Hungry Gulch

July=heat stroke

Sadly I spent the majority of my visit cleaning up trash and avoiding smoke. I think I counted at least two dozen illegal fire rings along the Kern River in 3 days as I was picking up cigarette butts, solo cups, beer bottles, folding chairs and fishing tackle. One of my favorite places on earth and I doubt I'll ever return because it's such a sad/disgusting sight to see.

lovely campsite, very safe, great bathrooms, friendly neighbors

Only one toilet in men's bathroom that door doesn't lock, no toilet paper most of the time. Many sites have much more than 6 people per site. Very noisy with loud people and guests running generators and kids running around.

Our site had no shade starting @ 9:30am and it was HOT. Luckily we had our canopy and tarp to extend the shaded area.
Bathroom was pretty nasty in one of the stalls. Poop on the seat, overflow, etc.
There were bugs but our mosquito coils and thermacell worked very well.
Saw a lot of shooting stars!
Lake isabella was in full algae bloom. Had to walk to a different part of the lake where the water looked safer to swim in, though many people were swimming in the super green algae waters anyway.

We have reserved a place at Hungry Gulch campground, however when we arrived the Host told us that he has no place for us. This is not what you expect when doing a reservation online. Luckily he redirected us to the Tillie Creek campground and Host at Tillie Creek was kind to admit us there with existing reservation. Tillie Creek has more space between sites and it felt less crowded and more peaceful.

This is our favorite campground near Lake Isabella. Good proximity to Kernville and town of Lake Isabella, easy to drive up to the Trail of 100 Giants. The campground hosts have been pretty laid-back over the years, sometimes to a fault...when we have camped here, the hosts aren't the best at keeping the restrooms clean and stocked. They are always nice and accommodating, but lax about rules. The people at the campground walk through your campsite at all hours of the day and night; loud music plays most evenings several hours past quiet time. But somehow it's all okay, everyone is pretty chill and friendly, singing and laughing, and it's a great place to spend time with family.

The host could not point us to our site. The campsite itself was extremely crowded, devoid of shade, and located on a slope. We chose not to stay for the night.

Our experience here was really frustrating for multiple reasons, but for the sake of this review I will try to highlight what is important for other campers to know. We had a bad experience from the beginning when we arrived at Hungry Gulch when we were blown off by the camp host for asking who we could ask some questions of since we had made a reservation online and it was unclear what to do since there are not assigned camp spots. Since we had a kayak lesson to get to we called the Sequoia Recreation line and were told that we could pick any empty campsite, put our tent there and then it was OK to leave and the camp host would come along later to check our reservation (again which was done online so we had no other proof besides our email). We pitched our tent, went off for our kayak lessons, and when we got back to the campsite around 9 pm there was another family in our site and our tent was gone! The camp host took down our tent and gave our spot to someone else because we "didn't have the proper tag and hadn't checked in with him." Of course, I was LIVID! So, I had to go find him and explain to him how I had done exactly what I was told by Sequoia Recreation and then he had to drive around for 15 minutes to find us a new spot and didn't even offer to help us put our tent back up that he had taken down. We were surrounded by people playing really loud music on a speaker on one side, another group that was drunkenly yelling on another and loud road noise. Someone came around the sites at like 10 pm and of course everyone was quiet for all of 5 minutes and then we didn't see anyone else after that checking on things. At 12:30 am I had enough, asked both groups to be quiet and while it helped some, both were still making lots of noise. After a long day of kayaking I was exhausted and gave up. We packed up our site at almost 1 am and left out of sheer frustration and ended up having to get a hotel in Bakersfield just to get some sleep. Believe the bad reviews!

Great site went in mid-July very hot they do have water hookup at each site. Lake is not too far.