Lake Camping in Minnesota: 10 Sites With Real Water Access

Minnesota advertises itself with a number — 11,842 lakes over ten acres, per the DNR's long-running inventory — and the tourism copy has been recycling that figure since roughly the Coolidge administration. What the number obscures is that "lakeside campground" in this state can mean anything from a tent pad twenty feet from a swim beach to a loop of RV sites separated from the water by a county road, a rip-rap wall, and someone's grandfather's cabin.

So this is a roundup with a filter on it: ten places in Minnesota where the lake is actually part of the camping experience, not a distant view through the birches. Most are state parks, because the state park system (much of it built or improved by CCC crews between 1934 and 1941) was designed around water access in a way private resorts never had to be. A few are Forest Service sites in the Superior. I have left off Voyageurs, which deserves its own post, and the BWCAW, which is not campground camping in any useful sense of the word.

How I'm defining "real water access"

By real access I mean: you can walk from your site to the shoreline in under ten minutes without crossing a road; there is either a swim beach, a canoe/kayak landing, or a fishing pier reachable on foot; and the campground's layout treats the lake as its front yard rather than its neighbor's. I'll note where this is true of the whole campground and where it's true of only a handful of premium sites.

I also prefer shoulder season and will say so throughout. Minnesota's lake campgrounds in July are functionally small towns; the the same sites in mid-September, after Labor Day and before the leaves turn hard, are a different and better country. Not always: Zippel Bay in late September can be genuinely cold, and the walleye people will disagree with me about crowds.

The ten sites, at a glance

• Lake Bemidji State Park — north of Bemidji, off MN-197
• Itasca State Park — near Park Rapids, on Lake Itasca
• Bear Head Lake State Park — south of Ely, off Cty Rd 128
• Scenic State Park — east of Bigfork, on Coon and Sandwick Lakes
• Sibley State Park — near New London, on Lake Andrew
• Father Hennepin State Park — Isle, on the south shore of Mille Lacs
• McCarthy Beach State Park — near Side Lake, on Sturgeon Lake
• Lake Carlos State Park