Brantley Lake State Park: A Campground Review and a Very Flat Tire

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Travel dates: July 13-15, 2017

To get to the campground at Brantley Lake State Park, you have to drive about six miles off the main highway, down narrow, little traveled roads surrounded on all sides by rabbits of both the living and dead varieties. I don’t know how many of those miles we drove with a flat tire on the van, but as soon as we pulled into the campground the people in the car behind us waved us down to tell us about it. It was very, very flat. It looked like this:

We were, at this point in our summer, pretty closed to finished with driving this van 7,000 plus miles around the country, up and down mountains and across deserts, and this is the first real trouble we’d had. So we could not complain. Much.

But this was the end of a 350 mile day, so we weren’t exactly excited to be dealing with a flat tire. Fortunately, Brantley Lake is–or at least was while we were there–home to the world’s most helpful camp hosts, and we happened to discover the flat tire right across from their site. He came over to help immediately, and we would have had a much bigger mess on our hands without him. I took the kids over to the playground while the camp host and Dave worked on a fix for the tire that would at least get us to our campsite. The camp host had a compressor, so first they tried to put air in. But it turned out the problem was with the valve, and it wouldn’t hold air. So they moved on to putting on our ancient spare, and this was good enough to get us not only to our campsite but to the tire place in Carlsbad the next morning. Where they charged us all of $18 to put the real tire back on and replace the valve.

So! First thing Brantley Lake State Park has going for it is that it’s a great place to get a flat tire, if you have to get a flat tire.

Second thing is this:

This is way up there on the list of prettiest campsites we’ve ever had. We had site 19. One of the reviews I read online says site 19 is the best one in the park. I booked our site before that review was written, but I’m going to have to agree with it. It was big and private and easy to back into, and it had an awesome view of the lake.

Each site has a little picnic shelter next to it (which you need to block some of the wind).

The third thing major point in Brantley Lake’s favor is that it’s $14/night for a water/electric site! New Mexico officially beats even Oregon for ridiculously cheap state park camping.

We picked Brantley Lake State Park as our home base for visiting Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The caverns are nearly an hour away from the campground, but you really don’t have a whole lot of choices in the area. There’s a well-reviewed KOA about 10 minutes closer to the caverns, but it’s not $14 a night. And there’s a campground right outside the park entrance, but the reviews for that one were a little…terrifying. Then there a few places in between–closer in to the park but with worse reviews than Brantley Lake or the KOA–so we opted for great views and a spacious site, a super low price, and a little extra driving. It’s about half an hour to the town of Carlsbad, where you can find restaurants and a Wal-mart and tire repair places and all that.

Half the sites here are reservable, and the others are first come first served. We reserved in January, but I get the impression that the park does not stay full most of the time. The reservable site was mostly full while we were there, but we didn’t make it over to look at the FCFS sites.

There’s a ranger station at the entrance of the park, but we didn’t see anyone there during our visit. You’re pretty much on your own here unless you break down by the camp host’s site and they have to come out and help you.

I found the bathhouse architecture charming:

We didn’t use them much (and not at all for showers). They get some bad reviews online, but I’ll say they seemed pretty clean and well-kept when we went in them.

There’s a small playground with a shade over it for sun, which is a nice and necessary feature:

The dump station is tricky to get into for bigger rigs, thanks to a very inconveniently placed dumpster.

And aside from that, there’s the lake. I’m not sure if swimming is allowed in Brantley Lake, but you can canoe or kayak or fish, and there are hiking trails to explore. And lots of wildlife to spot. Bunnies, bunnies, everywhere, and lots of birds. We saw a roadrunner in the campground. We didn’t get to spend a lot of time at the campground since we spent almost all of our full day here at Carlsbad Caverns, but we did walk down to the lake via the trail behind our site the morning we left.