Where to camp, reservations etc

tatest wrote:
Booked up how? AFAIK the campgrounds in most Oklahoma state parks do not reserve sites. This time of year they are mostly empty, even on weekends, unless you are looking at Halloween. Even for that, they won't be "booked" rather just filled up by thise who came early.

COE campgrounds here typically have about 1/3 of the sites not reservable, so they show as not available on site-by-site reservation systems like recreation.gov. Typically, all sites subject to being closed for floodwater management are never reservable. If not occupied when you show up, the site is yours. You just can't reserve it.

Also, the farther you can drive from Dallas, the more you'll find open, until you get close to another big metro area (e.g. KC).

Specifically, the state park at Bernice, on Grand Lake O' the Cherokees, almost always has a lot of open space at this time of year, unless under water, which is really rare and certainly not the case this year. At the north end of the same lake, Twin Bridges SP has two campgrounds alway high and dry (a third, fishermen's camp, occasionally floods) and empty except for holiday weekends. But that one is almost all the way to Kansas, so even Tulsa folks don't go there, with so many other campgrounds with space closer to home.

Most of the COE recreational access facilities in Tulsa District will have closed all their larger campgrounds by end of October, because the volunteers and workcampers will have gone south for the winter. Most of these projects, however, keep open at least one CG that can be managed by permanent staff, but the sites are not reservable, they are first come, first served.
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If you limit yourself to camping at places where you can make a reservation, you might be excluding nearly half the opportunities in Oklahoma, and maybe similarly for Arkansas or Missouri.

What I've found with many Texas state parks, northeastern part of the state at least, is that the reservations get shut down off season because demand is so low. Where I've learned I have to be. careful is that many of the SP campgrounds are open weekends only. This hasn't been a problem further south in Texas.

Thanks for the reply!

We ended up staying at Lake Eufaula...they accepted reservations. When we got there, I'd estimate 75-80% of the spots were full. Odd, though---when we got there there was nobody at the welcome center. The sign said just to go and get your spot and you'd pay at the site. Well there was nobody "at" the site (small trailer at inner entrance) so we left a note and went looking. There was a reservation on our spot. We didn't ask for a particular number but we did ask to be away from others, and that's what she gave us.

We were going to stop by at Robbers Cave SP on the way back, just to look around and see if it would be our sort of place, but there was some festival going on and it looked crowded. So I guess if you run into a festival you better have a reservation.

Meanwhile, the wife was talking to a (tent) camper at work who said that he plans about six months in advance to be sure of getting what he wants. We did see signs for some COE sites on the way back. We'll definitely check those out. Now that we have a Wal Mart stay under our belts, we're more confident about backup plans.