Review: Standing Indian Campground

Although I spent many years living in and exploring southwestern North Carolina, mostly in the areas of Buncombe and Jackson counties, I hardly ventured much more westward than Highlands (and the serene Van Hook Glade Campground on the Cullasaja River).

This summer, however, Kathy and I decided to venture a little further west into Macon, Swain and Graham counties, homes of the Nantahala River, Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, Lake Nantahala, Bryson City, Lake Santeetlah and the Cherohola Skyway.

We spent our first three nights camping at Standing Indian Campground. Surrounded by peaks from 4,700 to 5,000 feet at their highest, Standing Indian Campground straddles The Nantahala River and a tributary, Kimsey Creek, near the river's headwaters. Several paths in the campground offer easy access to swimming and fishing holes. Rainbow and brown trout are supposedly in the waters, although I came away empty-handed.


View Larger Map
(There is no address to plot on Google Maps, these are the GPS coordinates of the campground.)

Standing Indian is a large campground -- five loops, eighty-one sites -- owned by the National Forest Service (that's us) and operated by an independent contractor with the help of several on-site "hosts." Although large and accommodating plenty of RVs, we found the more remote sites of loop five to be secluded and private enough to give us the serenity we were looking for.

 

We chose site #78. Curtained from neighbors by dozens of yards of thick mountain laurel and shaded by towering poplars throughout the day, the site, like the other tent sites, has a groomed tent pad, concrete picnic table, fire pit and lantern pole -- and it drains well, as two nights of heavy rain proved. #78 backs up to Kimsey Creek. You can't see the creek from the site, but you can hear it at night. Our site was about one hundred yards from the bathhouse: one sink, one toilet and one shower with nice hot water each for men and women.

The campground store is not a fully stocked convenience store by any means, but it offers eggs, milk, candy, some basic camping supplies and firewood at $25 for a load. We had purchased a couple of small bundles of wood in Sylva, NC on the way and supplemented our supply with a few more from Loafer's Glory, the closest convenience store and gas station to the campground we found, about fifteen minutes away, as I recall. Seen here:


View Larger Map 

Drive past the campground on the Forest Service road, the pavement ends and it turns to well groomed dirt, following the Nantahala upstream and leading to the "back country" area with turnoffs to fishing holes and access to primitive campsites, a horse camp and lots of trails -- many following mountain streams, some to waterfalls. There is an information board with maps and details at the beginning of the dirt road. We hiked the relatively easy Laurel Falls trail. It was about a twenty minute hike one-way with mild changes in elevation to Laurel Falls. The pool below the falls was inviting on a hot summer day, but I found the water too frigid for anything more than a quick knee-high wade -- it was, however, the only place I even got a nibble while fishing.

In addition to the numerous and varied trails in the back country area, just prior to reaching the campground there is access to the Appalachian Trail, which Kathy found especially delightful as she was reading Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail during our trip.