Pikes Peak State Park — Attraction in Prairie du Chien

I'll provide a TLDR here because I kind of went on a rant explaining our experience.

The gist of it is that this campground is not at all natural enough in my opinion, the bugs were just wildly out of control, and the camp plots are almost all more similar to parking spots with grass than what I would consider a campsite.

Not enough trees in the middle to provide shade. Mostly gravel coated lots makes setting up a tent far from ideal. Close quarters to the neighboring plots.

The good part is that there are genuinely pretty views, and forest, and an impressive deck-like trail built through said forest. That's about it.

The shortest TLDR I can give is, I did not have a good time, mostly because of the bugs. But it's got pretty places to see.

If you want the whole breakdown, here you go:

So... To start this rather disastrous tale, when we arrived at the camp site, me and my wife genuinely thought we were driving through the parking lot or RV section and would find ourselves in a different area soon, with the feeling of being in nature. However, we were disappointed when we realized that in fact, this wasn't the parking lot, this was the campsite itself. Paved roads in a mostly open field with trees around the rim of it is not what I would personally consider "camping" as much as I would call it pitching a tent in a park. And despite being a pavement and gravel collection of streets and parking spots, the organization and signage was terrible. It shows X-X numbers with an arrow one way, but then those numbers just are not actually that way, and you have to come back and circle around a few times to find out that it's actually a street over and on the other side. For some reason the signs which are meant to direct you to specific numbered lots, just have nothing to do with the numbers they point towards. I had to circle and explore the whole place 3 times before I finally found it by ignoring the signs.

There were some spots which were much more similar to camping spots in nature, where they had some surrounding trees and brush. But our plot was in the middle of the main area, and there was genuinely one singular tree in the neighbors' slot which provided a very slight amount of shade during the hottest times of the day. Then in the afternoon/evening the trees from the other side of the lot would start to cover us, basically right before the sun went down.

Being that every plot had a power hookup and several near the front had water lines as well. I can see how this site would be pretty decent for someone with an RV or camper of some kind.

But as a tent camper, it was one of the worst camp sites I have visited, and I have been to some really bad places. This was in the top 10 worst tent camping sites at least for me personally.

I was excited when I saw there were several hiking trails. When we talked about walking through the forest, I feel like it was a fine assumption that the trail we would be walking on would be... well, natural. However, that was not the case. It was a road, which led to a cement path, which led to a genuinely impressive, but still unnatural deck-like wooden and railed walkway all the way through the woods.

Anyway, the whole thing was just so frustrating and tiring that I ended up spending several hours of the daytime both the day we arrived and the second day just sitting in my car with the AC on taking a reprieve from the bugs while I could. Then reluctantly getting out and interacting with the people we were there to see only to be driven away again when the bugs found me and swarmed again. It was so unpleasant that we decided to cut our trip short despite being so excited to visit a pretty nature spot and see my wife's mom and her husband. It just wasn't worth it. I would have preferred to have never gone.

All in all, we arrived, stayed the first night, explored the second day, and left that night. We were just going to stay until the next afternoon originally, but I could not justify sleeping there another night. I much preferred driving back in the middle...

This is one place my family and I frequently visited growing up, which also happens to be one of my favorite places to go, although I’ve since moved away and haven’t been back in a while.

The campgrounds were always kept up and neat, the scenic views were breathtakingly gorgeous, the trails were amazing, I loved the sounds of nature as you were walking by, the Indian burial mounds were neat to look at. Overall a great place to go!

TRUE STORY: In my late teen years, my family I came to spend the day in the fall season, a nice warm day. My sister and I were walking the trails by ourselves and were coming up to the Indian burial mounds. There was no one around us in sight, no sounds of birds chirping or squirrels scrambling around, no wind in the sky. It was eerily quiet! We were having a long conversation about the Indians when we suddenly felt cold chills running down our spines. We didn’t think anything of it. As we kept walking and talking about the Indians we literally heard the leaves crunching on the ground behind us, as if someone were walking behind us. We both stopped and turned around, nothing there. We looked to see if there was someone nearby or an animal lurking somewhere behind us, but there was nothing. As we started walking again, the same thing happened with the leaves crunching on the ground behind us and again, cold chills ran down our spines. My sister and I were both pretty creeped out by then but the ledge to the Mississippi River was just up ahead so she started walking to it. I had stopped to look at the many Indian burial mounds that weren’t too far from where we were. As I did I saw something peering out at me from behind a mound, completely white but every detail could be clearly made out. I blinked and it was gone, all within seconds. Something my sister never saw. And that day I will NEVER forget. Something that gives me chills every time I...

The owners do not like Outsiders. Even if you're somewhere from the state they want you to be in the town or near it. You're allowed to Camp inside your vehicle. Which we did because our tent had a hole in it. We had to turn the heat on because it was so cold But Here Comes 4 to 3:30 in the morning we going to knock on our window. A police officer said he received a noise complaint. We can only expect that it was either the kids that were misbehaving non-stop or it was the owner's wife. There's a lot of immature kids there so I wouldn't bring the kids you want to keep mature there. Back-to-the top thing. He made us turn off our vehicle we got a lot with no electricity so we really had nothing to keep us warm . We paid for 2 days to Camp there but we decided after the first night that we were just going to up right leave. There were a lot of people camping in their vehicles but we don't know why we were the only problem. Our vehicle is not loud unless you're pressing on the gas. Also we had somebody that had a camper by us that was very loud. This shouldn't be a problem but it turned out it was we were away from the owners on the other side of the campground and we don't know why they send a complaint like that. They did help my dad find his phone and they took care of it and gave it back to him. But last time me and my dad Camp to the campground we have the car running but no one seemed to mind. The trails are beautiful but yet we had to get out of there so we weren't able to see it all. I'm only giving this one star because it wasn't that good of a campground. I mean the one that I went to that was for free was even better...