Walnut Ridge Recreation Area
October 2026
About
Overview
Walnut Ridge Recreation Area is a day-use facility located on the 26,000-acre Saylorville Lake Project, which stretches over 50 miles up the Des Moines River Valley. The lake provides a wide variety of recreational activities, including boating, swimming, fishing, hiking and hunting.
Recreation
The 18-hole Walnut Ridge Disc Golf Course runs throughout the recreation area. The beautifully manicured course contains both open and wooded fairways with blind pins and tunnel shots.
Visitors come to Saylorville Lake for its great boating, sailing and swimming opportunities. Anglers fish for walleye, wiper, largemouth bass, catfish, crappie and northern pike.
The paved Neal Smith Trail winds 24 miles from Des Moines to Big Creek State Park and connects the campgrounds on the east side of the lake. It is designated as a National Recreation Trail and is used for biking, hiking, jogging, walking and in-line skating.
Facilities
This day-use area offers three group picnic shelters with water and electricity. Amenities include flush toilets, a playground, and hiking trails.
Natural Features
The area is situated on a wooded ridgeland on the west side of Saylorville Lake. Large shade trees cover the area.
Wildlife is abundant throughout the project. White-tailed deer, turkeys, pheasants, waterfowl, and other small game animals roam the lands around the lake.
Phone: 515-276-4656
Is WALNUT RIDGE 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 WALNUT RIDGE RECREATION AREA in Johnston, IA 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 WALNUT RIDGE RECREATION AREA for cancellations is the paid part.