Best Dog-Friendly Camping near Madera, CA

This campground is situated by a lake. Love this spot! You’ll hear all the frogs by night and birds in the morning, great place for fly fishing or cat fishing and nice folks staying here! We had a bit of fun filling the truck up to make a portable pool, it’s quite warm in the summer months but perfect if you’re visiting the Clovis Rodeo!!! A local town isn’t far away. Great place for the family and pet friendly! It is pitch black at night, so bring flashlights. Restrooms are available, some sites have water, and trash dump is available. There’s no place on premise to purchase wood but park rangers operate entry at a booth during business hours for more information during your stay, if needed.

We arrived after carefully following the website and emailed instructions, as our RV GPS and Waze would not have gotten us here. We pulled up in the small parking lot in front of the entry gate. Although we arrived during open hours, there wasn't anyone in the office, but a kid came up to us and offered to get his mom, who was the manager. However, the kid came back alone and told us our information package was on the front board outside the gate and had everything we needed to include the gate code. We then proceeded to our assigned FHU site 34 that was a pull-in with utilities set up for a motorhome. The site was large enough that we could have pulled in, unhooked, and moved the truck out, but we were concerned about connecting to the utilities in this configuration. Back-in site 33 with FHUs was empty, so we called the office number and the man who answered didn't know if it was empty but would go check in the office if we wanted to move sites. It was obvious we were putting him out, but he did call back a few minutes later and said that back-in site 33 was open for our two-day stay. The pads here are all sand, and after settling in, we noticed the campground(CG) was about half full with either residents or transient workers. Some sites were organized, and others were not. The way the large-sized sites here are arranged, you can park your rig in various configurations. The utilities worked fine, including a decent water pressure of around 40 psi. Supposedly, they have Wifi, as indicated by the multiple repeaters around the park, but we received no instructions/password and didn’t see a guest network to try and log in. This was fine as we put out our Starlink and we had 4 bars on Verizon. We are in no way prudes, but several of the private WiFi names we could see on“Other Networks” were pretty disgusting making us question who we were parked by. They do have a nice pool area with two hot tubs. There is also a nice-sized dog park with two separate fenced areas. According to the front of the office, they sell sundries and souvenirs, but they never opened the office during our stay even though should have according to the hours on the door. From the information on their website, the King River that runs adjacent to the CG is pretty much dried up this time of year(January) but fills for the summer season. Sorry to say we didn’t“feel it” on this CG and would not want to be here in the busy season.

We reserved this site because we were driving down to Big Sur and wanted to reserve a site for the nights we would be down there. We drove 13 hours and arrived on the first day late at night and set up. The ground was so hard and we were unable to secure our tent. The wind was very high, so the next day we asked for a way to help secure the tent, so it did not blow away while we were in Big Sur for the day. They gave us heavy nails and a hammer. Their customer service and accommodations were great except for one incident.

There were a lot of stray cats running around and we had an issue with one stray dog. Our dogs were required to be on leashes and a stray dog that the grounds crew had seen on the grounds, came up to our dogs and before I could get to them had attacked and bit my dog. My wife was able to get them apart before they were seriously hurt. We told the KOA and they tried to call animal control. They would not come out so it was held in the dog area for the day and then let out in the morning or someone came and got it at 6 am. We were told the owner wanted to talk to us but was never approached again or offered a refund.

I was happy with the facility but disappointed with how they handled the problem. This could have been a serious situation and wish the communication between all staff would have been better to keep us safe.