Lake Chicot State Park

Lake Chicot State Park is a fairly nice SP built on the largest natural lake in the state of Arkansas. The lake is an oxbow lake, which means that it was once part of the Mississippi river but the curve in the river was cut off and left the isolated lake. Experts think that happened about 500 years ago.

I have to be honest, the SP is in need of some updating and maintenance. The roads through the park are terrible, but I am sure that has some to do with the unstable soil and frequent flooding. The sites along the lake are nice, but cost $8 more per night. If  I had it to do over again, I would have chosen one of those. The bathrooms are in bad shape and just need to be rebuilt. It appears this place gets lots of visitors in the summer to fish and enjoy the lake, so I am not sure why there is not any money in the budget to fix up the place.

On Sunday, April 3, I took a walk around the entire park. The place is not large, so the walk was only about 3 miles. They do have a nature trail that is .75 miles long, but it could also use some work. Don't get me wrong, this place is not bad, it is just not up to the standard we have come to know with most SP's around the country. We would come back, but only for a night or two as we were passing through.

They do have nice docks and if you were totally focused on fishing the lake, this place would be good. 

Nice Docks at Lake Chicot SP

Lake Chicot was a bit flooded while we were there

Part of the Nature Trail. It could use some trail maintenance. 

Well, there you have it . I guess you could view that as a negative review of Lake Chicot SP. To be honest it kind of is. After three days, we were ready to move on. We looked at our options and found a COE park that was along the Arkansas River, just north of Pine Bluff. It would have been perfect except it looked like it was closed. I could not find out for sure if it was temporarily closed or if it was permanent. I looked for other options and could only find one, Cane Creek State Park. The problem is that we had been there before. We are all about going to new places. We had been there in 2014 on or way back from the gulf coast, just after I retired. We had only stayed one night because we were in a hurry to get to Russellville to see our new grandson be born. The good news in our short time there, we loved it. We decided to go back and spend the next three days. The drive was only about 75 miles, so that made it easy. 

The negative review of Lake Chicot may have been influenced by the fact that Cane Creek is AWESOME! This may be on of my favorite campgrounds...EVER! It just has it all. We have a great site up on a bluff overlooking the lake, they have more hiking trails than I can do in a week, and they have a paddling trail. We love this place. I am sure my next entry will be with stories of long hikes and hopefully some nice paddling. Come back to see how it works out.