Monte Sano rises straight off the east side of Huntsville, a hardwood bluff high enough to look back down on the city. The state park on top is the reason people camp here, with miles of oak-and-rock trail and old stone cabins the CCC set into the hillside in the 1930s for the sunrises. Its trails also run into a free land-trust preserve next door, so a morning walk can keep going well past the park line.
It makes the easy first night. Book a water-and-electric or full-hookup site in the improved loop, because the primitive sites are tent-only and will not take a camper van.
The improved loop is sized for camper vans. If your group needs more beds or a rig longer than a van, the same Huntsville trips run out of an RV just as well.
You can also trade the van for a roof for part of the stay. The park keeps 14 rustic cabins on the same hillside, most of them the original CCC stone with fireplaces.
When a thunderstorm settles over the ridge, Cathedral Caverns east in Woodville is the rain-day trip: a walk-in mouth 126 feet wide and 25 feet tall that opens onto a lighted chamber running back to a stalagmite called Goliath, 45 feet of it. Tours take about 90 minutes, and school groups fill the mornings from February through May and again September through November, so an afternoon is calmer, and you sleep back at Monte Sano either way.
Lake Guntersville, south on US-431
Lake Guntersville is the water. It is Alabama's largest lake, and the state park wraps 6,000 acres of woodland around one arm of it, with a lodge set on the pinnacle of Taylor Mountain that looks straight down the water.
The campground runs 282 improved sites on 50/30-amp sewer and water along the shore. The drive is US-431 south to the park at 1155 Lodge Drive. Check-in runs until 9 p.m., and if you land later than that there is overflow parking with electric and water at the gate.
In January and February the park runs its Eagle Awareness weekends, the one winter reason to book the lake early.
Little River Canyon and DeSoto State Park
Little River is one of the few rivers that runs almost its whole length on top of a mountain. It has cut a canyon across Lookout Mountain full of waterfalls and rim bluffs, with a paved drive that follows the edge along AL 176, and Little River Falls drops right where AL 35 crosses the river for an easy first stop.
This is the longer day out, about a two-hour drive southeast of Huntsville, and the national preserve has no campground of its own. You base at DeSoto State Park, roughly seven miles north of the Canyon Center, where the improved loop has 94 full-hookup sites at 50/30 amp.
Come US-72 east to AL-35 and trust that route over GPS, which is unreliable on the mountain and will try to send a van through gaps it should stay out of.
For campervan bases in the rest of Alabama, the state hub lists them.