Best Cabin Camping near Gustavus, AK

Working for the USFS- We spent a week at Peterson, redoing the floor, repairing cabinets, countertops, and the table. We fixed the gutter outside and repainted the propane tank. Performed trail maintenance where needed and fixed the dock on the lake. Peterson is a great cabin and the perfect place to getaway!

This cabin is at the end of the road going North of Juneau. The cabin is not furnished with mattresses & sleeps a max of 8 for a max of 3 nights. Summer access by foot or boat (can haul onto a rocky beach). The foot trail begins at Point Bridget State Park Trailhead parking area at Mile 39 Glacier Highway. The trail is 3.4 miles to the cabin. Winter access**:** the same trail is open in the winter. Visitors can ski or snowshoe in, but no ATV's or other motorized vehicles are allowed. Primary heat at the cabin is kerosene with an emergency woodstove.

Be sure to bring enough water for the night because the creek by the cabin is currently dried up.

This campground has one site with a picnic table and a fire ring. However you can camp anywhere that there is parking. This is on a well-maintained road and would be great to bring a kayak. I look forward to spending a lot of time at this campground.

4 spots with picnic tables and fire pits. Clean bathrooms and big trash cans that got emptied while we were there for 4 nights. Low GCI service. Water spout that didn’t work for us. Beautiful central location for the Kenai peninsula. Highly recommend.

This area is exceptional, everywhere you look is a postcard-worthy scene. This campground is very well designed, almost all of the sites are along the water. Many have amazing views but all are within the trees. I don’t think there were any RVs, not sure if it was an off week or the road here is too much. You will love it here.

This place is great!!!! Close to town yet out in nature.

Great place for the family, bears do frequent the area so keep site clean.

Must see beauty in Juneau. This beautiful site is not only spectacular but conviently close to town. After setting up camp you can explore the trail to get close to the glacier and see beautiful waterfalls!

The sites on the right on the lake can be great. However, on a sunny day the wind will likely blow hard off the glacier making it very cold till the evening, which in summer can mean 10pm or so. I’ve lived just s couple block from here for 30 years. Trust me

Stayed here two nights - reservations must be made in advance on recreation.gov. Hot showers available, as well as a stocked bathroom. 12/10 recommend.

We’ve been full-time camping in our vintage camper for over10 years, and in that time we’ve taken some “camping trips” without our rig, Hamlet. This time we hopped on the ferry from Haines down to Juneau and pulled out the tent for a few days in this amazing campground. We were just looking for the least expensive place that was close to the ferry terminal in Auke Bay, but struck gold in the hills just above. This might be one of the best traditional campgrounds we've ever stayed in with some of the most stunning views in our "backyard."

The campground is laid out along the southern bank of Mendenhall Lake, and offers drinking water, flush, and vault toilets and hot showers -- at no extra charge. Did I mention that camping here will only set you back $10 per night? We cannot remember such an inexpensive camping experience that offered showers. These $10 sites don’t offer electrical hookups, so bring your solar panels and solar generator or power bank and you’ll be all set. 

The western trailhead is a short walk from the campground, but the Mendenhall Visitor's Center on the east side of the lake is just a few miles away. There are many trails, photographic viewpoints and opportunities to paddle on this side of the lake, but parking is competitive because it is such a popular area- including with the busses from the cruise ships docked in town. So, get there early. We enjoyed paddling on the lake where we got great views of the glacier and Nugget Falls, but keep your distance from icebergs. We watched one crack and roll not too far from where we were paddling, had we been closer I might not be writing this review. 

The Mendenhall Valley has all the amenities you could expect from the Juneau suburbs, grocery stores, malls and restaurants. Downtown has a few more options as well as Douglas Island, just across the bridge.

Tent camping review. This was a great camp ground. Very clean and quiet. You can't beat the proximity to the park and hiking. Some of the sites even have great views. Each site has plenty of privacy, so even with intermixed RV's it stays pretty quiet. The showers were okay, not the cleanest and not the hottest but got the job done. My only complaint was coming after dark the first night to someone clearly squatting with their RV in our site. The camp hosts do not mark each site with the booked reservations (even though the posts clearly say that the section we were in were "reservation only". So people just drop in and take sites, assuming they aren't reserved. We attempted to solicit the camphosts help but in the 4 nights we stayed there, we never saw the hosts available once. We asked the people to move the next morning in daylight- not wanting to start anything or end up shot by knocking on their door and asking them to move that first night. However, that meant that we set up in someone else's potentially reserved site and started a huge domino effect. So I recommend getting there early to make sure your reserved spot isn't taken.

After being unable to find good reviews of campsites here, I took what I could find and gambled on a site. We were in tent site 021. It was a gorgeous site, had a large picnic table, bear box, water spigot between us and the site next to us, fire pit, clean pit toilets and a clean bath house. This campground has backpacker sites, RV sites, and car sites as well. We had a short walk through the moss on a trail that led down to Mendenhall Lake. It had a gorgeous view of the glacier. We enjoyed listening to all the birds and it was a pretty quiet campground.

There are a few sites close to boggy areas and they can be mushy and muddy, especially after a rain. There is a map on the reservation website where you can kind of see it. Our site was fabulous.

The trails are not far from the campground, so they are walkable.

If you fly into Juneau, the towering Mendenhall Glacier is sure to impress. The glacier is huge and dangles right near town. I took a cheap blue bus from the cruise ship down to Mendenhall. It's a pure Alaskan experience to camp near Mendenhall. A state capital with a huge glacier. Awesome. The campsite has flush toilets and a shower house, as well as some covered shelters. Sites can be reserved on Recreation.gov.