What are your favorite campgrounds in the Northwest?

[Writer_Mom]

DH and I just bought a popup. Now, we need to find some good places to camp.

What are your favorite campgrounds?

Are there any you'd recommend staying away from?

[tahoecampers]

Any of the Oregon SP's. We have camped all along the Oregon coast and the SP there are wonderful. They are clean, well located and the people are very nice. I am partial to the Newport Area, South Beach is one of my favorites, but I enjoyed Ft Stevens PK also. Honeymon SP, in the Oregon Dunes area is a great place to stay too

[Writer_Mom]

Any of the Oregon SP's. We have camped all along the Oregon coast and the SP there are wonderful. They are clean, well located and the people are very nice. I am partial to the Newport Area, South Beach is one of my favorites, but I enjoyed Ft Stevens PK also. Honeymon SP, in the Oregon Dunes area is a great place to stay too

Thanks!

The only place we've stayed so far is the Icicle River RV Resort, a private campground near Leavenworth, Washington. We really liked it.

We've had trouble finding reservations available this summer at state parks. I'm going to check out the ones you mentioned to see if we can get reservations for next spring.

[GWPeck]

DH and I just bought a popup. Now, we need to find some good places to camp.

What are your favorite campgrounds?

Are there any you'd recommend staying away from?

You can have a beautiful time at Ohanapecosh campground at Mt. Rainier National Park, if it is (now) open after this past winter's disasters up there.  It is a dry-camping experience, but the site is lovely and offers a lot of local hiking opportunities.  

There is also a huge (700 site) commercial campground I've not tried, right on Highway 12 near Packwood, WA.  It looks like it might be OK--but, again, I've not tried it.

All of the Tacoma Power campgrounds in the Morton-Highway 12 area are nice places, and Taidnapum is the jewel of them all.  It is popular and busy, but does offer a shady, dense evergreen-tree-studded camping experience.  The other campgrounds are also very nice (all have great, clean, well-maintained facilities), but vary in the amount of shade available.  All of these places are near water, and offer fishing and other aquatic activity, if you want it.

The county campground next to the Dungeness Spit in Sequim is also a great tent-camping location--and its proximity to the Strait of Juan De Fuca allows beachcombing, trips to the Olympic National Park in Port Angeles, touring Ft. Warden State Park, and experiencing the Olympic Game Farm (where bison will "smooch" you, if you let them get close).

Sun Lakes State Park, outside of Ephrata, is a spectacular (and very popular) place to camp--this is a very busy park, but the Dry Coulee, Grand Coulee Dam, and other geological and Columbia River related sightseeing in this area is hard to beat.  This is a park that is probably best to visit in the "shoulder" season (off-peak times).

We have also pop-up camped at Viento State Park, in the Columbia River Gorge (of Interstate 84 on the Oregon side).  You have not lived until you have been through a windy thunder-and-lightning storm in a pop-up in April at Viento.  This, too, was a wonderful trip for our family--there is a lot to see and do in the Gorge, and it is all very close-together and reachable.  The only downside:  a rail-line runs right through the campground, and it is active at night.

Finally, we just tried the Wenatchee River County Park on Highway 2 between Cashmere and Wenatchee, and found it to be quite nice.  You'll need to find a site with shade, because it does get very warm there, but otherwise, the park is clean, quiet, and convenient to lots of central Washington pleasures--especially when the fruit-harvest is underway.

All of these locations offer on-line reservations, many of them with great maps and allowing booking of individual camp-sites.

We're off to dry-camp at Rasar State Park on the Skagit River easy of Burlington next weekend--I can let you know about this one, after we return.

UPDATE:  Rasar State Park is fantastic--it is almost-new, some distance off Highway 20  out of Sedro-Wooley (about 20 miles), and convenient to a lot of pretty sights and activities.  It also has about 4,000 feet of frontage on the banks of the Skagit River (which is just fine for the fisherman-crowd).

Since this park is so "fresh", the facilities are quite nice, there are plenty of trees, campsites are well-appointed and clean, and the local shrubbery allows for some privacy you don't get other places.

We dry-camped in one of the group camp-sites (family reunion), and found these to be extra-spacious and very nice.  We'd go back to this place in a second.

Nearby is the town of Concrete, with all the services you might need, and there are blueberry fields, a fish-hatchery, and lots of opportunities for viewing bald eagles in several locations.  You could also be seduced by the North Cascades Loop highway, which starts here.  The dam at Ross Lake is also worth a visit.

Right now, the early part of the fall Chinook salmon spawn is beginning, and the action at the fish-hatchery in later-August and into September should be exciting.  You could probably call Marblemount Fish Hatchery to find out about the peak-times (very kid-educational).

[twisty]

All in Oregon (so far)
Fort Stevens - coast
Cape Lookout - coast
Page - Col. Rvr. gorge
Hoodview - Timothy Lake, Mt. Hood
Shadow Bay - Waldo Lake, Central Cascades
Cultus Lake - Central Cascades

Laurel and I spent the first week of Sept. with our new to us Pup in the area of Waldo Lake. It will probably always remain my most favorite place ever in the whole world.
At //www.cwhatic.net you can view Vacation 2008 pics of the trip.