Ponderosa State Park
McCall, ID
This is a wonderful state park 107 miles north of Boise. The park is over 1500 acres that rests on a peninsula and is surrounded by the Payette Lake. The park is flush with activities, from boating, fishing, and various water sports, miles of hiking and biking trails, and is of course heavily treed with Ponderosa pine trees. In the winter there is Nordic and cross country skiing. Day activity use is open year round, but the camping facilities close in the fall/winter months. There are also several beach areas along the lake that have buoyed off areas for swimming.
There is 172 camping sites both FHU, and some W/E. Our site, #229 was a great site that was long and paved. The RV pad was just wide enough for the RV, but a large sanded patio site was towards the back of the site. We put out our large patio rug to keep things a little cleaner in the rig. A rail fence was around the edge of the site on the patio side, which provided a feeling of privacy. Except for the family of deer that wandered through the site each morning, it worked great! There is no Wifi or cable offered, and satellite reception may be tricky due to the numerous tall trees throughout the park. I got the kinks worked out of our on board Wifi, and was getting 10-15 meg download speeds on our T-Mobil cell card. Upload speeds were around 3-5 meg, probably due to the distance from the tower.
The bathrooms in the park are still open and available and are also handicapped accessible. Unfortunately the shower rooms are all closed due the Covid issues. The campground work campers are doing a great job keeping the sites clean and groomed after each camper leaves. They make sure that any trash is picked up, and even rake out the patio areas.
We stayed 5 nights and paid $40 a night for FHU site. Stays at the park are limited to 15 days in any 30 day period. Check in during the Covid restrictions consisted of going to the visitor center upon arrival and receiving your camping pass for your vehicle windshield. It appears that all reservations must be done on line, as there are no employees working a camping desk to allow for walk in camping. We already had our site reserved, so when we arrived I drove the rig to the site and set up while Diane went to the visitor center to check in. This turned out to be a good idea as the parking lot of the visitor center can be packed, and getting through it with the motor home and Jeep would have been impossible.
This was a beautiful state park that was perfect for beating the heat wave that was rolling across most of the country. While most of the lower elevations were seeing daily temps north of 100 degrees, the daily temps here were in the high 70's to low 80's. I highly recommend it. Diane's blog just went up with lots more pics, and you can see it here
Ponderosa and McCall - Aug 21, 2020 - McCall, Idaho, United States
From here we head into Oregon for a few stops, as we work our way down the coast for a while.
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