Little Pee Dee State Park

We arrived on Thursday afternoon, May 8, 2025 around 4pm (yeah, you guessed that one!).  We had reservations and I found out that if you already have reservations (paid in full) you can proceed directly to your campsite without stopping at the park office.  I also noticed that there was not someone at the park office most of the time - a few hours a day someone is there.

Park details

Little Pee Dee State Park is located at 1298 State Park Rd, Dillon, South Carolina 29536.

Phone Number: (843) 774-8872

Lake Norton is 54 acres and located within this park

NOTE: This park is remote and the nearest town is about 20-30 minutes

Campground details

• Water/Electric (has dump station); NOTE: Some of the campsites do have septic hookups, but not those along the lake side.  Some have water only (no electric or septic).  I have included a map at the bottom of this blog post
• 30amp electric (I can’t confirm whether it has 50amp)
• Picnic table, Fire ring
• Back in sites
• Shade/sand sites
• Playground
• Bathrooms/showers
• Checkin is 2pm
• Checkout is before 12pm noon
• Quiet hours are 10pm till 7am

Another note, in reviewing the overall list of state parks within South Carolina - it does not appear that ANY of the South Carolina state parks provide laundry facilities - so we learned to plan accordingly.

Here the dogs hang out while we set up camp (I think they have learned the drill now).

Abby (black/white), Rue (green harness), Ollie (red harness)

We stayed in campsite #9 - a beautiful lake front campsite.  There are steps at the back of the campsite that lead down to the lake edge.  Our approximate travel to this state park was 226 miles (from Skidaway Island State Park).

Wildlife Encountered

• Birds
• Turtles
• Frogs (heard them, never saw them)
• Snake (just 1 in the water by spillway)
• squirrels

Walking along the spillway and in day use area

In reading the various pieces of information that I was able to find on this park, they mentioned that going to see the dam was a 'big thing' so that was one of the first things that we walked over to.  It is located in the day use area a short drive or walk from the campground (as time when on I found shorter routes walking with the dogs to get to the day use area).

They do start out small!  This one was so small it reminded me of the ones that you find in the pet stores.

The walk area across the spillway - with the lake on the left and 'forest' on the right.  When we got to the other side, it didn't look like much of a trail so we turned around and came back to the dam area.  Here we spotted a bird that we started watching, little fish trying to get back up the spillway and then eventually an unexpected animal while I was photographing a bird.

See it?  I was a little surprised as I was doing a camera review of the photograph (of a bird!) to see that there was something else that my camera caught.  Yep, this is the only snake we saw for the couple of days that we visited.

Later on, the dogs did notice a snake skin along the road - so they are here but the park staff indicated that they don't really have alligators or many snakes.  This one looked to be a non poisonous water snake.

Trails

The park has two official trails - the Beaver Pond Trail and the Longleaf Pine Trail.  I asked if there was a pond on the Beaver Pond trail and was told that a long time ago there was.  However, it has since dried up and no longer exists.  Both trails are pretty easy and neither are extremely long.  There are unofficial trails - walking the area above the spillway and walking from the campground over to the day use area to get to the dock and lakeside.

Sunrise on the lake

Maps

Little Pee Dee State Park trail map.  Note that Beaver Pond Trail is listed as 1.5 miles - it does at one point cross the main road and that's about where we stopped on this trail.

This is the campground map.  As I mentioned, we stayed in campsite #9.  The camp host mentioned that campsite #8 is the most popular and it's a very nice site!  We enjoyed our site too, but it was a little more difficult to get backed into and if you have a longer rig, I suspect that it could be challenging.  The view of the lake was very nice from site #9 and listening to all the frogs as they started up their chorus was pretty cool.  Although we were on the lake, we didn't have any alligator sightings.  The park ranger, Amy, said they did not know for sure, but they didn't think at this time there were any in the lake (or at least not this part of the lake).  We didn't allow our dogs to go do to the lake edge.

We enjoyed our stay at this park.  It does have some possibilities of having dark skies for star gazing or night photography.  We didn't attempt because we had a downpour the first night that we camped here (so glad I wasn't in a tent!).  The second night the sky wasn't clear, so that eliminated it as well.

To view more photographs at this park, click on this link: https://www.vpshoots.com/LittlePeeDee
 

Our next stop is Virginia Beach.  That blog post will be coming soon.