Site development, utility trenching, seasonal maintenance, and year-round operations for Canadian campgrounds and RV parks.
Canada's campground and RV park industry is significant and growing — between KOA franchises, provincial park concessions, and thousands of private operations from BC's Okanagan to Ontario's cottage country to Nova Scotia's shore, there's an enormous variety of sites and operational contexts. What they share is a recurring need for earthwork, utility work, and seasonal maintenance that a skid steer handles efficiently.
Most campground operators are owner-operators running small to mid-size sites. They're not construction contractors — they need a versatile machine that can do multiple jobs without requiring a full-time operator or a specialist attachment for every task. That's exactly the skid steer's strength.
Developing a new campground on raw or semi-cleared land involves several phases that a skid steer handles well. Initial clearing — removing brush, small trees, and slash — uses a mulcher or a grapple. A mulcher makes sense if you're clearing a lot of material; it processes in place and leaves ground cover. For selective tree work where you're preserving specific trees while removing others, a grapple lets you work precisely without mulching everything.
Once clearing is done, site grading begins. Individual campsites need to be reasonably level — RV guests need sites where their rig doesn't require a stack of blocks under every wheel. A dozer blade attachment handles rough grading; a laser-grade or hydraulically angled blade speeds up the process of cutting high spots and filling low spots. You're not shooting for billiard-table perfection, but a site that drains away from the pad and gives an RV occupant a reasonable platform.
Campsite pads for large RVs (Class A motorhomes run 35–42 feet) typically need a level 14×50 foot area. That's straightforward grading work — nothing a standard GP bucket and blade can't handle in a day per site once clearing is done.
Full-hookup campsites — water, sewer, and 30/50-amp electrical — require trenching for underground utilities. The depths vary by province and local code: electrical typically goes 600mm (24 inches) minimum under the Canadian Electrical Code, water service lines need to be below frost depth (which ranges from 1.2 metres in southern BC to 2.4 metres in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan), and sewer laterals typically run at 1.0–1.5 metres to maintain gravity slope.
A trencher attachment handles all three trenches efficiently. A chain trencher (Bradco, Blue Diamond, Bobcat) in the 36–48 inch depth range covers electrical and sewer. For deep water service trenching in prairie frost conditions, you may need a 60-inch cut — verify your machine's aux flow meets the trencher's requirement (most trenchers need 15–25 GPM).
The trench configuration for a typical full-hookup campsite:
For an efficient trenching operation, a chain trencher attachment cuts all three in separate passes. The spoil from the trench needs to go somewhere — use the bucket to manage the stockpile so it doesn't collapse back into the trench before utility installation.
Private campgrounds need on-site sewage handling. A dump station — where self-contained RVs can empty holding tanks — requires a concrete pad, a sewer inlet, and connection to either municipal sewer or an on-site septic system. Building the pad and approach, and installing the sewer connection, is standard bucket and trenching work.
Larger campgrounds with full sewer hookups typically need a septic holding tank or a series of tanks plus a drain field. Tank installation — dropping pre-cast concrete septic tanks into excavated holes — involves the skid steer for final grading of the excavation, backfill, and surface restoration. The actual tank pick is usually a crane or excavator; tanks are too heavy for skid steer lift. Our guide on septic system installation covers the full excavation and installation process.
Campground loop roads take a beating: heavy RVs (Class A motorhomes can weigh 15,000–30,000 kg loaded) on gravel roads, combined with spring thaw and fall rain, creates washboard and pothole problems that require seasonal maintenance.
A 72-inch or 84-inch grading blade handles most campground road maintenance. The technique is the same as for any gravel road: grade the washboard when it develops rather than letting it get deep, crown the road center slightly (2–3 degree cross-slope) for drainage, and maintain ditches so water drains off rather than saturating the base. On tight campground loops with site entrances every 20-30 feet, an angling blade lets you work in one direction without constant backing up.
For adding gravel — whether topping up existing roads or building new spurs to new sites — a bucket moves material from a delivered stockpile and a blade spreads it. See our guide on gravel driveway work for gravel spreading technique with a skid steer blade.
Canadian campgrounds have a hard seasonality. Most private parks open May long weekend and close sometime in October. The shoulder seasons involve substantial setup and teardown work that a skid steer handles.
Moving fire rings, dumpster corrals, and concrete picnic table pedestals with pallet forks is faster and safer than hand labor. A set of 48-inch forks rated at 4,000 lb handles a concrete picnic table (typically 800–1,200 lb) easily and puts it exactly where you want it.
Wooded campgrounds — and most desirable campgrounds in Canada are wooded — constantly deal with tree hazards: dying trees over sites, storm fall across roads, branches down after winter ice loads. A grapple moves fallen trees and large debris. For standing tree removal, a skid steer isn't the right tool for the primary cut (that's a climber or a small tracked machine with a felling head for larger operations), but it handles the cleanup: moving cut sections, chipping brush runs, clearing the site after the arborist leaves.
See our guides on tree removal attachments and tree service operations for more detail on grapple and debris handling in tree work contexts.
Many campground sites on sloped properties require retaining structures to create level pads. The skid steer handles the earthwork side — grading the cut bank, placing the base course stone for block walls, backfilling behind finished walls, and compacting in lifts. A pallet fork with block forks moves retaining wall blocks (typically 35–80 lb each for residential-scale block walls) from a stockpile to the wall face.
For larger gravity-block systems (1-tonne concrete retaining blocks), the skid steer ROC is typically the limiting factor. A mid-frame machine with 2,200 lb ROC can barely handle a single 1-tonne block — most operators use an excavator for these larger retaining applications. Smaller standard block systems are well within skid steer capacity.
Year-round campgrounds and RV parks — more common in BC and Ontario than the colder provinces — need winter maintenance. Snow removal on campground roads uses the same equipment as any property: a snow pusher or snow blower handles volume removal, and a blade handles road cleaning and ice control. The campground context is less demanding than a commercial parking lot — lower traffic, lower liability for slip-and-fall — but the equipment is the same.
At year-round parks in colder regions (Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan), keeping water service active through winter requires heat tape on exposed connections, insulated service box installations, and deeper service lines than seasonal parks. The skid steer isn't directly involved in the winterization work, but any utility repair through winter — a service line freeze, a pump failure — means trenching in frozen ground, which requires a high-torque trencher or a frost ripper attachment before the trencher can cut.
If you're buying or renting attachments for campground operations, the priority order is:
For most campgrounds, renting a trencher rather than owning makes sense — you'll use it intensively during site development and rarely after that. The bucket, forks, and blade are year-round tools worth owning.