Thursday, May 17, 2018

Gunter Hill COE Campground - Alabama (April 2018)

The email we received said that some members of the Alabama WBCCI Unit were planning to stop over at Gunter Hill Corps of Engineers Campground while in route to the Unit's annual rally. We enjoyed our previous camping experiences in Gunter Hill, so we decided to meet our friends there in what they were calling a rolling rally. 

Similar to most Corps of Engineers campgrounds we have seen, Gunter Hill is a beautiful park with large camping sites in its two loops. We stayed in the Antioch loop during our first visit to this park. It appears to be the older loop with many trees throughout the site. It also has some excellent views of Catoma Creek, the large body of water that borders the campground. The drawback to this loop is that it only has water and electrical connections. That is probably why it doesn’t fill as quickly as the Catoma loop.

View of the creek

The Catoma loop adds sewer connections to the standard water and electric connections. There are fewer trees in the Catoma loop and that may be why the sites appear to be larger.

Rosie parked in Gunter Hill Campground

After setting up in our Catoma loop site, we noticed that the area around the water connection was starting to flood. A quick check of our hose connections confirmed that they were tight and that meant that the problem was coming from the park's spigot.

A quick call to the camp host suggested a possible cure. The water spigots in this park have weep holes to prevent them from freezing during the winter. If you fail to completely open the water valve, water can leak out of the weep hole. When I checked, the camp host was correct in that the water spigot wasn’t fully on and making that simple adjustment fixed the problem. 

About half-a-dozen Airstream trailers showed up for the night. We enjoyed meeting those members of the WBCCI's Alabama Unit. 

Here are some specifics about this campground:
  • Our site had 20, 30 and 50 amp electrical service 
  • Our site had a water connection with 46 pounds of pressure 
  • Our site had a sewer connection 
  • There are two dump stations in this park, one for each loop
  • Sites in the Catoma loop have concrete pads
  • Sites in the Antioch loop are dirt 
  • Our site in the Catoma loop was level
  • There were two bathhouses in the Catoma loop. Both were modern, well maintained and clean
  • The park does not provide WiFi service 
  • AT&T provided marginal 4G voice and data service over our campsite 
  • We were able to watch ABC, CBS, FOX, PBS and NBC using Rosie’s TV antenna. (Rosie is our 25 foot Airstream trailer.) We also received digital channels Antenna, Buzz, Escape, Get, Grit, H&I, ME, Movies and THiS 
  • This is a pet friendly park 
We noticed something this time that we didn’t have to deal with before while camping in Gunter Hill. We caught a whiff of a bad smell as we we setting up Rosie. We couldn’t decide if we were smelling sewage or if there was a dead animal in the woods near Rosie. Our camp host said we were in the section of the campground that when conditions were right the wind carried the smell from the paper mill across the creek. Conditions must have been right because we smelled the mill at our site and didn’t smell it about two sites away.

Another view of the creek

A walking trail in the park

We hope the wind will be coming from a different direction the next time we camp in this park. 

Rosie's site in Gunter Hill

Gunter Hill COE Campground


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