Red Top Mountain State Park

11.24.21-11.28.21

Full hook-up site for Thanksgiving was the way to go!

Red Top Mountain State Park is located in Acworth, GA on Lake Allatoona. The state park is 1776 acres with 15 miles of hiking trails. Named for its red soil, the park used to be an important mining area. Red Top Mountain State Park has 93 campsites, 1 yurt, 20 cottages, and 1 pioneer campground.

The state park is in the middle of renovations projects and we were impressed with the work they have done so far. They removed the putt putt course and built a unique picnic area looking down over the beach. We have never used the beach before, but it seems like they have made it larger and cleaner. A new ramp has been added for wheelchair access and they replaced the old bathrooms with a brand new building.

The main Visitor Center caught fire a couple years ago and the new building has been a great addition to the park. We really enjoy looking through the store and almost always buy something. The Visitor Center looks out over a large field with a brand new playground addition, the 1860s homestead, and many other picnic areas. When we come to hike at Red Top Mountain State Park, the Visitor Center is where we would usually park.

The Trading Post is located off the main road of Red Top Mountain State Park and has a small parking lot. This is the building where you check in to your campsite. I called ahead to get the campground gate code so that we would not have to pull our camper into that parking lot. The Trading Post is geared more toward the needs of campers, while also offering small souvenirs. Next to the Trading Post are the pickleball and tennis ball courts.

We have camped at Red Top Mountain State Park many times in our early 20s, but all of the trips were pre-camper. The park is built to be more suitable for tent camping as the sites are smaller and heavily wooded. As part of their large renovation project they are working to make the campground more suitable for RVs.

Using the website wanderinglabs.com I put in a request for a Red Top Mountain campsite for the dates of Thanksgiving, Wednesday– Sunday. We picked up this cancellation about a month before the trip. It just so happens that we scored what would be our favorite site in the new full hook-up section.

Sites 1 –12 were renovated a couple months ago to include sewer hook-ups. Unfortunately, they had to take out quite a few trees in the process, but the sites are still nicely spaced and wooded. We reserved campsite 10 for the four nights.

This campsite was our favorite because it had the most distance between sites in front and behind it. The site was level side to side. My only complaint about site 10 was the erosion barrier they left that surrounded the camping pad. Our daughter tripped over this many times throughout our trip, but she also enjoyed running up and down the large blue barrier.

There were a couple things about the renovations that made me question if the people in charge of designing it knew anything about camping. Specifically with site 10, the fire pit grate opened into the campsite. I would think you would set it up to open to the outside of the campsite. We banged our shins on the grate a couple times. On the road, they had to go back and take out a tree and stop sign that were making it almost impossible for larger campers to make the turn out of the 1–12 loop.

The dump station was also renovated. They moved the location of the lane to fall between the entrance and exit lanes of the campground. We did not have to use the dump station as we were in a full hook-up site.

We didn’t do as much hiking as I wanted to do. Red Top Mountain State Park has some great hiking trails. The park did build a new parking lot for access to the Iron Hill Trail that you can also get to from the campground. We were able to see people hiking this trail from our site.

The campground playground is located by site 89, about a ten minute walk from campsite 10. The playground seemed to be newer, but I’m not positive if it was part of a recent renovation. Our daughter enjoyed playing on it every day we were there.

Red Top Mountain State Park has a contract with Brighten to provide wifi access in the campground. For $18 I had access to the wifi for three days. On Friday I had trouble with the connection and emailed the company. They were quick to get it fixed for me. The closest wifi antenna to our site was at campsite 8. There are a total of 10 antennas throughout the campground.

About 6 years ago we tent-camped on site 22 and when driving around the campground we noticed that they are building a new yurt in the location of site 19. This cul-de-sac of sites does NOT accommodate trailers, in fact there is a sign on the road that says for campers to keep right.

A brand new bathroom is going where site 23 is located. They already tore down the bathroom by the campsites in the 40s and the brand new bathroom is almost done. This is the largest bathroom building in the campground.

The only site in the full hook-up section that I do not think I would be happy at is site 12. The living space is on the back of the the campsite and looks out over the sewer pipe field. When you open your trailer door you are looking straight into the bottom of the camper in site 11 and their sewer connection. The campers that were in site 12 while we were there did not pull their camper to the center of the site as it’s a long drive and makes the camping pad on the opposite side less awkward.

This trip was our last trip of 2021 and made for a great place to end our season. The full hook-up site allowed us to get the tanks extremely clean before winterizing. We did the entire winterizing process before pulling out of the campground.

Things we learned at Red Top:

1. Latch It sent us their keyless RV lock a couple weeks before this trip. We installed it at the campground. Why did we wait so long?! It’s so nice to be able to unlock our camper with the key pad or the two key fobs it came with. The Latch It RV lock has lifetime warranty. They gave us a 15% discount affiliate code to share with our followers – Imaginecamper
2. We encountered so many issues with the camper before even leaving our house for this trip. I am going to create a separate post about problems and solutions we have dealt with in our camper the last five years of owning our Imagine. This information can be found here.