Are the lake crescent campgrounds first come first serve our are reservations recommended?

1st come 1st serve. And not many sites available. We showed up at like 8am on a Thursday or Friday and we gotnone of the last spots

They are first come first served, sort of. The system is pretty terrible and getting a site is basically complete luck. Getting there really early doesn’t help since the only way to get a site is to just happen to be pulling past it when the occupants from the previous night are leaving. People already in a site have the option of extending their stay all the way up to the checkout time of 11am so you could end up waiting around for a site all morning only to lose out because someone decided last minute that they wanted to stay longer. We tried 2 days in a row to get a site. We showed up at 11:30 am one day and 7am the next but weren’t able to get a site either day. Since you have to wait until the site is physically unoccupied to claim it as your own you can’t even go do anything else while you’re waiting since you have no claim to the site until you have your stuff setup on it.

I always bus it there from seattle and walk in. So I prefer camping around lake shore.

There are walk in campsites that when you get there you pay the amount on the billboard and reserve it there, I dont know about the spots above the walk in sites. I think those ones you can reserve online, but im not sure. We did the walk in sites and there are enough sites that it is possible to still grab a site once you get there. Most people when we were there stay a night but like no more then 3.