Hidden Lake Campground and Resort

We stayed at Hidden Lake Campground and Resort in Hot Springs, South Dakota. (Campground Reviews listing.)

A campground with a nice mini lake (a large pond, really).

Dates:

Check in: 2023-09-17
Check out: 2023-09-24
7 nights

Weather:

Mostly sunny, some drizzle
High temps ranging between 60-83°F, lows around 50-59°F
Negligible wind most days, gusts up to 33 MPH one day

Noise:

Occasional road noise
No train noise
Negligible neighbor noise

Site:

#9, pull-through, gravel
Didn’t need to disconnect toad; parked behind coach
Fairly level
Gravel driveway about 83 feet long by about 10 feet wide
Grass on passenger side about 10 feet wide
Grass between driver side and next site about 30 feet wide
No trees on these sites, some on other sites
Picnic table, fire pit
Not very clean site; several small bits of trash

Utilities:

50 amp power, inconveniently located at the rear of the site
57 PSI water, inconveniently located at the rear of the site
Good sewer connection, somewhat conveniently located (2 10-foot pipes needed)

Internet (in usage priority order):

T-Mobile: 97-107 Mbps down, 21 Mbps up, 55 ms ping
AT&T: 130 Mbps down, 16-25 Mbps up, 47-81 ms ping
Verizon: 17-22 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up, 37 ms ping
Starlink: not used
Campground Wi-Fi: none (an “unplugged” campground)

Amenities:

Lake with swimming and board rental
Garbage bins
Package delivery to office

Our review on Campground Reviews:

Lovely pond, close to Wind Cave NP

This is a nice family-run park in the southern Black Hills and is close to everything you’d want to do there. The town of Hot Springs is cute and has everything you could want; just be sure to heed the detour advice the campground sends you, and don’t try to drive your rig down the main street. There is a bit of a hill to get up to the campground, with a sharp turn at the top. It’s not a big deal, but be careful of oncoming traffic.

We had a pull-through site, which was long enough for our rig and tow vehicle but pretty narrow. The “missing” site between us and the next one on the driver’s side was useful as there is still a power pedestal that we had to hook up to after a town-wide power cut did something to ours. I would’ve liked one of the back-in sites, but they’re too short for a 40′ motorhome. We camped at Hidden Lake Campground and Resort in a Motorhome.

The campground map:

Map

An intereactive map:

Our site:

Our site

The power and water were at the rear of the site, rather inconvenient:

Utilities

There were wild rabbits that liked to hang out around our site:

Rabbits

Rabbit

And some wild turkeys in the campground:

Turkeys

After visiting the Wind Cave National Park, 15 minutes north of the campground, we added its sticker to our coach:

Adding Wind Cave National Park sticker

National Park stickers

The town had a power cut; it took us a while to notice; we just noticed when it was getting warm, and our ACs weren’t coming on (most other stuff runs fine on batteries):

Power cut

Unfortunately, our solar system was not working either — but good thing we noticed now, since we’ll be without hookups for 10 days soon, when we attend the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. So I’ll fix it before then (and yes, I’ll have a blog post about that soon):

Solar not working

When the power came back on several hours later, my Power Watchdog reported that the power pedestal had a fault, under voltage on line 2 (only 44 volts):

Power Watchdog fault

Fortunately, there was a spare power pedestal next to our site, where there used to be a site, but now has trees (presumably because it was super narrow). So I plugged in to that one:

Power plugged into neighboring ex-site