Newaygo State Park: vault toilets, high banks, and a four-thousand-acre pond

The “pond” at Newaygo State Park is a stretch of the Muskegon River six miles long and roughly 4,000 acres wide, held back behind Hardy Dam. Calling that a pond is the kind of West Michigan understatement that tells you something about the place. The park sits on its south shore in Big Prairie Township, 400 acres of oak and pine on high banks, and many of the campsites look out over the water through the trees from a comfortable height above it.

This is a rustic park, and the word earns its keep here. No electric hookups, no flush toilets, no showers — vault toilets, drinking water, and quiet. The roughly 99 sites are spread across two loops and set far enough apart that you’re not listening to your neighbor’s radio. There’s a boat launch, so people haul in kayaks, canoes, and fishing boats and disappear onto the reservoir for the day.

The land has an unusual landlord: the state leases it from Consumers Energy, the utility that built Hardy Dam back in the 1930s and still owns the impoundment. Michigan has run the campground as a park since the 1960s, and the arrangement is why a public park exists on a private power company’s reservoir at all.

What you get for the trade-off — bring your own everything, leave the resort amenities at home — is a calm woodsy camp on a big inland lake without the price or the crowds of a full-service place. It suits tent campers and small trailers, and the county parks and trails ringing Hardy Dam Pond give you somewhere to wander once the tent’s up.