Lake Maloney State Recreation Area

Lake Maloney is on a big lake in North Platte, NE. We have stayed two or three times. Our first time staying put us in a bit of a pickle. We stayed the night at the campground and packed up to head out on our last leg of our trip only to find our truck was broken. We found a great shop only about 6 miles from the park and they let us use a car of theirs for the three days it took them to fix our truck.

The campground was very inexpensive, even for out of staters. It was $5 for the day and $8 for the overnight. This worked well for us. We were traveling cross country and being the last leg, we were nearing broke. The campground wasn't overly tidy. We also didn't see a camp host, at least one never checked on us to ensure we had paid and did what we were supposed to.

When you come in you can take the loop to the right, which is what we did to tent sites. It's all pretty much open and you pitch your tent where you please. If you want a picnic table and firepit, you have to be a bit more selective. If you were to go straight at entry, it loops around to the left where mostly RVers camp. Straight ahead is also the lake, it's a big lake and people get on it early when it's hot out. Everything to the left is a bit more modernized, flush toilets, pay showers, more developed. To the right there are old playground equipment (really old) and pit toilets, big grassy field and open space. There are a few shade trees to the right, more to the left.

Not all firepits have a cooking grate so you may want an alternative if this is how you cook. We use a camp tripod for cooking most frequently and did on this trip. Adding three days on to the end of our trip meant our food needed to be eaten as it was reaching the end of it's life. So we cooked it all up the last night we were there.

Our second trip over we utilized freeze dried food for travel to aid in keeping our food from spoiling. It worked well for us and we just made sure to find a picnic table to camp near. The weather did get really nasty this trip and with the lake, open fields and few trees, the lightening was pretty scary and we retreated to our truck to ride it out in the middle of the night. The sunsets are really nice over the lake.

This is a good spot to stop and we enjoyed our stay even though the length was not planned. It is for sure our go to when traveling east from Denver.