The area around Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas is blessed with many well-reviewed campgrounds, from fancy resorts to state parks…so I don’t quite remember how we ended up at perhaps the tiniest of them all: little Stephens Park with all of nine campsites, right on the shore of Lake Hamilton. It’s a gem, though, however we found it; you can get a giant full hookup site at this Corps of Engineers campground for $30/night, just 20 minutes from the national park. You can get closer at some of the private parks, but if you’re looking to save some money and/or have a lot of room to spread out in a beautiful setting, you won’t do better than Stephens Park. 
Location
We were here for Hot Springs National Park, which is about 20 minutes away, but there are a lot of other attractions in the area as well. The big one is probably Lake Oauchita; you can take a kayak out right from the campground or drive a short distance to all sorts of other recreational opportunities. The city of Hot Springs has everything you need as far as shopping and restaurants.
Booking and Arrival
As I mentioned, Stephens Park is a tiny campground with only nine sites, but it doesn’t seem to book up super far in advance (perhaps owing to there being so many other campgrounds in the area), at least not during the week. We booked a few months in advance, but most of the sites were still available when we did, although I believe they were all full when we were there.
There’s no office and no one to check you in when you arrive; you just go to your site and set up. The drive is fairly easy, but you are on smaller country roads and want to make sure you don’t pass the campground or take any wrong turns (take a look at a map and plan your route in advance), as things can get pretty hilly and windy pretty fast in the area.
Campsites
Most all of the sites here are great–very spacious and private and mostly pretty level. Site 3 is right on the lake and I suspect books up the fastest. Sites 6, 8, and 9 are along a scenic little creek that your door would open out onto. We had site 4, and it was lovely–huge and easy to back into. All the sites are full hook up. Site 7 looked like it might be a little more sloped than most and backed up to the (not very busy) road, but I’m nitpicking a bit trying to find something wrong with any of them. Each site has a picnic table, grill, and fire ring. All of them are at least somewhat shady (it was cloudy/rainy the whole time we were there, so I didn’t notice this as much as I might have on a hot, sunny day).
Activities and Amenities
So we’ll get this out of the way: the bathhouse is not good. I actually didn’t even go in, but the reviews have bad things to say, and Dave confirms these bad things. But the good news is full hookups, so if you’re self contained you don’t have to worry too much about the bathhouse. But it is available if you need it.
Aside from that, you pretty much just have the campsites here and nothing else. The main amenity is the waterfront location and the availability of boating right from the campground.
So overall this was a great base camp for checking out Hot Springs National Park and the bigger area. We did find that how it was unstaffed was occasionally inconvenient; there were a couple of dogs running around loose and no one to do anything about it, for example. And when we needed to make some changes to our reservation because of car troubles it was very difficult to get anyone on the phone.
Loose dogs aside, though, the neighbors were great. We went for a walk one evening and met some full timers who travel with two birds, including this very friendly one named Baby:
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