My wife and I were planning to go camping in the Adirondack High Peaks region. I looked for campgrounds near Lake Placid and Saranac Lake. I found a KOA but it was up around Wilmington, and I wanted to find something with a shorter drive from Rochester, NY. I found another campground with all kinds of amenities, but as I tried to book, I found it required a 3 day minimum stay. Darn it. I found another campground, but found that the tent sites were located on islands and you needed a boat to reach them (good thing I read more before booking one). Then I tried Rollins Pond Campground. It is a state campground. I went ahead a booked a site.
There are two campgrounds here: Fish Creek Pond Campground & Rollins Pond Campground. Fish Creek Pond Campground is more family oriented, and has it’s site located directly on the pond, and are all squished close together. Rollins Pond Campground offers more quiet, and has buffers between the sites.
As we arrived in the area, we found that we had to drive through Fish Creek Pond Campground, to reach the entrance of Rollins Pond Campground. There were about half a dozen cars in front of us at the check in. The check in process was agonizingly slow, and took us about us between 20 minutes and half an hour to get in.
We drove to our camp site. 80% of the campsites are located on the water, and the rest are across the road. Our site was not one of the 80% on the water. Reserve America listed our site as Drive Tent Prime. I am still trying to figure out what “Prime” is. The best thing about our site is it was near the bathrooms. The only things found on our site were a picnic table and a cement block firepit that looked kind of busted up.
The bathrooms were dimly lit, and not very clean. Often we found the toilets clogged up. And most of the bathrooms had only toilets and a couple sinks with cold running water. There were also mirrors, but because of the dim lighting, they weren’t extremely helpful.
There were a couple shower buildings at the campground, but we would have had to get into the can, drive to them as they were quite a ways away from our campsite. We never did.
There were water faucets located along the road for campers to use, but these were located a distance apart, and required a short walk to get water.
I looked at fishing in the pond (from a camp site on the water), but the water near shore was too shallow to try fishing from shore, and I didn’t have a boat. There was a place near the entrance where I saw people fishing on a small dock. But I would have had to drive to it, and just never got around to it.
There were a handfull of activities scheduled each day. We checked out one listed as Mountain Pies. We weren’t sure what mountain pies were. So we got in the car, and drove to it as it was a long ways away from our site. Mountain pies seem to be pie filling spread on white bread, and toasted over a fire. We didn’t bother with them, and headed back to our campsite.
Overall, I just wasn’t impressed. I will not likely stay at this campground next time. Maybe I was spoiled by our last trip to Old Forge where we stayed at a private owned campground.

Posted by RJ in Campgrounds, Reviews on July 12th, 2006 |