Arbutus Lake State Forest Campground

Convenient location from Traverse City with a nice swimming beach. Some sites are very connected with each other without much vegetation between them, but there are some walk-in sites that have some privacy with a view of the lake. Some of these sites don't have parking immediately next to the stairs so a little walk is needed to get your gear from the car if you took one of those. It was fairly busy compared to some other state forest around the area. My site had a lot of acorns on the ground and in the fall season acorns kept dropping on my tent at night, but otherwise I enjoyed my stay there.

Nice little self serve campground. Clean and quiet. 15 minutes from traverse city

Loved this campground, disappointed to see how much trash was laying around though. We really cleaned up around our site,but wished others would do the same and not use this wonderful forest as a trashcan. Other than that, very peaceful and quiet when party people weren't there. Definitely want to go again!

Nice beach. It's pretty clean, and water is decently warm. We're only a few decent sized sites that were level. So, if you have an RV or larger party, I'd just expect that you won't be able to get a site on a holiday/busy weekend. There's only 10-15 sites, maybe a few more, but theres not many at all. The rest of the sites are decent but only accessible to camp with a tent. About half of them require you to walk down/up steps to even access the site. However, if you don't wanna be treated like you're basically incompetent of understanding english and don't enjoy being harassed by the DNR for days in a row, I'd just go someplace else. We stayed for 14 days. 4 days in a row, they came to "remind" us that I was only allowed to camp there for 15 days. Even after making it more then clear to them that I understood them and planned to be gone before then anyways. Then also even came to ask me if we were leaving when we were literally in the process of packing up our things, as if they couldn't tell that we were taking everything down and into our vehicle to leave. They told us that it was because "other people need a chance to be able to use the campground" but the site we were on was nothing but roots and on a hill. So truthfully don't know who'd even wanna use that site when all the other ones were unoccupied the entire 2 weeks. There were 3 sites occupied at most the entire 2 weeks we camped there. There were also people there even longer than us, who were still there when we left. I never once seen the DNR say a single thing to them about needing to leave. Aside from that though on a more positive note, we had a great time playing at the beach, in the woods, and creating memories while camping there.

There was trash around my site which I picked up. The fire pit was filled to the brim with ashes. Otherwise, it was a pleasant location.