The 2026 Honda Pilot TrailSport and Land Between the Lakes

Getting to Land Between the Lakes from Clarksville

The drive is the easy part. Head west out of Clarksville on US-79, run through Dover, and you reach the south end of Land Between the Lakes in roughly 45 to 50 miles. Call it an hour. Fort Donelson National Battlefield sits right on that route, which makes it an easy stop on the way out or a decent excuse to break up the trip home with restless kids in the back.

Land Between the Lakes covers around 170,000 acres of federal recreation area wedged between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, straddling the Kentucky and Tennessee line. The Trace runs north to south through the middle of it, paved the whole way. That is worth saying plainly up front, because a lot of vehicle marketing implies you need serious hardware to get anywhere out there. You do not. A Civic gets to the Golden Pond Visitor Center just fine.

What you need hardware for is everything that branches off the pavement.

What the All-Terrain Tires Actually Do Out There

The TrailSport wears all-terrain tires and an orange TrailSport badge. Both are honest about what the trim is for.

The TrailSport is not a rock crawler and Honda has never claimed it is. What it has is a specific, useful set of parts: all-terrain tires, Trail Torque Logic all-wheel drive that shuffles power across the rear axle rather than only front to back, a TrailWatch camera system that shows you what is under the front bumper, and suspension tuned for rough surfaces rather than for a smooth ride down Wilma Rudolph Boulevard.

Where that combination pays off is the unglamorous stuff. Gravel spurs off the main routes. Campground access roads after a week of rain. The washboard section between a parking area and the water. A wet, mossy launch ramp in November. None of that is dramatic, and none of it is what off-road advertising shows you, but it is 95 percent of what actually happens on a Saturday out there.

The trade is real and worth naming. All-terrain tires cost you fuel economy and a little road noise every single day of the year, in exchange for grip you use on maybe a dozen days. That math works for some families and not for others.

Towing a Boat to Kentucky Lake or Lake Barkley

Rated at 5,000 lbs with a properly equipped hitch, which covers most of what gets launched around here.

This is the reason a lot of Clarksville families end up in a Pilot instead of a smaller crossover. Every trim, including the TrailSport, is rated to tow 5,000 lbs when properly equipped. That number covers the great majority of bass boats and small pontoons people keep on Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, trailer included.

Two honest cautions. First, weigh your actual rig rather than trusting the boat's dry weight, because a full fuel tank, a battery, gear and a live well add up faster than people expect. Second, the tow rating is not a separate budget from the rest of the vehicle. Eight people, a week of camping gear and a loaded cooler all count against what the Pilot is carrying before the trailer is attached.

The other thing towing changes is which trim makes sense. All-wheel drive is worth more on a wet ramp than almost anywhere else, and it is standard on the TrailSport and optional on the Sport, EX-L and Touring. If your weekends involve a ramp, do not treat all-wheel drive as an upgrade to skip.

Turkey Bay, and What the Pilot Is Not

Two different jobs. The side-by-side plays. The Pilot hauls it there and brings everyone home.

Turkey Bay is the off-highway vehicle area inside Land Between the Lakes, a few thousand acres of trails set aside for side-by-sides, ATVs and dirt bikes. It is one of the main reasons people from Montgomery County drive out there at all.

The Pilot TrailSport does not belong on those trails, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to sell one. It is a three-row family SUV with all-terrain tires, not an off-highway vehicle. Taking it into a dedicated OHV area would be a bad day for the vehicle and a worse one for whoever has to explain it.

What the TrailSport is genuinely good at is the job around the job. It tows the machine out there. It handles the staging area, which is loose and chewed up by definition. It carries the fuel cans, the tools, the helmets and five people. And when everyone is filthy and tired at four in the afternoon, it has eight seats and a cargo area you can hose the worst off before loading.

Camping With a Full Car at Hillman Ferry and Piney

Eight seats standard, and the TrailSport's available brown leather is a genuinely practical colour for this kind of weekend.

Hillman Ferry, Piney and Energy Lake are the campgrounds most Clarksville families end up at, and they are the reason cargo numbers matter more than trail numbers for most buyers. The Pilot holds 22.4 cu ft behind the third row, 60.1 cu ft with the third row down, and 113.7 cu ft with both rows folded.

The practical version of those numbers: you can carry six people and a real weekend's worth of gear without a roof box, or drop the third row and carry four people plus everything for a week. That is the difference between a camping trip and a logistics problem.

The 2026 TrailSport also picked up a heated second row, which sounds like a luxury item until you are standing at a boat ramp in December with two kids who have been in the water. Small feature, disproportionate value on exactly the weekends this page is about.

Closer to Home: Dunbar Cave and Rotary Park

Not every weekend has an hour of driving in it. Dunbar Cave State Park sits inside Clarksville, with trails, a lake and a cave that is worth the trip on its own. Rotary Park is a few minutes away with its own trail network. Both are close enough that you can be walking within fifteen minutes of leaving the house.

They are also the honest test drive for this trim. If you want to know whether the TrailSport feels different from an EX-L, a lap around a dealership block will not tell you anything. A run out to Dunbar Cave and back, with the parking areas and access roads included, will.

Ask us for that route. We would rather you find out the all-terrain tires are more than you need than have you discover it in month three.