Carter Lake

We love Carter Lake! The lake is much higher than in years past so the beach is much smaller.

This park is awesome. The lake it’s beautiful. Highway Rd. sound is acceptable.

Site 13 is really cool, being on the lake. But the noise of cars on the road is overwhelming, especially at night.

Lake is small but nice. Decent bathroom with running water and electric lighting.

Keep your food in the car at night, there are bears and other things.

The path out to the beach is frightful. glad to hear the plover is making a comeback. If there hwas a place that mentioned Carter Lake beach was essentially off limits of just about every use, I didn't see it.

We rented a few spaces here with our friends. Overall, the sites are clean and flat enough, but the bathrooms weren't very clean and the only urinal in the men's bathroom was broken. The dumpster was also over capacity. The sign said "campers must check in with host" but we went to do that and the host didn't care to. The dune access led to a mostly weedy dunes areas. None of the reservation spots had markers to indicate what was and wasn't reserved. It's a fine campground just to sleep, but not really the kind to make a destination.

The camp host was rarely there to answer any question. When he or she was there, he was of no help at all.

Beware a good amount of the campsites have stairs from the car parking to the site. Our campsite had about 10 steps that took us down by the lake. We had very great privacy thanks to all the bushes. Campsites are a little tight, but seem to offer a lot of privacy. No camp host when we got there. Only one very clean bathroom with a few water spots.

Excellent Location, less crowded atmosphere than your typical campground. Bathrooms were unbelievably gross for having a ‘host’ onsite & plumbing. The ‘host’ was never around & always off duty. At one point we got excited because we saw a ‘forest service’ truck parked out front with supplies and we thought they were coming to hose everything down and maybe get some hand soap in the bathrooms. NOPE. Not even sure what they were there for.
The urinals in the men’s bathroom literally had green algae/ mold growing like a plant, all-toilets were brown inside in both bathrooms, sinks were covered in dirt/mud, dead bugs & spider webs, etc…
I don’t mind roughing it in the great outdoors, truly. I have been in better portapottys than this bathroom was in. I guess I was just disappointed because we usually return here every year and I have never seen the place so gross.

Very cool campground; great host-Larry, super helpful. We had site 2; nice and flat with good privacy . Great little lake to SUP or kayak on; I fished and caught about 25 little bass. There are two connected hikes with a trailhead right in camp. Beautiful Ocean beach as well. Bottom part of campground is mostly sunny with some shade near sites 6&7; after that mostly shady from 9 on. Bathroom is clean- seamed all throughout the day- no issues; water was good. No Verizon signal even though it showed one-bar; some people were using their phones assuming other carriers. Overall- we definitely would come back here. Great campground! If it’s only a base and what we did during part of our stay- so close to other lakes and hikes in the area- made it a great choice for us.