Maine’s biggest lake is Moosehead Lake. Forty miles long and ten miles wide, it covers nearly 118 square miles and offers 400 miles of shoreline, some of the loveliest of which is preserved at Lily Bay State Park. This park, on the eastern arm of the lake, offers rustic camping along with boat access to the lake and its beautiful islands. The park also features a scenic beach alongside a children’s playground and so earns its place as an outstanding family destination (provided one is careful about boating in the wind — this is the only lake I’ve ever paddled where the waves came at us from all directions! And on a lake this big, even powerboats can be overcome by the waves, not to mention small paddlecraft! If you paddle here, listen to the weather forecasts and watch the wind — whitecaps are serious business on this lake and if you see them, paddle another day!).

Sadly, our visit coincided with dreary weather and so we decided not to bring the boats, which would in any case have been a challenge since it would require loading them on top of the truck. I have the hardware to do it but have never dared to give it a try, and the prospect of going to all that extra trouble when there was a good chance we’d be rained out anyway, made the decision easy.

There are two loops of campsites at Lily Bay State Park: Dunn Point and Rowell Cove. All are rustic and without RV hookups (so this is absolutely a boondocking destination), although there are excellent bathhouses with free showers, and there is a dump site for RVs as well. Our site is in the Dunn Point loop; of interest here is the remarkable number of blowdowns and shattered tree stumps, offering mute yet eloquent testimony to the power of whatever storm did such damage. In fact, many of the hiking trails at Lily Bay were closed during our stay due to blowdowns, and shattered trees border every site in the loop.

I am proud of the tarp rigging I accomplished here, knowing that we would want a campfire, and knowing also that I had no intention of trying to enjoy a campfire (and s’mores!) in the pouring rain. And the tarp, being strategically placed over the campfire, not only keeps the rain off and the wood dry, it also captures the wood smoke which drives away the mosquitoes. Mid-June in northern Maine is prime mosquito season, and they are everywhere here — we cannot enter or exit the RV without admitting several. Cool trick: a cordless electric, hand-held vacuum sucks them right up without you having to mash them individually and then clean up the mess!

Here are some views of the beach:

This stand of trees at the end of the beach offers some intriguing exposed roots:

Here is a view of the playground. At the time of our visit, Bambi was there shooting hoops as well:

The pine trees on the beach were displaying some kind of flower (?) which I had never seen. Pine cones, I recognize — but what is that tall spike in the middle?

Given the gloomy weather and intermittent rain, grandson Jaxon was the only denizen of the beach on the day of our visit; but he was in the water despite the 59-degree air temperature, and water which could not have been much warmer.

One could easily spend a week or more at Lily Bay State Park. Eight miles away is Greenville, a cute village with every kind of amenity for the Moosehead Lake visitor including the 1914 steamboat Katahdin, offering a variety of daily tours; and the lake itself offers hundreds of miles of shoreline to explore, world-class fishing for landlocked salmon, brook trout and togue — and Mount Kineo, with its 700-foot cliffs dropping straight into the water. Lily Bay State Park is one of Maine’s great treasures and is most definitely worth a summer visit!