Golden Pines RV Resort & Campground

Bad Management

This campground has the potential to be great, but bad management and a poor vision for the campground is keeping it from being anything special. The owner spends the majority of time out of town and leaves the day-to-day operation to a manager, who rarely gets off his butt and does any work.

I was there for four days, and not once did the bathrooms ever get cleaned. There was one set of bathrooms that were absolutely disgusting. They had showers, but there is no telling if you would have actually come out cleaner if you used them.

I arrived in the mid afternoon and nobody was at the registration building to check me in. I finally ran down a young kid they have hired to help out, and he found out where I was supposed to be camping. This was the theme of the week.

When I finally found my spot, I was crammed into a small spot, surrounded by year-round campers. It had more of a feeling of downtown Manhattan than the Sierra Mountains.

The surrounding areas and towns were great, but the campground really was not as advertised on the web. The pool was mercy and dirty. The facilities were dirty. If you decided to take a walk, you were likely to find a garbage dump at each end of the campground.

In closing, the campground has a lot of potential, but the owner is more concerned about year-round campers than weekly and daily campers. He probably rakes in about $25,000 a month on the 30-or-so, year-round campers and appears to have no desire to clean things up for the rest. If he would spread things out and give the campers more space, he would have a much more desirable campground, but I don't think this is his goal. He is maximizing his profits and providing a space for older folks that have no where else to park their RV. The area has no other campgrounds with full hookups and he has the corner on the market.

Stay Away!