Bay Campground - South Manitou Island
1Heads uppark alert
- Right now
- Nobody has saidNo season, no closure, no bookings to read
- Sites
- 2825 of them walk-up
The place
the agency’s own description · what’s there
In the agency’s own words
The Bay Campground is the closest campground to the dock. Bring water filtration equipment because there is no source of purified drinking water. There are 25 individual sites and 3 group sites.
Facilities
- Toilets
- Vault Toilets - year round
- Drinking water
- None, bring your own
Around the campground
- On the water
- Coast
- Night sky · 105th darkest of 192 in MI
- Bortle 2
Some sites book, the rest walk up
recreation.gov publishes no availability for a campground you can’t reserve, so there’s no thirty-night reading to draw here. The season bar above is what the agency does publish.
We make nothing when you book. The link goes straight to the government.
Every line of the receipt · 11
What you actually pay
Who keeps the booking fee
The agency’s own policy text says the reservation fee and the cancellation processing fee are “retained by the reservation service contractor”, and that a campground concessionaire will decline to refund them because “they did not receive these fees”. Recreation.gov is run under contract by Booz Allen Hamilton. What share of your booking fee the contractor keeps isn’t published in any federal dataset we can read, so we print no number for it. Our reporting on the contract →
How we know this receipt · 4
record Aug 24, 2026 · How we know all this
Getting there
the map and the coordinate · the phone number
Where it is
South Manitou Group Campground0.6 mi
Weather Station Campground - South Manitou IslandSleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore · 1.1 mi
Popple Campground - South Manitou IslandSleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore · 2.0 mi
D.H. Day Group CampgroundSleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore · 9.3 mi
D.H. Day CampgroundSleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore · 9.3 mi
Village Campground - North Manitou IslandSleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore · 9.7 miThe weather
the next four days · the thirty-year normal
Next four days, and the thirty-year normal
Forecast
NWS forecast for Glen Arbor, MI
Typical weather
Typical October night 40°F, day 58°F.
Coldest month of the year: typical February night 16°F, below freezing. Bring a bag rated colder than that, and expect ice in the water bottle.
Daily high and lowDays with 0.10 in or more
A normal is the 1991-2020 average for the month, not a forecast: about half of all Julys are colder than the July line. The seven-day forecast above answers the other question.
The land, and who answers for it
who answers for it
Who answers for this land
Bay Campground - South Manitou Island is in Michigan’s 1st congressional district. Its representative, Jack Bergman (R), votes on the laws that decide what happens to this land. Public-lands grade so far: F. See every public-lands vote →