Magpie Campground

We were really excited for a weekend of camping at Magpie. Imagine that excitement killed when we pulled up to the campground and there is a road closed sign at the entrance. First, we had a reservation which I made in March for site 7. When I made the reservation, I indicated that we had a trailer but even had the gate been open, the“road” was covered with river rocks, not even drivable gravel. The campers that were there parked their vehicles at the gate, and were walking their camp gear to their sites. We had no way of doing that even if we wanted to. There was no indication on recreation.gov that the campground wasn’t open, and we even received a reminder of our reservation two days before we were supposed to be there. Not only was it a waste of money on gas, good, and the$70 reservation but also the waste of a weekend camping when we could have made a reservation elsewhere had we know before actually arriving. I will be calling and requesting a refund of the reservation charge on full, and will update my review once I do.

We were road tripping through with no reservations. The whole South Fork area has many campgrounds. Magpie is the first and one of the smaller of the campgrounds as you drive up the canyon. We drove through all the campgrounds and didn’t find any hosts to talk with to find out if we could occupy a spot. We thought it would be ok but weren’t sure if we could stay in a spot that had a weekend reservation posted. Plus there was simultaneously not very much shade and lots of overgrown vegetation that made tent camping not very feasible. All the sites with actual river frontage were occupied and most folks had campers. This was especially true at South Fork, Lower Meadows, Upper Meadows & Perception Park campgrounds. We finally found a host at Willows campground who explained the process but we didn’t see any sites we liked there. Magpie actually had some shaded sites so we headed back down there. We grabbed a spot that had no obvious river access but good shade right next to the host site. It was pretty overgrown but had enough of a flat spot to set up our tent and a big concrete pad for the picnic table and huge fire ring. Midweek it was only half full. Campground is literally mere feet from the road. Lots of road noise. Bathrooms were good enough. The host when he finally came around was very nice. The adjacent site was vacant (a double site that cost more $$) and we were able to get to the river there. We stayed two nights mid week and it never filled up but all the sites had weekend reservations. There isn’t a lot of hiking but if you like river recreation or we saw lots of paddle boarders headed up to the reservoir. We drove up Monte Cristo which was still closed for the season but probably would have been more our style. Birding was good around the campground probably due to the river. Again, road noise was annoying but expected. Also note that the forest service’s website was out of date as far as all the campgrounds in this area being open.