Best Tent Camping near Lincoln, MT

Very well kept. Not just a group use area. Nice trailer or tent sites. Clean restrooms and fresh water. Wonderful camp hosts. Beautiful spot on Blackfoot river. Only 6 miles to Lincoln, Montana if you need anything.

I called 30 minutes before our arrival for a tent camping spot and the host was easily able to accommodate us. Two men met us in a golf cart and drive us to our nice grassy site. The campground had coin showers with hot water and a family friendly rec room.

Hooper Park is a nice city park on the east side of town which contains a camping area. The campground has RV sites with electric and water hookup and sites with out hookups for tent camping. Campsites sit in a nice flat grassy area under large ponderosa pines. Restroom facilities area available as well as trash bins. Camp sites prices are based on the type of camping you are doing, RV vs Tent and if you are using an electric site or not. The park has a large pavilion that comes in handy if it starts raining and you want to eat your meal while staying dry. The park/campground is on the east side of town and a short walk just about everything Lincoln has to offer. This is a good spot to stay if you are traveling and need an easy to find campsite with out having to travel miles down a forest se

Harper's Lake north of Missoula on Hwy 83 and Hwy 200 right along the Clearwater River.the campground sports two small lakes Blanchard Lake and Harper's Lake which are within walking distance to the campground. The sites are mostly for tent camping, but there are sites large enough for trailers. There is no water, electricity or sewer hook-ups.

Was a pretty decent campground to camp at. It was mostly TT staying there at the time we went and seen wildlife within the first 30 min of setting up. Swimming area is nice and water was warm however it may have been too hot to tent camp. There was only a few places to find shade to set up a tent but we were unable to fine a shady spot for throughout the day that's the only reason for the 4 and not 5 stars.

My husband and I stayed here for about 14 days in July 2017. It is free to stay here. The campground has vaulted toilets. There are at least 2 camp sites that are literally on the banks of the Blackfoot river. My husband caught several nice trout while we were there and if you walk down river a bit by a bridge there are a few nice swimming holes. The campground is not that far from Lincoln for a quick trip to the grocery store.

I rolled into this place because White Sandy BLM was closed on Nov 1. This CG looks to stay open year round because it has a boat launch. The water was turned off and the main bathhouse was closed for the season. Two pit toilets remain open. The electric service was still on for the sites. The tent only sites were not suitable for van camping and require a walk to the tent site. I used the RV site and about half of them a siamese type sites with gravel pads. I was the only one here so this didn’t matter. Cell service on Verizon is one bar 3G so I set up my starlink.

Well managed, clean, and pretty campground with views through the trees of Salmon Lake. Best access to the lake is from the day use and boat ramp area south of the campground. We enjoyed exploring all the trails leading down to and along the lake. The park manager was very friendly and helpful. We lucked out and got a site with water and electricity. The only down side was we could hear the highway during the day, but it quieted at night. The sites closer to the lake probably didn’t have that issue. The walk-in tent sites are really nice above the lake.

We stayed at Salmon Lake on 2 different occasions in June 2021.  We were lucky enough to score last minute reservation on the lower loop. The lower loop is right on the water and has only 2 campsites, #22 and #23. These two sites are farther down the hill so we did not hear the street noise that other campers complain about in the upper loop. We were tent camping when we stayed in site #22 and #23,  Site #22 has a very nice covered picnic table and is large enough to accommodate a large RV or trailer. This  lower loop only has pit toilet but the upper loop has flush toilets and  very clean showers.  We did appreciate that they sold firewood at the campground for $4. This campground also has very nice walk-in campsite for cyclist and hikers.  We enjoyed both of our stays and would highly recommend the lower loop since the sites were right on the water and you had more privacy.

This is a typical KOA. First the good: Friendly helpful staff until their gone at closing time. Little mini store with a few essentials. Clean bathrooms and showers and clean laundry room with several washers/dryers.$2.00 per load to wash. Can't remember how much to dry. Very cool pinball machine that costs 25 cents per game. Fun fun fun! Another bathroom/shower in middle of park but I never looked inside that one. 65 sites that most have full hook-up and pull-through. A few cool tent sites with gas BBQs. Some cool looking cabins but I never looked inside one. I'm here on 8/24/2024 and RV park is sold out except 3 pull-through sites. All tent sites were full. I don't know about the cabins. Cool playground for kids and large mostly gravel dog run. Edit added: AT&T has 5G and three bars. KOA has wifi but slow slow slow I got 3MPS so instead of KOA wifi I used my iPhone Personal Hotspot that worked great. THE BAD(and reason for only 3 stars): All gravel roads and sites throughout the park. Very close together. Some sites have a very narrow strip of grass. Some of the picknick tables need to be re-painted. Unfortunately while eating breakfast you could be 2 feet away from the next RV dumping their sewer. P.U. The luxury sites don't have that problem. They are at the end of each row and only have a neighbor on the drivers side. I think well worth the extra 17 bucks. Not ADA friendly. Very hard for someone with a walker to get around because of gravel roads/sites. Someone with a wheel chair near impossible. Has a nice handicap shower in main office building. Only problem is that once I take my walker in with me it's very tight and no room to move around. Not EV car friendly. There is a$250 fine and eviction if you plug in your car. The person at the front desk told me the$250 fine and eviction is because EVs overload the outdated system and cause a fire. This KOA is an older one and was wired before EVs. Each individual site has its own 30 amp and 50 amp circuit breaker. Some trees but few and far between. No pool or hot tub. Final thoughts: Make reservations well in advance if you can. This KOA is the best game in town and is mostly sold out in summer. I think(sorry I don't know for sure) there is only one other RV park in town and from what I can tell, it is a much older one. I would proceed with caution before I booked it. Good traveling. See you on the road.

https://www.camppaxson.org/app/

*Must rent entire facility*

"Camp Paxson sits on the shores of Seeley Lake, one of a chain of five lakes nestled between the Swan Mountain Range and the Mission Mountain Range in Western Montana. It is a 15-acre peninsula of land that Salish, Blackfeet, and Crow tribes cared for, hunted, and fished for centuries prior to European colonization and we recognize their time-honored traditions and connections rooted in the earth. While the history of the land reaches centuries back, the buildings on this Forest Service landmark are just 80 years old. Camp Paxson originally consisted of a tent camp with six small frame structures. By the 1930s, a larger facility was needed. The Depression-era Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps began building the current facility in 1939, and the bathhouses and cabins were completed in 1940. Because of its unique architecture and as an example of the contributions of the WPA and CCC during the Depression years, Camp Paxson was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. The camp was originally used by a variety of groups including the Boy Scouts and the Forest Service for their Smokejumper training housing. Camp Paxson is a Lolo National Forest Service site administered by the Camp Paxson Preservation Project, a non-profit organization that operates with the mission to preserve and improve historic Camp Paxson and to advance the public’s appreciation of this cultural and natural resource both locally and regionally through expanded appropriate use. The facility is used by schools, churches, weddings, family reunions, and other gatherings of large groups.

Big Nelson Campground is anything but big. This is a tiny cramped campground. I found 6 campsites, but the Forest Service website list this campground as having four. With the exception of site three, all the other sites require you to park in a parking area. Site 3 was the first site I noticed on arriving at the campground and was located to the left of the parking area. Sites 4, 5 and 6 require parking in the parking area and walking down a set of stairs to access. Sites 4, 5, and 6 can only be accessed from the stairs, driving down the road to the boat launch will only get you to the boat launch. Site 4 is on the left at the bottom of the stairs. Site 4 is tiny, it is a picnic table next to a metal fire ring, if you want to pitch a tent at site four you would need to do it next to the fire ring and skip making a fire or pitch it in a small flat area above the picnic table near the parking area on the opposite side of the fence. Site four really doesn't have much room for a tent. Sites 5 and 6 are fairly roomy, especially when compared to site 4. Site 5 is on the right side of the stairs, plenty of room for a tent, nice view of the lake and has a metal fire ring and picnic table. Site 6 can be reached by walking through site 5 or from the boat launch road. You could unload your gear at site 6 right from your car, but would can not park next to site 6, you will need to drive back up to the camping area. Site 6 has plenty of room for a tent and also has a picnic table and metal fire ring. The campground has one small vault toilet and is at the beginning of the road to the boat ramp. The boat ramp isn't really a ramp, but the shore of the lake with a gradual entrance in to the water. Campsite 2 I found as I was leaving the area, it is just past the vault toilet as you leave. Campsite 2 requires a walk down a few stairs. It is a tight campsite with just enough room for a small tent next to the picnic table. A metal fire ring is on the opposite side of the picnic table. What I guess would be campsite 1 is further down the road and down below the road, I would not suggest using this site as it is a bit of a walk from the parking area, the road is two narrow to park here. Site 1 does not have a picnic table but does have a fire ring, odds are you won't even notice the site coming in or out. During my stay the campground did not have a fee, but the information sign indicates a fee may be coming next year. This is a dry campground, your only source of water is the lake so come prepared, this is also a trash-in trash-out site.

Our goal is to leave an unbiased review for future campers. First, don’t check in until 2:00 PM. The billeting office is closed for lunch and doesn’t get back until 2:00. As you don’t have a site number and you’ll need a key for the utilities, it will not do you any good to arrive early. Using our RV GPS, we headed off I-90 onto US-12 into Helena. At West Helena we turned on Williams St., which brought us to the VA Medical Center, then less than a 1/4 mile further to the South Gate. The gate is locked. When we called 406-324-3970(main gate) prior to our arrival, we were told to park in front of the gate and call the number on the post to have security come and let us in. The private security guard checked our IDs, reservation confirmation email, and then called in our names and truck license plate number. We were then told to head to the three story building where the billeting office is located and park in front of the building near the stepped entrance. This is not a large base/post, so don’t worry about getting lost. A lot of reviews talked about going through the North Gate, but as of this writing, they are using the South Gate for arrivals and departures. The main gate barriers are too narrow for a large RV. The billeting office is on the first floor straight a few yards and to the right after you enter the building and also where the free laundry is located. The FamCamp campground (CG) was simple to find, and we went to pull through FHU site 7 with 50/30/20 AMP. Not all the sites in this small CG have 50 AMP. The pull through was easy enough to get into, but its narrow with 9” high cement curbs, which makes getting your sewer up and over a bit of a challenge. They placed a brick thing at each site to help level your sewer hose. Also, depending on how your stairs deploy, dealing with the curb can be a challenge. In our opinion, the cement curbs are a horrible design. This site’s gravel pad was not level, so we had to use our leveler blocks. Water pressure was good at about 50 psi. There’s no CG Wifi, but we had our Starlink, plus we got a 4 bar Verizon signal. There are 12 sites here with row 1-7 being FHUs with 50/30/20 AMP and the back row 8-12 are 30/20 AMP. The sites are close to each other. We had a large class A in the adjacent site and its slideout came to our large cement picnic table. There’s a small restroom building but no showers. There are 6 RV or Tent sites where you could dry camp. There’s no obvious water spigot, but there are grass watering spigots. We saw reviews about a camp host, but we did not notice one. We departed at 10:50 AM and billeting called wondering if we had departed. If you don't turn in your key by 11:00 AM, you are charged an extra day. We were not unsatisfied with our stay, especially the good service and free laundry. But for a three day stay, due to their check in/out procedures, and site challenges, we’ll pass on this CG in the future.

Blackfoot Canyon campground is a little secrete Forest Service campground west of Lincoln Montana on the Blackfoot river. Secrete in that you will not find this campground on the Forest Service's web site, no signage along highway 200 to indicate that it is their. You can't find this on a map unless you look at an old map. Old maps list this as Blackfoot Canyon Campground but you will not find that name on the sign for the campground when you reach it, the campground sign says“Moose Creek Campground” but this is not Moose Creek Campground, that campground is an hour away from this location and on the other side of the continental divide. This campground has 8 sites with concrete Forest Service picnic tables, fire rings are made of rocks. Other pull outs are through out the campground area but with out tables or rings. A small vault toilet is available and was very well stocked with toilet paper and was clean. The campground does have one garbage can, it is located in the vault toilet, so be sure to close the door to keep the animals out. Campground is on the Blackfoot river, and if you like to fish there is a great fishing hole with nice large trout in it. I caught a 14½ inch Brown trout and spotted many more. You will need to bring your own water or a filter to get it from the river. The best thing is that this secrete campground is free. Campground was located 1/10 of a mile off of Highway 200, but the tree cover is so thick you can barely hear the traffi

Browns Lake Fishing Access Site Campground is located on the 459 acre Browns Lake. This fishing access campground has 14 sites all with metal fire rings and picnic tables. The site is serviced by two vault toilets. This is a dry campground so bring water. This is also a trash-in trash-out campground. The campground is fairly exposed and tends to be windy during the summer. We visited in early June and were amazed by all the birds in the area. The real draw for this campground is the fishing. Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks stocks this lake with over 50,000 rainbow trout per year….that's right 50,000. The lake is known for large rainbow trout and 10 pounders in the spring are apparently not a fish story. The lake also has Brook Trout, Westslope Cutthroat Trout, Kokanee, and Longnose suckers. So grab your tent and fishing pole, because with 50,000 trout being added every year a trout dinner has to be on the menu.

Holter Lake Recreation Area campground is a very nice campground with 52 camp sites. The entire campground including parking pads is paved. The site also has a swimming beach, boat ramp, docks, fish cleaning station, and accessible fishing walkway. The site has several vault toilets as well as water faucets through out the campground. This is a very busy campground with sites filling up fast, especially on the weekends. All sites are first come first serve, no reservations. If you want to avoid the crowd bring a tent and camp in the tent only area, when we visited no one was using the eight tent only sites, yet all the other sites in the camp ground were full. Each campsite has a fire-pit and picnic table.

Great campsite with many spots available for both tents and RVs, lake is gentle enough for swimming and boating, nice walk around the campsites, bathrooms and water pumps available. Won't forget waking up to a hot tent with the crows talking in the morning, adds to the experience :) the scenery is very beautiful!