The campground is beautiful, but our experience was HORRIBLE! Oh, and campsites are$20 a night now, and it's quite a ways in, down a very poorly kept, narrow, windy road, followed by gravel road at the end, and no cell service.
Anyway... Every campground on the planet uses a piece of paper with a name and date on it to reserve camp sites, and everyone who has ever camped knows this, except people who camp or host at Nehalem Falls Campground. They don't take reservations, it's first come first served, and it takes a good 30 minutes to get there and back from Manzanita. So we drove all the way there in the morning for the sole purpose of securing a site for the night, picked a site, paid for it, put my proof of purchase in the clip on the site we chose, spoke with Cindy, the camp host both on the way in and on the way out, which was less than 5 minutes between, and even told her which site we had picked and paid for... only to return later to find our site OCCUPIED!!!
The host Cindy said"it's because you didn't leave anything there". Uh yeah I did, I left my PROOF OF PURCHASE!!!!! SO RUDE!
So we picked another site, which we actually ended up liking better than the first, camped, got up the next morning, paid for another night, put proof of purchase on clip AND made a sign out of a paper bag very clearly stating that this was our site for that day through next, put dates, etc in HUGE LETTERS so you could not possibly miss it. Also put a large branch across the front of the camp site entrance with a bright pink bin lid being held up by the branch. We car camp, as in no tent, we sleep in the car, that was literally ALL I HAD that I could"leave behind" while we went to play at the beach, oh except a bag full of magazines for starting a camp fire later.
Got back that night and once again, someone had STOLEN our spot!!!! I asked them if they had my bin lid, they had no idea what I was talking about. So THE HOST STOLE MY BELONGINGS that I had left there very specifically so that others knew it was NOT available!!!! And IN WRITING no less! So we chose yet another spot which was small, loud, surrounded by people& barking dogs, slept-ISH and left early the next morning NEVER TO RETURN AGAIN. SO UNBELIEVABLY RUDE!!! AND THEIVES to boot! We actually cut our entire trip short and went home because there was nowhere else to camp, because they all fill up month's in advance.
I wish the state parks were FCFS so you don't have to plan everything two+ months in advance and have zero option of changing plans.
