Best Equestrian Camping near Lake Red Rock

I stayed at Elk Rock State Park with my son and his Boy Scout troop. The weather was perfect that night and we were able to have a nice fire. The next day we broke down our tents pretty quickly because of the rain.

We obviously stayed in the group campsite, but the campground is big with lots of trees and good facilities. It even has an equestrian part of the campground for you horse lovers.

Lake Red Rock is really close so it is a great place to stay the night and then pull your boat down to the lake for some fun on the water. Iowa doesn't have any mountains but it makes up for it with a lot of green scenery and some wonderful activities like horseback riding and boating for the family.

This is a very good state park and campground.

We went in the chillier months so the park definitely was not at its most scenic as it probably usually is. The hikes throughout the woods were quite nice and eventually loop around at least the one we were on did). They have a ginormous and steep boat landing with a large parking lot. The water looked pretty nice, although is was quite low at the time. The best part about the trip was the eagles. We must have been there at just the right time, because lined all through the trees along the lakes edge were eagles upon eagles. I'd say we saw about 70 bald eagles perched in the tress. It was really a beautiful sight. Aside from the park, it's pretty close to pella, which is a nice historic Dutch town. Good food and bars there to check out! Would visit again, but when it's warmer!

Very well kept campground! Bathrooms and entire area was really in perfect shape. One of the cleanest showers and bathrooms I have seen. $10 for tent, $16 for electric - how can you go wrong?

Only issue is that the spots are pretty close together. Around 2:30am there was so much smoke in our van from nearby campfires that I woke up sick and my dog threw up all over the bed. At 3am we decided we needed to move to an electric site because it was too much to have the windows open. I felt really bad for anyone in a tent. I coughed all the next day.

The campground was not that busy so there is no way I would stay here on a busy holiday weekend due to the spots being too close. If a few people make a fire you better shut down all your windows. No sleeping in the cool, night air here.

But this is an issue at other places too. Just never experienced anything on this level before. Esp considering no one in our section even had a fire going.

I wish campgrounds would start banning these fires. But that’s a topic for a later date.

Other than that it was a great spot.

This place is huge. We pulled in very late on a Weds night / Thursday morning. Self registration at the front. Looked like a decent amount of folks here but we didn’t drive very far into the park. If you take a look at the PDF maps on their website you can see how vast the places is with 122 spots! Bummed we needed to keep driving the next day- was very tempted to stay another night.

Shower house and bathrooms were really nice! Wasn’t expecting to want to take a shower but couldn’t pass up the opportunity when we saw them. Very hot water.

There are picnic benches everywhere and fire pits. 10/10 - would stay again!