Summer afternoons on Smith Lake end at a sandbar, pontoons rafted side by side and kids swimming between them in clear green water under a shore of pine and hardwood. By dark the boats are tied up and everyone is back at the motorhome on its gravel pad, where the air conditioning has been running all day. Nobody breaks camp in the morning, because a Smith Lake week stays on one site from the first night to the last, with the boat out early and the worst of the heat waited out inside.
The lake is up I-65 north of Birmingham and then west into Cullman County, its 21,200 acres folded into long coves through the woods. Two shores take a rig for the week. The county park and the private resorts around it hold the Cullman side, and the Forest Service campgrounds hold the upper lake in the Bankhead.
Smith Lake Park and the Crane Hill shore
Smith Lake Park is the busy end of the lake, a big county campground with a pool, a swimming beach and a boat ramp, so the pontoon goes in at the ramp while the kids pick between the beach and the pool. On holiday weekends the park's stage puts on events and fireworks, and the lit pavilion is where the evening ends up after the boats come in.
The park lists 219 full-service sites, takes campers year round and books online, and a full-service pad keeps the air conditioner running and the tanks draining all week without moving the rig. When the county park is full, the private RV resorts along the Crane Hill shore, Arrowhead RV Resort and Hidden Cove among them, sit on the same water and take the overflow.
Talladega's race weeks pull on the same pool of Birmingham motorhomes, so a lake week that overlaps a race competes with race fans for the rig. The Talladega RV page covers the race-week side of that calendar.
Clear Creek and Corinth in the Bankhead National Forest
Up the lake toward Winston County, the shore turns into Bankhead National Forest, and the Forest Service runs two campgrounds there under tall hardwoods. Clear Creek is the one Alabama families keep coming back to, with a swimming beach on a cove of that green water and paved loops curling back into the trees. Corinth is the smaller camp, on its own stretch of the same forest shore.
Clear Creek gives every site water and 30/50-amp electric, with a trailer dump station in the campground, so a full week there means a run to the station before the tanks fill. Corinth's sites carry electric, water and sewer, which suits a family that would rather never move the rig until checkout.
Both campgrounds are reservation only through Recreation.gov and open early March through the end of October as of September 2026. Lock the site before you rent anything, then match the motorhome or trailer to the site you got.
Closer to town, Oak Mountain's trails and Wind Creek on Lake Martin make shorter trips for two that suit a smaller vehicle, and the Birmingham campervan page covers both. The long family drive south ends on the Gulf, and that beach week, where the pad is the first thing to book, has its own Gulf Shores RV page.