Local movement to restore Hanging Dog gaining steam
Hanging Dog - More than two years after the U.S. Forest Service announced that they would not be re-opening Hanging Dog Campground, a community-lead movement has their sights set on reviving the campground.
Spearheaded by Cherokee County native Preston Mashburn, the group’s petition has more than 2,100 signatures and more than 1,500 members on its Facebook page titled, “Re-opening and Preservation for Hanging Dog Campground.”
Mashburn said that he has been talking with others about the lack of a camping site for RVs in Cherokee County for some time and decided to organize the effort to get the ball rolling.
“I’ve been talking with commissioners and other people for a while now about having a place where we can use our RVs and camp in the area because there’s nowhere to camp,” organizer Preston Mashburn said. “So this year I decided to just go ahead and spearhead it up because it didn’t seem to be going anywhere.”
Mashburn said the group’s end goal is to have the Forest Service reopen the ground or in a preferred scenario lease the grounds to the group and allow the members to maintain and run the campground.
“Either the Forest Service to open it back up or, what we would prefer even more, we set up a group and under the county operate it where we run it, we fund it, we operate and keep it up and just lease it from the government,” Mashburn said of the group’s end goals.
The group is in the process of setting up a meeting between local officials and the Forest Service.
The campground, which sits alongside Hiwassee Lake in the Nantahala National Forest, was initially closed in 2014 due to “declining use and increased management costs” according to a release by the Forest Service.
The campground went through two “trial periods” in 2016 and 2017, when the Forest Service and Cherokee County attempted to partner in operating the camp.
However, the Forest Service claimed fees collected at the campground were “well below the operating and managing costs, with an occupancy rate of just 11 percent in 2017.”