Quartz Mountain State Park

We needed a place to stay for the night while passing through Oklahoma. We decided to take a detour and check out this state park. We camped in December, so we practically had the entire place to ourselves. The park was full of deer everywhere!!

Some sections has nice sized campsites and some sections were literally stacked on top of each other. I can imagine this place is cramped in the summer time, but it was excellent for the winter.

The Oklahoma State Parks book indicated that there was a restaurant in the lodge. We went to the beautiful lodge to eat and received strange looks when we asked for the restaurant. Apparently they do not have one. That was a big disappointment for us, but we found a local steak joint not to far from camp.

The night sky viewing was pretty good. I wish they would upgrade their lighting to be more dark sky friendly. This would be an great location for that.

I was able to hike up the New Horizon Trail. The views were incredible! Highly recommend this trail.

When I visited the park I was very excited having seen some of the trails and also the lodge area.    Unfortunately much of that was closed as a result of improvement projects, sadly limiting some of the things which were accessible to me upon my visit.   I instead settled into a campsite and checked out the beach area.   

The campsites were pretty close together in most loops  and because it is a very popular lake, it was a bit loud for my liking still I had shade a picnic table, fire ring and some basic amenities.   The restrooms were in decent shape but a bit outdated, a part of the improvement project is to create better facilities throughout the many loops also.  

I enjoyed the sites which were a bit further from the waterfront itself because they seem to have less noise from trucks with loud pipes.    

The beachfront was vast and amazing I could easily say this was what made it worth the trip.  You could walk the beach, get in the water or enjoy a picnic through one of the shaded areas.    A couple of small trails were accessible however because many were not these were very crowded also.  In addition the nature center was currently closed.

I would like to return to this site after renovations are complete and give it another shot.  It had all the makings of being able to be a really nice place to stay and enjoy lake activities.

We camped here in May 2019 in the tent camping area right on the river, just below the dam.   There is no electricity for the tent sites.  There is water, but not at every tent site.  Each tent site had a picnic table, fire ring and grill.  This campsite caters to RV's and it looks like several of the RV's live there year round.  There is a store.  We were the only ones camping in the tent area until our last day, we stayed 3 nights.  There is a bathroom (no shower) at one end.  Other bathrooms in the campground have showers.  We drove to the bathroom by the store and took a shower one day.  Even though we were the only tent campers, there was an extreme amount of traffic on the road.  The area had record amounts of rain and all the gates on the dam were open which had not happened in 20 years.  So, there were a lot of locals that came to see it.  We climbed Quartz Mountain on the first day.  There is not a well marked trail, you just have to try and find the path of least resistance and not die.  The view is well worth the hike (hiking shoes are a must, lots of slick rock).  You can see all the surrounding mountains, the dam, the lake, etc. from the top.  There are many hiking trails, not very many bike trails.  There is a paved bike trail, but it's not very long.  We did use our bikes to ride around the campground and up on top of the dam.  Tent sites are $10/night. If you're looking for a campground with lots of amenities, this is a good one.