A primitive campground offers six campsites with a vault toilet facility. The campsites are first come first served. No drinking water is located at this area.  Alum Ford also has a boat ramp, providing access for motorized boats, canoes and kayaks to this remote section of Lake Cumberland. There are no fees to use the ramp. 

The Sheltowee Trace National Recreational Trail also passes through the campground. The Sheltowee Trace is a 260-mile back country trail through Daniel Boone National Forest, Big South Fork NRRA, and Natural Bridge, Cumberland Falls, & Pickett State Parks in Kentucky and Tennessee.

 Lake Cumberland is the second largest lake in the Cumberland River System.  The lake provides varied outdoor recreational opportunities for millions of visitors each year.

Lake Cumberland is located in Wayne, Russell, Pulaski, Clinton, McCreary, Laurel, and Whitley counties in Southeastern Kentucky on the Cumberland River.  The damsite is at river mile 460.9 or about 10 miles southwest of Jamestown, Kentucky.

The Wolf Creek Project was authorized by the Flood Control Act of 1938 and the Rivers and Harbor Act of 1946.  Construction of the project, designed and supervised by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, began in August 1941.  After a three-year delay caused by World War II, the project was completed for full beneficial use in August 1952.

The dam was completed for flood control operation in 1950.  Three of the six hydroelectric generating units were placed in operation in 1951 and the remaining three in 1952.  Operation of the lake is for the primary purposes of flood control and the production of hydroelectric power.  The cost of the project was approximately $80.4 million.

Encompassing around 125,000 acres of rugged gorges and forest along the southeastern border with Tennessee, Big South Fork is one of Kentucky's most popular outdoor playgrounds. Within the Big South Fork, numerous pristine streams flow into the free-flowing Big South Fork of the Cumberland River. Over the eons, this ceaseless moving water has carved the sandstones of the plateau into the impressive cliffs, arches and chimneys found throughout the park.

The Big South Fork River begins in Tennessee at the confluence of the Clear Fork and New rivers, flows north through a spectacular 600-foot-deep gorge, enters Kentucky, and empties into the Cumberland River. This land embraces the wildest and most rugged territory on the Cumberland Plateau. Carved over millennia by water flowing over sandstone and shale, the plateau today is a network of hills and hollows, rocky ridges, and river valleys. Rock shelters bear evidence of thousands of years of human habitation, and remnants of homesteads and cemeteries dot the landscape.

The gorge slowly widens northward, revealing river benches, floodplains, and bottomlands. Many streams drop suddenly from the plateau's surface into deeply entrenched valleys. The bottom of the gorge ranges from flat and sandy, almost like a beach, to huge boulders that force the river into violent stretches of white water.

Plateau rivers sustain some of the most varied fish and freshwater mussel species in the nation. Ravines and hollows are among the richest wildflower areas in the South.

Nationally significant for its free-flowing rivers, its deep gorge, and variety of plants and animals, the area captured the attention of the U.S. Congress in the 1970s. In 1974 Congress authorized Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, the first to be designated as both a national river and a national recreation area. This insightful blend of park management—protecting an area with few roads and no development while providing visitors with recreational opportunities—preserves this park for you and future generations.