McLeod Meadows Campground

Nice campground on the southern end of Kootenay National Park. No hookups but water hydrants throughout and a dump station. The restrooms looked like they were abandoned. It has pay stations so take some Canadian dollars. The nightly rate is $21.50 Canadian. If you want to have a fire you have to pay $7 for a fire permit. It's not a bad deal cause they provide all the cut and slit wood you can burn. There are great trails connected to the site. Radium hot springs and a nice lake village called Invermere is just a short drive out of the valley. Take the swinging bridge trail to a remote alpine lake. A few of the sites closest to the river have of view of the rocky peaks. The loops are alittle tight and you may have to hold back a few tree branchs as your pulling through. We didn't spend much time here since we were headed north but would like to see it again.

There's only two options for camping in the Kootenay NP. McLeod is one of them. It's July 26, 2016, the height of the season, and half of the loops are closed due to "rest room maintenance". What IS open is not maintained. It's a grim little campground, nestled in a gorgeous valley by the river. Great location for some hikes, but is surely in need of some TLC.

It's our first time camping in Canada, so hopefully this was a singular experience. Yes you can pay by credit card at the self registration station. I'll post pics soon.

FYI- we drove through Marble Canyon CG and it looked no better. So we're moving on to Banff NP with higher hopes!

Made a booking here as we struggled to find any other free campsites in the area as we were late in the season (April) making our bookings for a July trip. Arrived during a thunder, lightening and hail storm which probably didn't help our experience of the site.

Horrible site - very narrow with trees in awkward places for maneuvering. Worst site we stayed in our 16 night trip. Didn't use toilets as they looked run down. Didn't use the fire pit.
Stayed in a 33' RV

Site says fully booked and we arrived to a nearly empty campground. Site worked well for a truck ,tent trailer and tent. Washroom was clean, and flush toilet. No shower. Extremely mosquitos. But humming birds too. Didn’t catch any fish in river here. Great trails to walk here, 5km hike to dog lake. Beautiful country. Short drive to radium and invermere from here. Park warden comes around once a day. If you like secluded and forest, come here.

We originally were supposed to stay here for two weeks and had a reservation in F7. We asked the park ranger, and they allowed us to move to one of the first come first serve sites in Loop A. We chose that site so we would have more solar and found a spot we could use our Starlink. It was very forested throughout the campground and I doubt you could find Starlink availability in many of the sites

The day we arrived, which was Friday there was a 2 to 3 hour heavy wind with blow down in the campground, that also meant that the trail to dog Lake and the loop dog lake trail had a lot of trees down on it. Today, Monday we saw them going in with saws to clear some of that out. My partner and I spent almost 2 hours clearing out the blow down on the dog lake loop.

The sites varied in size and closeness if I had to make a reservation I would choose K, which is closer to the river and further from the road.

There is a dump station with water and water throughout the campgrounds along with trash services.

Other hiking opportunities were few and far between with a lot of the trails saying they were overgrown. It was extremely smoky and there were no fires allowed at this campground. The national park made you pay $9.50 a day for a fire even though you didn’t want to have a fire, thank goodness there was a fire ban so they will return your daily $9.50. We canceled the rest of our reservation and due to the smoke they refunded all our money
There is a large creek with two bridges across it. I did not see anyone fishing, which are people down in the one slow, moving section, sitting in the water and playing with their dogs.
No cell service in Kooteney national park. There was a sign saying that 3 to 4 miles down in the day use area there was a phone available.