Best Glamping near Charlevoix, MI

Packed like sardines. Stones get picked over early but still the best I’ve found. Sandy Beach just down the road. board walk great for biking and jogging. More of a Glamping Park, with little shade.

This is a nice KOA with nice facilities and amenities. We camped there in the July and our first impression when we drove in was “wow, this place is busy!” It is a very family-friendly park and you feel like every other site is having a family reunion with so many people at each site.

We were assigned a pull-thru in a spot where most of the campers were transients. (There is another section that appears to be most of the seasonal campers.) Getting to the site in our RV was a little tricky because of all the trees and cars parked everywhere. The site was level, paved and had a paved patio and was full hook-up with cable and WiFi (which worked well at our site).

The park is a typical KOA with tons of amenities and things going on. We chose not to use the pool because it was overrun with kids and seemed way too small for the number of people in the park. There is an off-leash dog park but it was pretty small for our lab to get a good run in. The laundry was nice and clean but a bit expensive $2.25 per load. When we checked in the staff raved about the onsite KOA café’s pizza but we didn't try it. 

The park is very convenient to downtown Petoskey but the traffic on Hwy. 31 can be horrible at peak times. It is also close to Petoskey State Park and the Oden State Fish Hatchery (which has trails and a great place to visit). There are lots of breweries in the area, a great farmers market, and really good restaurants. We personally loved Beards Brewery, Palette Bistro, and the Crooked Tree Bakery. There is a great paved biking trail located nearby that runs from Charlevoix to Harbor Springs.

Nice park on Lake Charlevoix

We stayed for a week at Young State Park in September of 2020. Our site was at the end of a row and we enjoyed a decent amount of space for a truck and trailer, 30 amp service, and AT&t cell service. (I ended up needing to use Teledoc :( and my husband was able to turn on the hotspot and laptop and use the web.) The site is dirt but was level.

Some sites were not in use because of high lake levels and park water problems. Leaking pipe? The small dune area leading up to Lake Charlevoix makes you feel like you are at Lake Michigan. We saw some beautiful sunsets from the edge of the water. There are a walkway and observation platform. There is some hiking, a place to walk your dog, swimming, and bathhouses. We used the campground as a base to explore surrounding towns like Boyne City and Charlevoix, but mostly for kayaking. It was very quiet during the week and was packed on Friday and Saturday nights. The fall color was building toward a peak and the scattered maple trees mixed with cedar made it very pretty. We would stay again in the offseason.

We decided to splurge on a yurt for our first camping trip of the summer. Well worth it! We stayed in"Kai" one of the newest yurts. It's at the end of what we came to call"the yurt village". Complete with electricity, indoor and outdoor string lights, two deck chairs, a heater, a queen sized bed, and an electric kettle with pour over coffee supplies, it was truly a treat! The bathroom and shower building is about.1 miles each way according to my fitness tracker, but it's doable. Downside: the firepit is small(about the size of a small charcoal grill) and shallow, so it's not really suitable for cooking. Bring a propane stove or some no-cook foods, or go enjoy some of the area restaurants! The site is still a diamond in the rough with cut downed wood and sawdust scattered about, and the ground is uneven. With time, though, it will probably turn out beautifully! We were there for three weeknights and rarely even heard other campers. A quiet and peaceful retreat.

The neat thing about Young State Park is its site on Lake Charlevoix. Three miles away is the lovely and cute town of Boyne City.

This is a typical state park campground designed to pack in the numbers. Sites are close to one another, no to little vegetation between the sites. Not much comfort for tent camping. The shower houses are not large for the number of campers and despite daily cleaning, there's a lot of use. By the end of the day, early evening, it's a bit dirty. There are lots of other things going for it that includes hiking trails, boating, beach area with concessions, picnic areas and playgrounds.

Location, location, location. In addition to easy access to Lake Charlevoix, there's traveling through the other quaint towns that include East Jordan (where the manhole covers were cast), Ironton (where you cross the South Arm of Lake Charlevoix on a ferry) and of course, Charlevoix.

Nearby, Boyne City has developed nicely over the past few years. The town's supporters are doing a great job of sustaining this village. Seven years ago, it was a fine little town that seemed to "get along" with its harbor and a couple restaurants. Now, its center has many nice and newer restaurants and pubs, a great weekly farmers market and weekly summer events with a really nice, spacious town park on the lakeside. A grocery store is also located here, with a Starbucks inside for those who have to have it.

Huge park with three sections. Terrace is the best but hard to get. Lake side sites. Nice facilities and camp store. Lake Charlevoix sunests revival the Carribean. Breathtaking.

The campground was well maintained. The sites had adequate privacy and space. I really enjoyed the trails through Cedar Forest along Lake Charlevoix. More unique experience than just hiking through the woods.

Love being shaded by full mature trees everywhere yet the campgrounds are very well cared for inside and out. We’ve chosen to rent a cabin. Simple yet clean. I’m a bit fussy about having a firm mattress; no problem, I brought a firm air mattress to put over their marine covered like mattress. My brother put his 38’ trailer on a pad with full hookups. We wanted to follow figure out the best scenic bike route to get into Petoskey and beyond toward Charlevoix to go along the shorelines as much as possible. Customer service is amazing and they printed of a map for us as well. Lake Michigan beach is about a 5 minutes drive.

I love this state park. It is located right on beautiful lake charlevoix. The campground doesn't have any road noise. The beach is long and sandy and there are lots of hiking and biking trails.

Young State Park was a quiet gem of a campground for us. The facilities were clean and the grounds themselves were a pleasure to walk around. The camp store was the best stocked one I’ve seen yet. All the sites were well sized with the exception of the waterside sites which were flooded due to the high lake levels lately. Other than that the campground has a lot to offer, especially being so close to Charlevoix and Petoskey.

Here’s what we really liked about this park … it sits on beautiful Lake Charlevoix, is just a few miles away from the super cute town of Boyne City, some campsites with access to water right out of their back door, and the park has lots of beach to enjoy. Young State Park has a typical rustic campground feel. The park covers 560 acres which encompasses a campground, hiking trails, a large beach area with concessions, boat launch (located in the Terrace Campground loop), picnic area, playground, baseball diamond, basketball courts, and fishing pier. 

Reservations can be made on-line via the Michigan DNR site. The advantage of making reservations online is that you get a really good description of the site which includes length, width, hook-ups, amount of shade, length of site, distance to restrooms, and best of all - pictures.  We visited Young State Park in the summer but in talking to locals this place is wonderful in the winter and great for cross-country skiing with trails that wind through wooded areas. The price ranges from $20 to $33 per night depending on the season and electric hook-ups.  

There are three camping loops – Terrace, Spruce, and Oak.  Campsites in the Spruce loop don’t have a designated “pad” so you can arrange your RV or tent any way you like. This was the case with groups of friends who had two or three sites and arranged them so they faced each other with a common area in the center. The Terrace and Oak loops have less sites and seem a little quieter. The other plus of these loops is the easy access to water (some of which have great water views). All campsites are a mix of 20/30/50 amp or 20/30 amp with water spigots scattered throughout the loop. Each site has a picnic table and fire pit (firewood is for sale in the campground on the honor system with the nice thing being that you have access any time of day to purchase it).

The pros about this park are the easy access to Lake Charlevoix and being just a few miles from Boyne City (which has a great weekly farmers market, delicious food and beer at 7 Monks Tap Room, and a weekly Friday “Stroll the Streets” with live music). The park has a large beach area with a camp store/concession stand that has food and items for rent. It is really convenient that you can rent beach chairs/umbrellas/watercraft instead of having to bring them. Behind the concession stand is a fishing pier that was really popular with the kids. 

The cons are that the roads in the campground are pretty narrow and when someone was backing into their site it caused a traffic jam.  Sites are close together and the park has a very crowded feel. The bath/showers are not large enough for the amount of campers in the park and despite being cleaned daily they got lots of use and were always busy and by the end of the day, they were pretty dirty.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-NzcOOzCSk

We visited Wild Cherry RV Resort on the recommendation of some friends and found the park to be nicely maintained, sites were well-spaced, and we LOVED the area. Our site was a pull-in that faced a large pond on a corner that overlooked a four-acre lake. We never had a neighbor on the site next to us during our stay and since we were on a large corner there was nobody on that side either so we never felt crowded. The park was very quiet and since our site was in the back of the park there was not much traffic.

The park is called a “resort” which is a little misleading because there are very few amenities. There is no swimming pool, no tennis courts, no shuffleboard, no fitness center, no playground, in fact there were not even bathrooms/showers (except for porta john and tent shower in the rustic camping section).  There was a small club house and a driving range but that was pretty much it. You do get a free newspaper delivered to your site daily. It turned out that we didn’t care about the lack of amenities since we were so busy exploring and we don’t often use all the amenities that private parks offer anyway.  The park is a mix of seasonal and transient people. Most of the seasonal people went to work during the day which made the park even quieter. And while they do have a lot of seasonal campers none of the sites were junked up. Sites are gravel with paved patios with the average lot being 45x70 (according to their brochure). There are nice grassy areas between sites that is very well-maintained. All sites have picnic tables but not all have fire pits (if you have your own you are allowed to use it). 

The roads are very wide and there are not too many trees so maneuvering big-rigs is not a problem. The water, sewer, and electric were all placed appropriately in the site so no extended hoses were needed. There was no cable but sites are very open allowing for good satellite reception and we were able to get over a dozen antenna channels. Sites are either pull-in (which we had) or back-in. There are no pull-thrus. Set back in a wooded area are a scattering of rustic tent sites, rental cabins and yurts with potable water, grills, fire pits, and picnic tables. These sites are so tucked in a wooded area that I never noticed them until the last day I was in the park.

There is a lot of activities within a short drive of this park and we wished we would have stayed longer. The park is in a perfect location to explore the towns of Leland (and Fishtown), Lake Leelanau, Northport, and Sutton’s Bay. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and the town of Glen Arbor are a 20 minute drive and Traverse City is about 45 minutes. All these towns are quaint coastal towns with shopping, galleries, good restaurants. The park is on the Leelanau Peninsula which is one of Michigan’s most well-known and revered wine region and there are three wineries within a couple of miles (one is just across the street from the entrance). That being said, there are nearly some 20 wineries within 15 – 20 minutes of the park. There are a few state parks and county preserves nearby that have hiking, scenic views of Lake Michigan and picturesque lighthouses.

All-in-all we really liked this park and would definitely come back. We took advantage of their “Big-Rig Special” which gave a 25% discount if you booked 4 nights. Otherwise, the price per night was $69 which we found to be expensive for what you get. The biggest dings we give this park are for the high nightly price and the lack of amenities that should come in a “resort” with that high a price. This area is one of our favorites in Michigan and we easily could have spent a couple of weeks here enjoying the area.

Clean and quiet, with numerous sites right on Lake Michigan, what's not to like?

Awesome campground with lots to do. Can check out the lighthouse. Close to Northport with cute shops. A great way to experience Lake Michigan.

beautiful park next to the lighthouse. no showerhouse or flushing bathrooms...portajohns only.water pumps to get water from...and beautiful views of Lake Michigan