Chicot State Park — Hotel in Ville Platte

I was born and raised in Louisiana. I have always wanted to visit and fish this park. So this weekend, my wife's family had a gathering in ville platte. So some of the family traveled from Baton Rouge louisiana and Beaumont, Texas, and decided to stay here instead of a hotel. We all wanted to enjoy the outdoors fishing,campfires, and trails, all meet our expectations. Now, the reason for the two stars. I really want to show my native state off to some of the family who had not fished or started a campfire before. I am not a pro, but I can do it. We rented lodges 1 and 3, which was great because no one was in #2, so we had the whole area for the family. Now, let's talk about the lodges. I know we were in the woods, and we should expect some things like bees,snakes,alligators, and worms outside. But we should not have had to deal with the things we had to deal with . There were roaches in the kitchen cabinets, bedrooms, and bathrooms to the point we had to go out and purchase roach spray . The floors and the dishes were dirty. Spider webs were in the corner of the bedrooms in #3. The pillows were all strained up, and towels and the pillow cases were dingy. Lodge #1 had one bed made, but it looked like someone had laid crossed it and stained. So that prompted the purchase of sheets. This trip was a letdown for the family. I am so sorry that I did not take pictures. I would like to say thank you to the park ranger who was on duty the evening of 8-21-24 who did all he could to assist my uncle when his trailer broke...

This is a great trail for hiking and backpacking! My girlfriend and I got to the park and checked in at the office. The lady in the office was helpful and helped us choose the primitive site that would best suit our backpacking plan. We ended up choosing Campsite 4 and headed to the Walker Branch Trailhead. The trail was slick at some spots from it raining earlier that day but that was expected. It took around 45 minutes to hike to Campsite 4 with a few breaks. The trail was well marked and maintained with signs to each campsite. The campsite itself was clean with a fire pit and grill. The next day we hiked back to the car and drove to the office to rent a canoe for the day. A different lady this time gave us paddles and life jackets and told us how to get to the boat launch where we could get the canoe itself. We ended up canoeing all the way to our campsite along a well marked canoe path often close to the bank, through and under hundreds of beautiful cypress trees. When we arrived at the campsite we packed up, paddled back to the car, returned the canoe and we were on our way. Seeing all of the wildlife was perhaps the best part of the trip. We saw a rabbit, an alligator, a deer, a few turtles, tons of frogs, egrets, a hawk, two armadillos and even a hog. All in all this park was great and we will be...

It's a pretty park, a great place to go kayaking because of all the inlets and patches of cypress to paddle through. But if you are looking for a quiet and peaceful campground, only come in the middle of the week. Maybe it has gotten this bad since Covid started. We camped here one weekend and it was horrible. Our neighbors were loud, foul-mouthed, and stayed up late. They knew they were making too much noise because we even heard one say "it's their fault they are in a tent camper" referring to us. There was a loud group partying a few sites over and drunk guys were urinating at the treeline for anyone to see. There was a huge birthday party in a different loop and we could hear them whooping and yelling until late at night. The next day we talked to an older couple who were camping on that loop and they said it was terrible. We also heard loud music playing from another part of the park until around 1am. There was no rule-enforcment at all from what we could see. It's unlikely we will be camping here again any time soon, which is a shame considering the lake itself is such a nice place...