Esker Lakes Provincial Park: What to Know Before You Book

If you're trying to decide which campground to book at Esker Lakes Provincial Park, there's nothing to decide: our data shows exactly one campground here, simply named Esker Lakes, with roughly 105 sites — a number that lines up almost exactly with the park's total site count. The planning question for this park isn't "which campground," it's whether a quieter, more remote Northeastern Ontario park fits your trip, and what to confirm on the official map before you lock in a site.

Here's what we can confirm, what we can't, and where to look for the rest.

What our data confirms

Esker Lakes Provincial Park sits on Highway 672 near Kirkland Lake, Ontario, a short drive off Highway 11 in the northeastern part of the province. The park lists about 105 total sites, and the single Esker Lakes campground on our park page accounts for essentially all of them, so there's no unexplained gap between the park total and the campground count the way there is at some other single-campground parks in our data.

The park's name is a clue to its landscape: an esker is a long, winding ridge of sand and gravel left behind by a retreating glacier, and the area is generally known for having several of them running between its chain of small lakes. We don't have trail-level detail on eskers, beaches, or interpretive programming in our own data, so if that's part of why you're visiting, confirm current trail access and any seasonal closures on the official Esker Lakes page before you go.

Esker Lakes: what to check before you book

With one campground to choose from, the real work is picking the right site within it rather than comparing campgrounds. A few things worth doing before your booking window opens:

• Use the reservation map's filters. Electrical vs. non-electrical, pull-through vs. back-in, distance to the comfort station — none of that is in our data, and the official booking map shows it site by site.
• Check the satellite view for lake access and tree cover. Our guide to reading a campsite before you book walks through what to look for on the map, including how close a site sits to the water versus the access road.
• Have backup site numbers ready. A roughly 105-site campground is modest by Ontario Parks standards, so even without several competing loops to spread demand across, a popular weekend can still move fast once the reservation window opens.

When to book

Ontario Parks releases reservations five months ahead of your arrival date, at 7 a.m. Eastern, on reservations.ontarioparks.ca. Our reservation dates guide has the day-by-day schedule for 2027's long weekends, and our 7 a.m. booking playbook covers what to have ready before the window opens. Esker Lakes' location well outside Ontario's main cottage-country corridor generally means lighter demand than parks within a few hours of Toronto, but it's still worth booking ahead for summer long weekends rather than assuming space will be open.

If your weekend does sell out, it isn't necessarily final. Our guide to landing a cancelled site covers setting a Notify Me alert and timing your checks around the cancellation deadline, and that approach works just as well at a single-campground park as at a bigger one.

If Esker Lakes doesn't have what you need

If your trip depends on something the single campground doesn't offer — shore power for a trailer, a second option on different water, or roofed accommodation — it's worth knowing before you book rather than after. We don't have yurts or cabins confirmed at Esker Lakes; our yurt camping guide covers which parks we can confirm those at and points you to the Ontario Parks roofed-accommodation search to check directly. If you're already planning a longer swing through Northeastern or Northwestern Ontario and want another remote, single-campground park along the way, our Aaron Provincial Park guide covers a similar highway-adjacent park further west near Dryden.

The bottom line

Esker Lakes keeps the campground decision simple: it's one campground, and the park's roughly 105 sites essentially are the campground. Confirm electrical availability, site privacy, and current trail access around the park's namesake eskers on the official reservation map and park page, then book ahead of a summer long weekend even though this is a quieter corner of the province than Ontario's southern parks.

PitchPeek is a small, growing app for browsing sites at Esker Lakes, saving the ones you're considering, and rating your own site after your trip.

Free · plan the trip with your crew · rate the site when you get home

Questions

Does Esker Lakes Provincial Park have more than one campground?

No. Our data shows one campground, simply called Esker Lakes, with about 105 sites — matching the park's total site count almost exactly, so there's no campground-to-campground comparison to make here.

Is Esker Lakes close to a major highway?

Its address is on Highway 672 near Kirkland Lake in Northeastern Ontario, a short drive off Highway 11. Check the official park page for exact driving directions from the highway.

Are there electrical sites at Esker Lakes?

We don't have that split confirmed in our data. Use the electrical filter on the Ontario Parks reservation map before you book so you can see exactly which sites have power.

Why is the park called Esker Lakes?

The name points to eskers — long ridges of sand and gravel left behind by retreating glaciers — which the area is known for. We don't track trail-level detail on them in our data, so check the official park page for current trail access and interpretive programming.