Rain Puts A Damper On Holiday Camping

Thursday, June 28th 2007, 5:00 pm

By: News On 6

Lots of you are thinking about going camping for the Fourth of July, but you might be having second thoughts with all the rain. The News On 6â€™s Steve Berg reports on how Oklahoma campsites are doing following all this precipitation.

Are gray skies are gonna clear up? Ed Gray doesn't think so.

"I'll bet we had, since we've been here, about four, five inches of rain. Monday it just poured down right here," Lake Keystone camper Ed Gray said.

Gray and his wife Ellen have been making the drive to Oklahoma from Amarillo, Texas for the past 24 years to visit family, and theyâ€™ve been camping at Lake Keystone since Saturday.

"When we got here the lake was up. All that was covered down there with the wood on the roads and over here, this section over here was covered too. Yeah, it was higher, a lot higher," said Gray.

At Keystone there's a sure sign the water has been up high. Driftwood has been piled up all the way across the road. So the water has gone down a little bit, but not quite enough. The state park office in Oklahoma City told us only Lake Texhoma was affected, but we found several campsites that were blocked off at Keystone, and Gray says the electricity to those sites is shut off.

"So they're not going to turn it on or open it up right yet,â€ Gray said. â€œI don't know how much rain they're expecting right here, but it's a bunch."

The best advice is probably to call ahead to your specific destination, because as Gray pointed out, just at Keystone the situation is changing day-to-day. Even though he's spent a little more time under the canopy than usual, for the most part, he's a happy camper.

"Just beautiful this year,â€ Gray said. â€œI can see why they're calling it Green Country this year."

For the latest conditions at Oklahoma parks visit the Oklahoma Parks website,www.oklahomaparks.com. For lake information visit the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers website, corpslakes.usace.army.mil

Watch the video: Soggy Campgrounds