Limekiln State Park — Attraction in King City

SEPTEMBER 2022 REVIEW

PROS: Fantastic beach (no swimming!) Creek runs through campground to beach. Close to Big Sur sight-seeing.

CONS: NOT a California state park... (leased out to private company). So, the restrooms are always NOT clean, (even after they are "cleaned"), likely because the three 20-somethings in charge of running the park aren't trained in customary sanitization of showers/restrooms, as REAL state park custodians are! Ew! Gross bathrooms/showers. (And the TP was always put on backward.) There's a maintainance building right in the middle of the campground--near the park entrance and sites 7-15--that runs a generator from early morning 'til dusk, the noise from which disrupts nearby campers' quiet enjoyment of nature: the sound of the creek, the sound of the crashing waves. In fact, one morning an employee was power washing his truck for 2 or 3 hours, and the power washer machine was making even more noise on top of the noise from the generator. (Maybe he should have been cleaning the bathrooms with a bleach solution and scrubbing the toilets with Ajax instead of detailing his truck!) The racoons ate quite a bit of our food: all the sausages, eggs, peanuts, raisins, & avocados. They know how to unzip zippers and lift the lids off coolers. And the squirrels chewed holes into our soft-shell coolers. Our neighbors had the same experiences. One guy left a loaf of bread in his car, and a raccoon or squirrel climbed in through an open window and took it. Also, the raccoons and squirrels left daily, dirty tracks all over our picnic table, rugs, coolers, and other tables. One morning, I was eating breakfast, and a squirrel came right up to the bowl--on the tablecloth--and started eating my cereal. When I shooed it away, it came right back! Campers who have paid to camp must move cones out of the way each time they come and go. It's a hassle and unnecessary. AGAIN... THIS IS NOT A CALIFORNIA...

Limekiln State Park is amazing. Situated between the redwoods of the central coast and the ocean, it is an amazingly beautiful camp site. There are two main types of camp, ocean and woods. We stayed in the ocean sites at space 10 under the shade of some beautiful old California live oak trees (which were great for hanging hammocks). It's one of the most unique places I've ever camped because there's both a steam running behind the space and the ocean waves only a small distance away. I've been lulled to sleep by both before, but never at the same time. While camping here the in the summer is likely challenging as finding any available space without book 6 months in advance is nearly impossible, winter camping is much easier and there were open empty sites around us each night. If you have a big camper this may not be the best place for you. We stayed in our tent trailer which is about 16' when towing. Anything later than 20' and your camping space options will be pretty limited. If you are tent camping it's wide open. And if you have to have a boat that can get you there I think they have space for people who sail to the campground. There are sites to see to the North, South and directly out of the camp itself, though it was closed for trail repairs when we were there. I would highly recommend spending a few nights. We were there for five days and I'm ready to go back. I'm including some pictures from the camp site. Things to note, very few sites have electric or water hook ups, so be prepared with your own power, make sure to secure your food at night, there are plenty of raccoons and other small animals all too happy to raid things while you are sleeping. They do have really hot...

This is a great location to go camping during the summer. We visited in late August and we couldn't have asked for better weather.

The hiking trails are beautiful. The go through the woods so there's plenty of shade from the trees. It's a very comfortable walk that can be done fairly easily by young children and even more elderly hikers. There only three trails in the park. One leads to the lime kilns and another leads to a small waterfall. The trails are really short; you can hike all of them in 2-3 hours.

We had a beachside campsite, so we always had a great view of the ocean. It got pretty windy in the afternoon but calmed down at night. My biggest problem with the campsite was that the ground was too hard to nail down our tents. We had to grab rocks to weigh down the corners of our tent.

The facilities of the campsites are good too. The restrooms were pretty clean and had plenty of toilet paper. There are showers that cost a quarter for 2 minutes. One thing I loved about Limekiln was the super friendly park rangers. We had a huge group and the checkin lady was really helpful about finding us campsites close together. She also regularly checked up on us to see how things were going.

I definitely recommend this campsite if you're looking to visit the...