we usually stay at Wheelers – http://www.wheelerscampground.com/

They are a bit more expensive, but are equipped with warm showers and clean bathrooms :-)

Yeah, getting a campsite for a warm holiday weekend at nearly any state/federal park that doesn’t take walk-ins is a crapshoot.

Try the Green Valley Campground. Call 608-355-0090 and speak with Donna about details (cost & location).

I would highly recommend bivying on a porta-ledge on the Lost Face Wall. It’s out of sight from park rangers and has some great climbs….Otherwise, Wheelers is the place to go.

thanks for the recommendations mdub. I don’t think i’ll by bivying anytime soon though.

I’ve stayed at Green Valley and Wheelers, along with DL State Park. I prefer Wheelers to Green Valley, except for the time that Ha got us literally chased out of there. But surely Mr. Wheeler has forgotten what we look like by now….

Wheeler’s phone is 608-356-4877. It is THE climber’s campground. But that doesn’t mean they tolerate any monkey business (as Alicia and Ha will attest!). They toss people out on a whim!! But that just means that they might have a last-minute spot for you if you drive in without a res. Just don’t drive in late in the evening!

They also have last minute climbing gear that you may need to add to your rack.

I hate Wheelers. Stupid campground nazis. No Camping For You! All we did was drive in late and they got all in a hissy fit cause we parked in the campsite THEN walked into to the front office after we parked instead of vice versa. He told me that “my kind” wasn’t welcomed there. I don’t know if he meant my “ethnicity-kind” or my “young, disrespectful, trouble-maker-kind,” but he was a prick.

Then, after we left and went to another campsite, he goes and tells on us! The next campsite was like, “Are you the trouble makers from Wheelers?” WTF! Obviously, we said no and camped there, but seriously?! Who does that crap?!

On the other hand, the young people that work there are really nice. It was really only one horrible person. He was this old, mean guy that rides around in a golf cart. Just tread lightly around him.

I’ve stayed at Wheelers before. It’s cool. We partied a little until their 11pm curfew with no trouble. Of course I am a fellow white devil so I could pretty much do whatever I wanted.

zac, we didn’t just party a little. we pluck at least 100 tiny apples from that tree, and slung them into the lake one at a time while yelling out expletives (ok maybe no expletives). that was a good time. What happened to Ha was definitely not cool tho…it’s funny how he’s on the Wisconsin ‘No-camp’ list, haha

The guy at Wheeler’s Mark is generally a great guy and his wife, too. Really. But he is pretty quick to throw people out. “Get Off My Property!” is a phrase I’ve heard often and it sort of rolls off his tongue. In his defense, he’s trying to preserve the peace for his campers. Usually, it seems, he’s throwing out the people that deserve it—people that think they have paid for a right to raise hell. With Ha and Alicia he jumped the gun, and it really sucked that he not only called other campgrounds, I believe he called out the Wisconsin troopers, too. Theirs was a very minor mistake. He’d probably had a bad day.

Yeah, that golf cart routine is pretty funny!

One campground I will not go to anymore is Merry Mac’s down on 113 southeast of the state park. It’s a nice facility, but they don’t care if your stay is satisfying. I felt robbed by them after spending two sleepless nights of a three night weekend there (they FORCE you to pay for three days on holiday weekend even if you only want two days—a policy Wheeler’s has been known to set aside). Some drunken russian jerks were blowing off firecrackers and cherry bombs all night for two nights and well into each morning, and the management did not respond until 9am of the second day when everyone in earshot was so fried from sleeplessness that they probably didn’t have the energy to complain. The russians got the boot eventually, but I think we should have been given a full refund. They wouldn’t even refund us for one night! Climbing trip ruined. Weekend ruined. That’s when I turned to Wheeler’s.