Bald Ridge Campground – 69

06.26.20-06.28.20

Might have found my favorite site at our go to Lake Lanier Campground. And of course— I will share all the details! For more details about the campground, be sure to check out any of the other Bald Ridge Campground posts (4).

Ever since our first trip to Bald Ridge Campground I have been wanting to book site 69, but of course it never seemed to be available.

I finally found an open weekend, May 8th-10th 2020. We booked the site about five months out from that date. Unfortunately, Lake Lanier experienced heavy rains that caused flood damage to some of their sites. They did not close the entire campground — like Army Corp of Engineers did with Old Federal Campground, but they did shut down about half of the sites. Site 69 was one of those sites—so we lost our reservation.

I kept my eye on the website in case they opened the sites back up and they did!

Site 69 is on the corner of a peninsula and therefore has water on two sides (straight out the camper door and in the back.) My last blog post, on site 48 I complained that our path to the water was overgrown and not accessible. This weekend we had not one path to the water, but two. Technically there were three trails to the water from the site if a fallen tree had been cleared out.

When we swam on Saturday we used the trail from the back side of the camper because it had a sandy entrance to the water. We also enjoyed setting our chairs up at the waters edge to read.

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Site 69 is just past the boat ramp and dock, but the trees allow for a lot of privacy. We could not see into anyone else’s site from ours and vice versa.

When booking I had no idea how large the pad at the site would be. We moved the picnic table to the center of the pad, set up our shade tent above it, and laid out our mat. The dogs were on their chains on the grill and the lantern pole. With all of our stuff set up, we still could have fit two tents on the other side of the picnic table.

With how many people that could fit on the site— any camper bigger than ours and you would only be able to fit two cars on the driveway. We possibly could have squeezed three.

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Saturday we got out of the lake just in time for a storm to come out of nowhere. We were seconds away from losing our shade tent to the wind. Not everyone in the campground fared as well. Towards the end of the storm we saw a firetruck (no lights on) drive past. In the morning we saw that a class A in the first site of our loop had a fallen tree on their camper. Thankfully no one was hurt.

Things we learned:

1. Friday when we walked through the campground (with our pups) we had two different dogs run toward us. With the first animal, the people had no idea their dog was gone. It weighed maybe 5 pounds and was the size of our dogs’ heads, but man, did it act like it could take on our dogs. In the second instance, the people saw us walking down the road with our dogs and saw their dogs start to bark at us. But it wasn’t until their dogs were all the way to the road that they reacted. No matter how friendly you think your dog is, you don’t know how the other dog will act. There are leash laws for a reason.

2. We were able to have a fire after the storm Saturday night because we brought a tarp and put it over our firewood before the storm started. If you don’t have a tarp in your camper or truck, add it to the packing list!