Best Tent Camping near Pound Ridge, NY

Ward Pound Ridge is very well known to the locals as a great place for sled-riding in winter (Pell Hill area) and a place for big group gatherings. The many different trails are frequented by the locals as well. In recent years, the county government also allow bow-hunting of deer to control its population during the months of October to December.

As far as camping as a family, it is not too exciting a place for us. The grounds are far too well trimmed, as you can see in one of the videos. There is wide open space and the paths are well paved so kids can have fun riding the bikes or running around. There is also many trails of various difficulty levels to suit everyone, including horseback riders. The Trailside Nature Museum is also fun for the kids.

There are lean-to sites as well as tent sites. A maximum of eight people in two tents are allowed at each site. But if you really do have a party of eight, one picnic table seems to be inadequate. The sites are much farther away from the comfort stations than most campgrounds we have been to. But there are port-a-potties very close to the sites, which is very important when you have young kids.

All in all, it is not a place I would recommend if you want to get close to nature.

We stayed here on a Thursday night in September prior to taking off backpacking. The campground was clean and quiet. RV hook-ups, tent platforms, and rustic tent sites were available. Our rustic tent site had a few good options for pitching a tent, as well as picnic table and fire ring.

Ranger said that during summer weekends the grounds fill up and can be quite noisy, but mid-week during the off-season it was great. Expect to purchase firewood, although scrounging for kindling was possible. Facilities were clean and what you'd expect from a campground.

Would definitely return!!

The park itself is lovely and close to some other green areas. The nice thing about this campsite is that it’s so close to NYC. The bad thing about this campsite is that it’s so close to NYC. If you live in NYC this is a good, cheap, super quick escape accessible by public transport. If you’re visiting the area I’d recommend staying in Manhattan/Queens in an AirBNB for the full NYC experience or heading to Long Island, Pennsylvania, “Upstate” New York, or New Jersey for a better nature camping experience. For what it is, this site is a nice green little oasis. It’s National Park Service land and they try really hard to keep things clean and working well with so much traffic. Bring earplus for the airport traffic and the noisy neighbors. Tent sites are pretty and wooded, but there is also a TON of concrete from an old WW2 airfield.

We tried this campground without knowing what was safe and where to stay for visit New York City. It is located in Brooklyn and is little removed from everything. The sites are at Floyd Bennett Field which is an old airfield. The atmosphere here is eerily cool at the same time. You basically park and camp on the asphalt by the old hangars. No hookups at all but they do have a camp store and bath house. If you are tent camping, there are some grassy sites.

The campground is located right on Jamaica Bay so there were people fishing all the time from the seawall. At night, you could hear cars doing burnouts right next to us. To get to all the action in the city, we had to take a bus and then the subway. The travel was a headache but better than trying to drive in to New York City in our RV. One way to improve here would be to have some security at night as well as access to clean water and dump station. They remained locked most of the time for some reason.

The best part of this place was the free tour of Hangar B by some guys doing restoration of old planes (HARP). They had some great stories and gave us history of the planes on display.