Illahee State Park — Attraction in Bremerton

This campground is a small, well maintained space surrounded by parkland and homes nestled in a fairly mature forested area. We stayed in site 1. This site is across from clean restrooms with a “pay by token” shower, a water faucet and the garbage bins are a very short walk out of the site. This site has no one camping to the right (looking into site) or behind you. The sites are all fairly shallow but you can manage to set up in a way that gives you some privacy… or at least so you don’t have to stare at everyone coming and going. (Unless you’re into that then just plop your chairs upfront and watch away 🙂) The trees provide great shade and play space for many birds and the occasional squirrel (who will come into your site looking for scraps when you’re not looking)

The beach is pretty small with “Private property, no trespassing” signs at either end of the park boundary. These are there to prevent you from walking any further along the beach in front of the homes. This was a little disappointing to us. The beach area has washrooms with an outside showering area to rinse the sand off before you hike back up to the campground. The campground is at a higher elevation than the beach (as per my phone 16 stories were climbed from beach to campsite). We walked down the road to the beach first thing in the morning with only a bike passing us but the rest of the time we found it better to use the trail. We also noticed a lot of people drove down from their campsite 😏

A few of the trail steps have seen better days, be careful of metal spikes sticking out of a few rotted wooden boards, running shoes would probably be the best footwear on this trail!

The only real negative about the campground was that while showering, if you needed to add more tokens, you had to get out of the shower and walk across the stall to insert more… yes it’s a small space maybe only 4 - 5 feet away but I thought it would have been better installed outside the shower within reach. The door stall has gaps … need I say more 😆 We did enjoy our time here and …it’s actually very close to civilization so if you get bored of camp food you can walk, drive, or skip the dishes some...

Loved the environment / feel of the park. Minus one star for the cost and hours.

This was a really lovely park to camp in. It has a rain forest type of feel to it. In general it was quiet and was not crowded. The bathrooms were clean, but the stalls had short doors with no locks on them that left you feeling a bit exposed, luckily, it wasn't very busy. The shower required quarters to operate, which seemed a bit excessive considering the cost of camping was around $27 a night.

A couple things to know. It is self registration and as of when we camped there, the camping fee included the park access fee. This was a bit difficult to understand from the signs and we had to call to confirm. The reservation system was also very confusing.

One other important thing to note is that the hours of the park are kind of weird and after a set time (I think it was 10:00p.m.) the park is closed in and out, even to registered campers. We had gone out once our trailer was setup, to explore the area and got seriously delayed due to weather. When we came back we found the entrance to the park blocked off and a sign saying it was close from something like 10-6. Luckily a ranger was driving by and allowed us access to the park, but this is definitely something to keep in mind if you might be out late for any reason. (Other parks we have stayed in have always allowed registered campers to go in and out of the park at any time once we were setup.)

It was about $27 a night for a non-electric site if I recall correctly, which seemed a bit expensive for a state park, but perhaps was normal for this area (we are from Wisconsin and state parks for non-electric sties are never over $20, plus the showers are included in the price).

It was about a 10 minute drive to a major grocery store and gas stations. If we make it out to this area again, this is definitely on my list of places to...

Took my son and my niece camping here, for many reasons it was a pretty bad trip, first being Bremerton is very expensive. Gas, food ect. So if you camp here you’ll save a lot of money by making sure that you have everything you need before going. This campground isn’t very well maintained, there’s lots of bugs, no one had raked out our site in quite a while. The campsites where very close, usually doesn’t bother me however the other people camping here where very loud. I was told by a ranger she could arest me for having a charcoal bbq going, because despite there being no signs or info of any kind about a burn ban combined with the fact that it was raining, and the people next to us had a fire going the ranger got out and was like I could arest you for that. She was like you can put that out and then we’ll talk about some other things that have been going on here. So I do that, and she tells me I am lucky she didn’t arrest me and that drove down a road that is a one way road. It is not marked as one way road. I should have looked up the burn ban stuff, but approaching someone with 2 kids and saying I could arrest you in front of the kids is a little traumatic for the kids and after that encounter we where kinda scared to be at our campsite we packed up early the next day and went home I also feel like the sites here where very expensive especially since the bathroom was pretty far...