Shenango Campground

We had site # 9 which had electric hook up and you fill with water. To fill with water you have to pass the entrance for this loop and it's down a little on the left. Our site was waterfront which had a nice view. It was a steep slope down so we couldn't access the water from our site. A few sites you can.  Out site was a nice size and shaded for the most of it. There is a dump station onsite.

We saw big Blue Herons, Oriels, Robins, and lot's of little song birds. There are some groundhogs there too. 

The lake is big and you can boat, fish, kayak & canoe in it.  There is a boat launch onsite. There are several playgrounds, lakeside picnic shelter an Amphitheater and a nature trail onsite. The town is close so there are places to eat and stores of all kinds. 

Our favorite sites in the Golden loop are #6, 7, 9, 12 and 17.

The main loop sites # 72, 66 and 80.

The new duck loop all the sites with electric are on the inside not waterfront. 

The NON electric loops favorite sites are:

The Pine Loop # 130, 161, 118, 121, 123, and 128.

The lake view loop sites # 49, 39 and 31. 

The Old Duck loop Site # 212 is waterfront and has good water access.

The road going into the duck loops aren't as nice as the rest of the campground roads. 

If you are camping with a generator they don't allow them to run after 10 PM during quiet hours.

The Shenango Recreation Area is a large campground with some 300 plus sites located on a lake in western Pennsylvania. Access to the campground is fairly easy and about 12 miles north of I-80. Most campers come here to enjoy the boating, fishing, and relaxing in the lake. Some of the sites are right on the water and provide nice scenery and easy access but, if you are not at a water site, your only access is at the boat launch or public beach area. 

All sites can accommodate tents or RV’s and some are dry camping without utilities while others have 30 amp electric (99 sites) and 50-amp (15 sites). There are no water spigots at individual campsites so you either have to come in with water on board or fill up at a spigot in the campground. You can make reservations on recreation.gov and seniors get half price. The online reservation system has pictures of each site. There are bathhouses scattered around but the one I went in was not very clean and they are pretty old. The bathrooms are heavily used since sites don’t have sewer and water. 

We only stayed two nights as we were just traveling thru the area and had a nice stay. The only complaint we had was a pesky neighbor who came over the minute we started backing into our site and didn’t leave until we were all set up and went inside just to get away from him. Our site was long and level and the electric worked fine. Our site was at the beginning of a loop with a one-way road so there was a bit of traffic. The campground was very quiet at night. 

FYI, alcohol is not allowed in this campground and we did see rangers and camp hosts driving around the campground so we kept ours hidden when outside. Not sure if they were looking for violators or just driving around for other reasons. Check out is not until 4 pm so be careful arriving too early. We noticed in the that a lot of people are fairly local and spend the day on the water before packing up and checking out.

After getting off I80, our RV GPS wanted to take us on a wonky route, so we followed Waze and the campground’s(CG) web instructions that took us across the causeway on N. Hermitage Rd, then a right turn off on Birchwood Rd, which led us to take a left turn back across N. Hermitage Rd to get back to the Shenango Rec Area turn. Once we got to the CG, check in was quick and very easy. Just happened, our next door neighbor/camp host checked us in and told us we could get water off their site so we proceeded straight to site 199 that’s a back in with electric(50/30 AMP) only plus one of the better spaced sites in the CG. We had to maneuver a couple of times to get into the 90 degree site but the road was wide with no obstacles to prevent swinging into the site. We quickly found out that our 50 AMP connection had issues and after reporting it, a maintenance crew came within 20 minutes and fixed a bad breaker. We got 3 bars on Verizon and a handful of OTA channels. Due to the amount of mature trees, satellite would be iffy depending on your site. There are no FHU sites(camp host sites have electric& water). Electric sites are centrally grouped within the loops and spaced closer together than most COEs. The majority of the sites within this CG are dry camping and they too are fairly close together. The sites right on the lake were all dry camping. With all the dry camping sites in this CG, its nice that they allow generator use during non quiet hours. Quiet hours here are 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM. There are water spigots periodically located within the loops and the CG map identifies where they are. There’s also a two-lane dump station located near the entrance but there is no potable water. There are signs stating no alcohol in the park, but people were openly drinking. We also noted that the contractors who clean the restroom/shower facilities start early in the morning and close the facility while cleaning, which was inconvenient for the dry campers just waking up. If we were to stay at this CG again, we’d come during the week and get a dry camping site on the water.