Balsam Mountain Campground

Balsam is a small, quiet, out-of-the way camp ground that we always enjoy. There are no showers but we know that going in and love it anyway.

Very nice, clean and picturesque campground. First time visiting and it was great. We are tent campers and the sites were well maintained. A little close to your neighbors but not too bad. Bathroom facilities were very nice. Campground is within easy driving distance for hiking and other outdoor activities. We loved our stay and are looking forward to returning very soon!

Gorgeous campground, great views. Was busy so I had to reserve two different sites in balsam on consecutive nights but someone stole my campsite the second night. I ended up waiting until the night time and taking an empty site and the ranger took no issue with it. Definitely would camp here again.

We love this campground. It is in a higher elevation so it is the perfect spot to go to in the heat of the summer!! It was in the 90s at home but we enjoyed perfect 70s during the day and cool 50s overnight. It was wonderful. Being a smaller campground, we enjoyed not having as many campers surrounding us. It was nearly fully booked and we still felt we had some privacy and was never bothered by noise or felt like we had people right on top of us. In short, this is our favorite camping spot and we will be back again and again!!

Beautiful part of the Smokies. Recommend going to "sunset point" which is ~100 yards down the Flat Creek trail from the turnaround at the nearby end of the paved road.

An excellent campground at high altitude in the Smoky mountains. A great place to escape the southern heat in summer. Not a big campground but nice and well kept. Out of the way but convenient to nature and picturesque views.

Enjoyed my stay as usual! Everything was neat and clean. It's a very nice out of the way experience. The sunset viewing area is my favorite place to be in the evening. I will be back!

Stopped for an overnight stay after visiting 11 National Parks / Monuments in 16 days. Nice site, close to restrooms, our site had a very steep incline down to the campsite, which caused me to leave just 4 stars instead of 5. We will definitely stay again, but try to find a better level site.

It’s a beautiful ride up to the campground, and it’s secluded. There are several nice camp sites there. Other than that I was disappointed. Lots of the sites are crammed together. Some like ours you practically park in the road beside your camp site. Larger campers barely got by without hitting our car. The pictures of the camp sites online are very misleading. I have a van with a awning I was planning on using because they were calling for rain but when we got there realized you could not use a awning because you’re parking on the side of a hill and walk down to the campsite. Online it listed it suitable for campers and rvs and last time I checked most campers and rvs have awnings. They should have listed this on their site. Also you can use generators there but instead of having limited hours of operation say for an hr or so in the morning and then Manet an hr or 2 in the afternoon . You can run them almost all day. Not what I wanted to listen to at 9:00 in the morning sitting there trying to enjoy nature. Probably won’t go back.

Balsam Mtn was better before the check-in method was changed. Too many signs on all the posts. How do I know which site I want until I get there? It's hard to get phone reception way up there. We stayed at Gunter Hill campground. We tried to register on line and all sites were taken. We went there and hardly any sites were taken. Unless it has been improved, this process needs to be done away with.