Cottonwood Campground — Hotel in Ontario

We camped here for 2 nights (June 26-28) and while we had an overall decent time, there are things I wish I knew before booking and going through with the reservation.

Pros include the beach at Long Point PP: beautiful, warm sand, clean water and walkable from many of the campsites. The comfort station is clean, the campsite we had (274) was spacious and the staff were friendly. The road to the campgrounds has little shops where you can stop for groceries, camp necessities, ice cream and lunch such as burgers and fries. We tried the perch fish and chips and they were excellent!

Now for the cons. There was a complete fire ban while we were there so we could not have an open flame of any kind. Imagine camping with no camp fire! We couldn’t even light our citronella candles! The bugs took advantage of this of course and we ended up donating a lot of our blood to the mosquitoes. Luckily we had our propane stoves to cook our food but people who camp and only use the fire to cook their meals were outta luck.

We didn’t know this, but Cottonwood Campgrounds is called “cottonwood” for a reason. This is due to the huge and plentiful cottonwood trees that scatter the grounds shedding cotton and carrying/spreading it everywhere. Look up cottonwood tree and you’ll see what I’m talking about; it was like pillow fluff but times a million. These things got into everything: our tent, shoes, car, hair, clothes, cooler and food! As soon as the wind blew, our campsite looked like a winter wonderland and it was so annoying. I imagine this was the reason for the fire ban. My understanding is that these trees only shed for a few weeks before all the cotton is gone, so had we known this ahead of time, we wouldn’t have booked it for the dates we did. I feel like this info should really be posted on Long Point’s website so I would’ve understood and had more knowledge about this particular campground. We wanna give Long Point another try to redeem our experience, so we will hopefully book again, (obviously on different days) and I hope to update this...

Nice place for some camping. Some sites are not in a great location - close to road, comfort station, pretty small, or not much privacy, but overall pretty good. Most are very sandy. I brought special sand tent pegs for our tarp. Watch out for cottonwood blossoms in the spring, they are very sticky and will stick to your tent and feet. Very easy access to the water for beach time, beach not crowded, and some of the vault toilets have been update decently. Seems to be lots of kiteboarders who use the public beach access nearby. Seems to be very children friendly (take that as you will), especially with the camping spots near the play structure, swings and teeter totters. Last but not least, lots of birds in the spring! Access to this spot is by scanning a bar code given to you when you check in. You have to drive past it to the Long Point Gate/Office. By the way if you don't know what cottonwood is, it's a tree that has extremely sticky buds that fall off in the spring. They're everywhere here. They will mess up your tent, RV, vehicle. Even the bottom of my feet had black sticky residue thats hard to get off from walking barefoot. I'm still trying to get sticky spots off my car a month later from the Cottonwood. It would be good if the park had some awareness information...

Wonderful park, had site 263, beach acces from site was able to have hammock overhang the cliff which was very relaxing. Sites were close but far enough away, helped that all campers were respectful. Comfort stations were well kept and the newer showers were nice. I didn't expect the beach to be as nice as it was, clean waters and sand. The beach wasn't crowded especially in the campground section. The birds were spectacular, so many different species, had the chance to visit the observatory in between the two parks. They were banding various species and were knowledgeable and very happy to answer any questions. The staff seemed very happy. I have no complaints about this park, we will...