South Shore Recreation Area
October 2026
About
Overview
South Shore Recreation Area is located on the south side of the Cowanesque Lake along State Route 49, just five miles west of Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania. The area is easily accessible from Route 15 and offers a great location for boating, picnicking and fishing.
Recreation
Cowanesque Lake offers a variety of outdoor activities including boating and fishing. A variety of native fish inhabits the area's streams and lakes. The North and South Tailrace areas provide access for fishing below the dam.
The fields and forests around the lake are popular destinations for hunters looking for large and small game species that inhabit the eastern hardwood forests.
Many miles of hiking trails circle the lake, including the Mid State Trail, which travels through the recreation area. It links the trails at Cowanesque and nearby Hammond Lake into a long path that extends all the way through Pennsylvania from Maryland to New York.
Facilities
The recreation area offers three group shelters. The Iroquois and Oneida Shelters have electric and water hookups; the Mohawk Shelter has water hookups only. All three sites are fully accessible and comfortably accommodate groups of up to 100 people in a lovely lakeside setting.
Natural Features
Cowanesque Lake is situated in the Endless Mountains region of Pennsylvania, along the Allegheny Plateau in the Appalachian Mountains. The surrounding land paints a scenic picture of rolling terrain and open fields.
Amenities
Phone: 570-835-5281
Is SOUTH SHORE RECREATION AREA fully booked?
A campground showing no availability is almost never full for good. People cancel — plans change, weather turns, someone books three weekends and keeps one — and the site goes straight back into the booking system, usually without warning and often at odd hours. The reason sold-out campgrounds feel impossible is not that sites never free up; it is that nobody is watching at the moment they do.
CampHawk watches SOUTH SHORE RECREATION AREA in Lawrenceville, PA for you. We recheck it every 15 seconds, around the clock, and the moment a site opens we send a text, an email and a push notification — and on Recreation.gov we can put the site straight into your cart, so it is held while you get to your phone.
Searching is free and needs no account — the calendar above is live right now. Watching SOUTH SHORE RECREATION AREA for cancellations is the paid part.