By the time the Corps locks the gates for the night, a Lake Lanier campground has gone quiet except for the water lapping at the red clay bank. The family motorhome has sat on the same waterfront pad under the hardwoods all week, leveled once on the first afternoon. The days belong to the kids swimming off the bank while the grown-ups carry chairs down to the shoreline.
The campgrounds for that week are on the Hall County shore at Bolding Mill, Duckett Mill, and Old Federal, with Bald Ridge Creek on the Forsyth County side. Sawnee, also on the Forsyth side, belongs to the campervan trip from Cumming. Summer is the busy season on the lake and the one where a motorhome earns its keep, the air running through the hottest part of the afternoon while everyone else is in the water. Fall is the quieter month to land a waterfront pad.
At Lanier Islands the shoreline turns to pines, and Camp Margaritaville RV Resort sets rigs among them on pull-through, pull-in, and back-in sites with 30 to 50 amp power, water, and sewer, as of October 2026. It's the easy first night when the family gets on the road late, and it works as the whole week's base for a group that would rather not ration tank space.
Locking a waterfront pad on Lanier
On Lanier the pad decides the rig. Hall County publishes no single length cap, and site size and grade vary from pad to pad on its online reservation map. Find the waterfront site that takes your length, reserve it, then pick the motorhome or towable that fits. Two families traveling in two rigs book two sites, since the Corps allows one trailer or motorhome per site.
If the pads you want run short, or it's only two of you, a campervan from Atlanta fits where a family motorhome won't. That smaller rig is also the one for Stone Mountain's granite dome east of the city and for the Vogel, Unicoi, and Blue Ridge nights up in the north Georgia mountains.
Fort Mountain State Park in the northwest ridges
Up GA-52 by the Cohutta Wilderness, Fort Mountain State Park camps its 70 tent, trailer, and RV sites at 2,850 feet, in hardwood forest with blueberry thickets along the trails. A small lake in the park has a sand beach that opens in season, so a ridge weekend still has a swim in it. Atlanta families head up for a weekend when Lanier is booked or the city's heat has gone on too long.
As of October 2026, the park's reservation listing shows electric sites with 50 or 30 amp power and water, in pull-through and back-in layouts, and its RV length filter runs to 50 feet. Caps change from site to site, so match the one you book to your rig's length before you reserve the RV.
Farther northwest, the trails at Cloudland Canyon drop off the rim into a deep gorge near the Tennessee line, a rig trip planned from Chattanooga.
