Lake Lavielle – Site 6 – Hayes Point

This is a spacious point site located where the Crow River exits Lavielle.  To start with, this is a big site. Located at the tip of a point (Hayes Point, to be precise), the site is essentially a large clearing focused on a large fire pit and not much else. The site proper is slightly sloped, but completely free of obstructions and not slanted enough that you’d be uncomfortable pitching a tent. And you can pitch a lot of tents. You could easily get three tents up here with room to spare. On top of all that, the fire pit is quite nice!

The canoe landing is a lovely little rock beach facing out to the Crow River. It’s a decent sized hike to get up from the water to the site proper, but the swimming looks like it would be very good from this spot and loading/unloading would be easy.

Easy canoe landing, good swimming and a big site? So far, so good, right?

Right, but there are some drawbacks too. 

First off, the size of the site makes you think it’d be a great spot for a large group, but maybe not ideal if that large group included children or particularly careless dogs. The south side of the site is fairly high above the water (like 20 feet), and drops off fairly quickly. Someone not paying attention (or stumbling out into the darkness to take a midnight leak) could find themselves on a very quick trip south.

The other main drawback to this site is that it’s very enclosed. The site is surrounded on all sides by trees, meaning your view out to the water is obstructed. You can always walk down the (steep) path to the water’s edge to get a view, but if you’re hoping to see something besides trees from the site’s interior, you’re out of luck.

With those two caveats in mind, I’d say this is a decent option. It would be particularly appealing for a shoulder season trip where that growth around the site would be a wind cutting feature, not a bug.