Black House Mountain Campground

Black House Mountain Campground in Jamestown, Tennessee, is a camping destination in Fentress County with easy access to Pogue Creek Canyon State Natural Area, Pickett State Park, and the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area — a campground in the Cumberland Plateau's most remote and most spectacular canyon landscape, where the Big South Fork's deep sandstone gorges, the Pogue Creek Canyon's carved slot canyons, and the Pickett State Park's natural arches and bridges give guests the most concentrated sandstone canyon and rock formation landscape accessible from a single campground in the Tennessee Cumberland Plateau. Jamestown's Fentress County position on TN-28, 50 miles north of Cookeville, gives the campground the specific Cumberland Plateau character of a gateway town to the Big South Fork's wilderness river canyon in a county whose rural Tennessee heritage and the Scott State Forest's timber country give the campground the remote, forested character of the upper Cumberland Plateau's least-developed section. RV sites and tent camping with the practical Jamestown area campground infrastructure give Black House Mountain the Cumberland Plateau base for the Big South Fork, Pickett, and Pogue Creek outdoor recreation corridor — the campground's position in Fentress County gives guests the geographic centrality to the three state and federal conservation units that give the upper Cumberland Plateau its specific outdoor recreation identity in a landscape that the Tennessee State Parks system and the National Park Service jointly administer as the most significant sandstone canyon and rock formation corridor in the state. Pets are welcome. Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, 20 miles northwest of Jamestown in Scott and McCreary Counties, Tennessee, and Whitley County, Kentucky, protects 125,000 acres of the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River's sandstone gorge landscape — a National Park Service unit whose Blue Heron mining community's preserved coal tipple and the Kentucky side's overlook above the gorge's 400-foot sandstone walls give the recreation area the industrial and geological heritage combination that the Cumberland Plateau's coal mining and sandstone canyon history specifically created. The park's equestrian trail system, the whitewater paddling in the river's Class III-IV gorge sections, and the Rock Creek and No Business Creek backcountry give the Big South Fork the multi-use recreation depth of a nationally significant river recreation area. Pogue Creek Canyon State Natural Area, five miles east of Jamestown in Fentress County, protects a 3,853-acre undeveloped natural area around the Pogue Creek canyon — one of Tennessee's most dramatic and least-visited slot canyon systems, where the narrow sandstone canyon walls, the natural bridge formations, and the seasonal waterfalls give the natural area the specific geological character of the Cumberland Plateau's Black Hand sandstone erosion in the most intimate and most canyon-level accessible format in the state. The natural area's primitive trail and the canyon's scramble access give the experienced hiker the remote slot canyon experience. Black House Mountain Campground serves guests through Fentress County's Cumberland Plateau camping season from spring through fall, with the spring wildflower bloom in the Big South Fork and Pickett State Park from April through June and the October fall foliage on the Cumberland Plateau giving the campground's most spectacular visual seasons in the hardwood forest that the plateau's sandstone soils and the creek drainage's rich bottomland sustain. Pickett State Park's natural arches, the Hazard Cave recess shelter's fern grotto, and the Arch Lake's lakeside trail give the adjacent state park its concentrated geological and natural feature access within the shorter hiking distances that give Pickett the family-accessible complement to the Big South Fork's more demanding wilderness trails. Reserve sites ahead for summer peak and fall foliage weekends on the Cumberland Plateau.