Fort Mountain State Park

11.10.17-11.12.17

Fort Mountain State Park is located in the Chattahoochee National Forest in North Georgia. At the top of the mountain hikers will find a stone fire tower built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, open for tours on the weekends. The drive up the mountain has quite a few curves, but our truck did great. There are two overlooks that you can pull off for an epic picture, however it was dark on the way up and foggy on the way down – so we didn’t stop.

The park includes a 17 acre lake with paddle boats to rent in the summer, a sand beach, and a putt-putt course. The State Park offers a fully stocked visitors center with plenty of ice and firewood. No cell service at this State Park – guess you can only glamp so much!

The campground offers overnight experiences in 15 fully-stocked cottages and 62 campsites. Many of the cottages have their own overlook off the back deck. The campsites are split into two sections. The roads throughout the campground are very narrow, with sharp turns and large drop offs. Anyone with a larger rig would need to be comfortable with their set-up to navigate through this park.

Arriving late Friday night (like usual) we were forced to find the best of the unoccupied sites in the dark. Not to mention, the roads in the park had us anxious. We ended up choosing site 54, the section of the campground with the lake. The  site was extremely narrow with a large tree we had to navigate past and a wooden curb built into the site. Once we were in, the site was level, thankfully not much work was required there. The next site over was separated by a decent amount of woods, perfect for us.

Saturday we hiked through both sections of the campground to the lake. We drove over to the overlooks and hiked up to the Stone Fire Tower. Both overlooks have parking lots near them, or you can hike to them from the campground. Heather was dealing with an injured foot, so we were looking for the least amount of hiking required to see the overlooks.

Our middle pup, Cedar, was acting funny Saturday. To get to the main overlook it requires hiking down a narrow staircase and the trails were fairly crowded this day. Heather and I decided to go one at a time down to that overlook with just one dog, while the other sat back at the fire tower with the other two pups. The second overlook has a small parking lot right next to it, with a paved path all the way to the deck.

This particular weekend it dipped below freezing and the host came around to all the sites letting us know we needed to disconnect our water. This was the first time we used the furnace in our camper, besides testing it out when we first bought it. We enjoyed big campfires and played with mystical fire packets that change the color of your campfire. [See details on the Recommendations page] The pictures don’t do it justice, if you have kids you HAVE to buy some of this for your next trip. Even adults will have fun with it.

Things we learned:

1. We might need to look into buying a hose insulator. Anyone have one of those? Hope to do more winter camping next year.
2. Can’t always get THE epic picture, but on a camping trip there’s bound to be more than one.