour drive from the Twin Cities, a cute little park that's perfect for an overnight getaway. Decent dirt trails through the woods, but not lengthy. A few miles perhaps. A wonderful paved bike trail that runs along the lake, but it doesn't loop in the park, it's just a section of a much longer trail that cut's through the park. Nice sites that are well spaced out with trees and vegetation for privacy plus a really friendly park staff. Nearby town has all the essentials if you forget anything. More trails or longer trips would be nice, but it's excellent for what it is.

I stayed here one night in April 2017 in a small travel trailer. Great park, good trails, totally worth a visit.

The campground has four loops and most of the sites do NOT have electric hookups. Electric sites end with an "e" and are in the middle loops toward the center area. I stayed at __e, which had working and properly wired 30A power. It was a horizontally/width level site but a slight incline to reverse. Good privacy.

You can hear highway traffic from the campground, which would be worse toward sites 40, 41, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, which practically back up right up to the highway. However, there is very, very little traffic after dark.

Note that the campground has more loops than on the map view on Google Maps, be sure to check satellite view. I’ve also uploaded Streetview 360° images from a few spots around the campground and along the trails. The park map says they close a gate at the entrance at 10pm, but I don't know if this is true.

Cell service in April 2017:
AT&T: 5 bars LTE, 57ms ping, 4.59mbps down, 12.17mbps up
Verizon: 2 bars LTE, 30ms ping, 15.31mbps down, 3.97mbps up
T-Mobile: 2 bars LTE

As with all Minnesota State Parks, you need a daily or annual permit, and sites can be reserved online, even same-day. Reservations that begin today do not incur an additional reservation fee, but if you reserve tomorrow or later, there is an added fee.