Erving State Forest — Attraction in Erving

Quiet camping at a beautiful lake in Northern Mass. We camped here on site 7 over Memorial Day weekend. This state forest was booked up though you would hardly have known it. It was so quiet! Most sites were far apart from each other, with a fair walk to the nearest toilet. Toilets are either porta potties or composting toilets without water. They are very clean however! There is large bathroom with showers and sinks past site 17, and a bathroom with changing rooms at the lake (entrance to the campground). Showers required quarters (about 50-75 cents for a decent shower) so bring yours or get them at the contact station.

Dry, cured firewood is available also at the contact station for $5 a bundle. Or forage for your own in the woods!

The sites are sandy and easy to stake tents into. We brought a pop-up and had some trouble leveling it on our site as the campground sits on the side of a hill.

We usually bring bikes, but this campground was not very bike-friendly. The Camp Road from the lake started with a very steep hill.

If you want to camp with another group, I'd recommend calling ahead to ask which sites are near each other. The map does not accurately reflect the proximity of sites to each other. Sites and 8 and 9 are adjacent.

The highlight of this campground is the BEAUTIFUL lake for swimming, which was cold in May, but we still enjoyed. Overall the campground is VERY clean, well attended with some recreational activities posted by the small Nature Center near the showers.

I am taking away one star as the hills, and the distance between sites and bathrooms and the poor maps makes it hard to understand how to book and plan for visiting this state forest. But overall a...

I biked to Laurel Lake today June 20, 2022, from Greenfield and back, and had only half an hour left to swim before they closed down the facilities by 6:30 pm. It's a really lovely lake, very clean and clear. Surprisingly few people were there. It's of course easier to get there by car, but then I guess you have to pay at least for parking. Or you can camp for only $17 a day. The only problem with biking there from Greenfield is that you may have to use at least a few miles of Rt 2, and that really sucks, and it feels quite unsafe, since near Erving it has not even a break down line. An alternative path south of the Millers River (on the other side as Rt 2) that I found on Google maps (Mormon Hollow Rd and Stone Cut Off Rd) didn't get me all the way to Erving. Stone Cut Off Rd (what a name!) was no good for my touring bike, and finally the path ended signed as private property; and the signs looked kind of...

Sadly, I feel like over the past couple years, the overall experience at mass state park campgrounds has steadily declined. The Mass state park system has taken a weird turn where they don’t raise the prices from a ridiculously low price of 17$ to something like 25$ for state residents. This would allow them to hire more staff at the campgrounds providing more oversight and less riff raff in the parks. I feel like dcr has some beautiful treasures for parks and grounds and it appears they just kinda don’t care about them anymore. I will never stay at mass state park again after what my daughter and I experienced last fall and summer. Too many waaaay better choices for an extra hours worth of driving. If you’re a family and you think you want to camp at one of these places, please...