Corinth Recreation Area

The Corinth Recreation Area is a state-of-the-art campground on the shores of the upper part of Lewis Smith Lake in Winston County. Initially built in the 1960s and renovated in 1998, it offers facilities for individual and group camping, picnicking, swimming and boat launching. Two camping loops contain 52 campsites with electrical, water and sewer hookups, and four bathhouses with warm showers serve the camping areas. The spacious standard sites have paved parking spurs, picnic tables, grills and tent pads, and can accommodate RVs of any size. Corinth also offers eight rustic tent camping sites with nearby community hydrants and a bathhouse. ADA accessible sites are available, and all facilities are wheelchair accessible, with flush toilets, drinking water and showers for both campers and day-use visitors. An entrance station with an electronic gate controls access to the campground. No garbage bins are in the campground; users are required to pack out trash and deposit it in the dumpsters by the dump station. The day use portion of the recreation area focuses on the swimming beach, served by a bathhouse with an outdoor beach shower. Twenty-nine first-come, first-served family picnic sites are available nearby, connected by paved access paths, and near the beach is a reservable 100-person group picnic pavilion with a flush toilet that serves both it and a portion of the picnic sites. A year-round boat launch with an SST vault toilet and boat/trailer parking is available, and a separate boat launch serves the campground. A hiking path runs along the shoreline of the lake, and hikers can also access the 1.3-mile Bobwhite Trail. The lake provides excellent fishing for Kentucky Spotted Bass and Hybrid Striped Bass, and interpretive programs are hosted during the summer. The 180,000-plus acre Bankhead National Forest is in northwestern Alabama, and its prominent feature is the Sipsey Wilderness. Known as "The Land of a Thousand Waterfalls," the Sipsey is at the juncture of three separate geologic areas — the Appalachian Plateau, the Cumberland Plateau and the Coastal Plain — and the vegetation from these three environments blends into a remarkable diversity of species. The 12,726-acre area holds swift streams, waterfalls, sandstone cliffs, undisturbed gorges, majestic hardwood forests, wildflowers, birds and animals, and Alabama's largest tree, a tulip poplar with a 21-foot circumference at its base. Lewis-Smith Lake was formed when a 300-foot high dam, completed in 1961, impounded the Sipsey Fork of the Black Warrior River; it has a surface area of 21,200 acres, 500 miles of shoreline and a maximum depth of 264 feet. Other nearby attractions within Bankhead National Forest include the Little Natural Bridge, the longest rock arch east of the Rockies, where 27 varieties of ferns and Canadian hemlocks traced to the Ice Age thrive; the 19th-century Pine Torch Church, one of the oldest churches in Alabama and one of only four surviving log churches, built of hand-hewn logs and said to have taken its name from the pine knots set ablaze to light the building after dark; and the Houston Civil War Jail, built of hand-hewn logs filled with nails to prevent prisoners from "sawing their way to freedom" in the town that served as Winston County's first county seat.