5 Best Primitive Horse Campgrounds

Campsite at Berryman Campground

This list of campgrounds is a list of primitive only campgrounds.  To me, this means there is no electric hookups at all.  These 5 trails made this list because, even though they have no electric hookups, they still offer other facilities that help make your camping trip a comfortable experience.  These are listed in alphabetical order, not best-to-worst order.  They're all about equal in my mind because they are all just different enough that it's hard to judge one as being better than the other, although Smithville lake slightly noses out the others because of the laundry and shower facilities available.

1. Berryman Trail - St. Louis Area - Mark Twain National Forest
    This trail has two campgrounds and the one I'm talking about is Berryman Campground, not the Brazil Creek Campground.  Berryman Campground has nice outhouses (as nice as an outhouse can get anyway), highline posts, picnic tables, fire rings, concrete parking pads, a pavilion, and a lantern hook.

2. Cedar Creek Trail - Central Area - Mark Twain National Forest
     This trail has all the same facilities as listed above, but also include a BBQ pit.  The parking pads aren't concrete, they're gravel, but they are well packed and more than long enough.  If it hasn't changed since last time I was here, this had the best outhouse because it actually had a strong air freshener of some kind in it.  It was the best smelling outhouse I had ever been in.  LOL  Small campground compared to the others though, this one only has 8 campsites.

3. Honey Creek - N.W. Area - Missouri Dept. of Conservation
     This campground is not as nice as the Mark Twain National Forest campgrounds, but it's much better than the average campground that MDC usually has.  It includes highline posts, hitching rails, an outhouse, and a few picnic tables. 

4. Lead Mine - S.W. Area - Missouri Dept. of Conservation
     Again, this campground isn't as nice as Mark Twain, but it is the best campground that MDC has to offer.  It is a large campground with room for 25 horsetrailers.  The parking pads are well packed and long.  There is a nice outhouse and they used to have a cistern for water, but last time I was there, someone had broken it.

5. Smithville Lake - N. W. Area - U.S. Army Corp of Engineers
     This is a very large campground with 90 campsites.  This is probably the best primitive campground overall because in addition to providing outhouses, picnic tables, fire rings, and trash cans, there is also laundry and shower facilities available here.