Mt Gilead State Park
Not all camping trips are created equal, just like not all state parks are created equal. And every camping trip has its own mishaps. Our next featured state park delivered a camping experience I won’t soon forget. Less than an hour north of Columbus lies Mt Gilead State Park (no you won’t find handmaids here). Instead there’s opportunities for hiking, picnicking, camping, disc golf and a lake for small boats (word on the street is they’ll be offering boat rentals soon). We made sure to get some birdwatching in too. We even found a bird blind near our campsite… love me a good bird blind!
What I didn’t love was our campsite. Because guess what I didn’t do: Research the campground. Rookie mistake. Stay tuned for a video/blog post describing what not to do when booking a campsite. Like most campsites, you get a concrete slab, grassy area, a fire ring and a picnic table. The site I chose had very little grass in which to set up our tent and that grass was on a slope… so basically a ditch. If we were in a camper, it would have been no problem! Of course we arrived after the camp office closed. Our campsite neighbors (who had sick SUV tent set-ups) saw the disappointment on our faces and encouraged us to check online to see if there are other sites available nearby. So we picked the perfect unreserved site, set up camp, and asked for forgiveness at the camp office later.
One feature we thought was super neat at Mt Gilead was their recycling program. I’ve never seen this at a state park before but its genius! At the entrance to the campground there are buckets to grab and take back to your site. Throughout your stay you collect all your recyclables and then dump them in the recycling bin next to where the buckets hang. So convenient! Why don’t all state parks have this? Oh and there’s a community composting bin at the park as well but it was quite far from our site so we didn’t contribute.. It’d be nice if there were portable buckets for that too! Its definitely necessary to keep your trash under control at Mt Gilead’s campground, especially because we had a visitor… We woke up in the middle of the night to a raccoon ravaging our cooler. Somehow throughout all these years camping, I haven’t been the victim of any animal getting into garbage/food. Of course, we made sure to put our bags of food and garbage in the car overnight but we thought the cooler would be safe. It has these rubber latches that are hard even for me to open most of the time. How he got his little paws to open it is beyond me… He helped himself to most of our food, but blessed be the fruit salad (Get it? Cause this is Gilead?) cause he didn’t snag any of that.
The campground is pretty close to a main road so if you’re tent camping here, you may want to stick to a weekend to avoid noisy commuters. I’m sure the folks in campers were sleeping like babies. That’ll be us someday! As we were leaving, we noticed the embankment at the park’s entrance — a spot that could have easily been overlooked — was instead covered in flowers, creating a special pollinator habitat to be admired. That’s just one of the ways Mt Gilead State Park, though it’s small, manages to maximize its potential to offer more for its visitors.
XOXO Kara
