Oak Mountain State Park, et. al: A Campground Review and Van Woes

travel dates: June, 2022

Ah, August! That time when, for us Georgians, it is still unbearably hot and muggy outside and yet summer is officially over and everyone must return to real life. We’re back from our mostly wonderful eight week long summer trip, which we dubbed Mountains, Mountains, and More Mountains for reasons that you can probably guess. Our first stop was at Oak Mountain State Park outside of Birmingham, Alabama, so I’m starting off with a campground review.

We were supposed to spend a couple of days checking out Birmingham while we were here…but our van’s air conditioning decided to act up, which is not really something you want to leave unaddressed at the beginning of an 8 week long summer trip. It actually started at the end of last summer’s trip; the AC will cut off (and/or blow out of the defrost vents, blow hot air on the kids in the back, all manner of strange things) pretty much any time the van downshifts, but only when we’re towing. We sort of forgot about it over the winter, though, and so we started out the trip with an uncomfortable drive to Birmingham and decided to find somewhere in town that could look at it. The good part of this was that we had two cars with us for this stop, as our oldest son, Ari, was tagging along for a few days before he had to leave us to go do a summer research job at Iowa State University. The bad part was that the extra car only held five people, so we couldn’t all go off and explore Birmingham as planned. Long story short: the place we took the van diagnosed it with all manner of expensive problems, put in a new compressor and a bunch of other stuff, charged us $2700, and….the AC still did the same thing for the rest of the trip. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as before? It’s hard to say. Since we spent an awful lot of money on it, we’re choosing to believe that all that stuff really did need to be replaced, at any rate. The guy seemed very sure, and it’s a very old van. Flashing forward to the present, we’re still trying to get the AC fixed for real. Later on in the trip, someone else would diagnose it as a bad vacuum check valve and replace that to no effect. I became suspicious, based on extensive googling while suffering in a hot van, that there was likely a vacuum leak somewhere, and that’s the thing that’s currently getting fixed. Fingers crossed! (from my notes from this stop: “I hope I’m not reading this and thinking about how we wasted $2700 and the van was about to break again.” Ahem. Not “again” past me; it turns out it wasn’t really fixed to start with!)

Anyway.

So! We had, at least, been to Birmingham a couple of times before, so we weren’t sitting around at the campground missing out on a brand new to us city. If you want to read about stuff to do in Birmingham, I have blogged about it here and here !

We’d never stayed at Oak Mountain before, though, having stayed in hotels for our previous trips. We’d driven through, though, and done some hiking and were eager to check out the well reviewed campground. And we really liked it! Very spacious sites, full hookups, inexpensive, lovely setting.

Location

Oak Mountain is just outside Birmingham, Alabama and is a great base camp for exploring the city….but it will take you awhile to make the drive–probably a full 30 minutes–not just because of distance but because the campground itself is tucked so far back in the park; you have to spend a long time driving through the park at 25 mph just to get out of there. Which, of course, makes for a lovely, secluded setting tucked back in the woods, but doing the drive over and over again gets a little old. But there aren’t a ton of alternatives in the city. There’s a private RV park (Birmingham South) very close to Oak Mountain that’s a shorter drive because it’s right on the main road. There’s the Hoover Met Complex, which is essentially a stadium parking lot with RV hookups. And there’s Tannehill Ironworks State Park, another nice state park with a similar driving time into the city. So it just depends on what you’re looking for…you can do a bit better if you want to prioritize proximity, but we opted for the lovely setting for this stay. There are restaurants and shopping closer than Birmingham, but, again, you’re always going to be doing that drive through the park to get anywhere.

Booking and Arrival

I don’t have any great pictures of this campground; things were so hectic with the van that I didn’t ever pull out the real camera. Anyway, here’s a sign that shows you how to get to your campsite!

This appears to be one of those campgrounds that books up on weekends in season but is pretty easy to get a site in otherwise. It was perhaps 2/3 full while we were there. So we booked fairly early but likely would have been fine if we’d waited until closer to last minute, given that we were there mid week (right after Memorial Day). There’s a pretty decent online booking system with pictures of each site. We paid about $35/night (plus a $5 reservation fee) for a full hook up, pull through site. There are also W/E sites for a few dollars less.

The park is a few miles off the interstate, and it’s a fairly easy drive to get there, except that there was some construction and my GPS tried to have me take a wrong turn. But I ignored it and followed signs for the park and that worked fine. Important to note that there are two entrances to Oak Mountain and you want to make sure you take the main entrance with an RV (John Findlay Drive); the back entrance is a very hilly, windy road AND they close the gate at dark (as we found out after getting back from dinner one night and having to turn around on the narrow road and go a LONG way around).

When you get to the park entrance, they’ll wave you through without paying if you have a campground reservation and you’re free to drive a long way through the park to get to the campground. There’s a bit of a climb here, but nothing bad, but it is (have I mentioned?) quite a ways on a low speed limit road. The registration area is easy to access and well marked; you pull over by the registration building/camp store and then go in and give them all your information.

Campsites

We were in site 48B, a big pull-through with an asphalt pad. The neighboring site was set up buddy site style with its fire ring right next to ours, which would have significantly decreased the privacy had it not been empty the whole time we were there. Most of the sites that we saw looked pretty nice, but there were exceptions, including a few sites that were just parking spaces right along the campground road. As I mentioned, there are pictures of every site on the reservations website, and we also found a couple of good video tours on YouTube showing every site.

Amenities

The big amenity here is the state park itself, which has all kinds of activities like hiking, swimming, golf, archery, a wildlife center…just tons and tons of stuff. The kids did the Treetop Nature Trail one day while we were sitting around waiting to hear about the van, but not much is easily walkable from the campground so we mostly stuck to that area. We did do short hikes on the Light Trail, since it leaves right from the campground. It’s a nice little walk in the woods, but nothing spectacular.

The outdated bathhouses might be Oak Mountain’s biggest shortcoming. We didn’t really use them since we had full hookups, but they could definitely use some upgrades:

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