Mauthe Lake Recreation Area — Attraction in Town of Auburn

This isn’t a campground. It’s a ritual site for land erasure disguised as recreation.

The “forest” here is artificial—rows of pine monoculture and unmanaged scrub brush covering what was, within living memory, a mosaic of working farms, homesteads, and intergenerational settlements. The Wisconsin DNR and associated conservation bodies acquired this (and other) land through Depression-era forfeitures, forced buyouts, and narrative laundering, then rebranded it as “wilderness” to the unsuspecting public.

Trail signage tells you this is “restored landscape.” Reality: it’s a state-sponsored blackout, burying the memory of rural people under fire-suppressed dead zones and invasive thickets. You’ll see collapsing stone fences, forgotten field boundaries, and unnatural tree lines—all evidence of prior human habitation deliberately concealed by post-facto tree planting.

Facilities are average, but irrelevant. The real issue is that your tent is pitched atop stolen land passed off as pristine. You’re not “connecting to nature.” You’re unknowingly participating in a controlled forgetting.

If you’re looking for honest ecology, living land memory, or respect for cultural continuity—go elsewhere. If you want to understand how land theft is spiritualized through recreation, come here and look closer.

This is not conservation. This is a graveyard...

My buds and I camped here regularly as kids, both summer and winter, and these days it's a regular summer stop for our family...we try and bring the 5 kids to camp 2 or 3 times a summer, plus numerous day trips there to swim and hang out. We love it, and not just for sentimental reasons.

Not much has changed in all those years. Super clean. All kinds of sites, from electric and RV friendly to some really private stuff back in the woods, and as tent campers, that's our thing. If you go for some of those more remote sites in the upper 500's, there are nearby trails you can hit for a decent, hilly little hike. Lower 500's are tighter sized sites, but have a lot of pine trees and pine straw, kinda nice for very little kids.

Great walk/hike around the entire lake. The beach is medium sized, and on hot, weekend days, expect it to be fairly packed...but even then it's manageable, overall very family friendly. Small lake, medium temperature. Lots of grills and spots to hang out, and plenty of parking. Decent little playground. Right in the middle of the Kettle Moraine, lots of nearby stuff to do if you look a little and are willing to...

We made our first camping trip to Mauthe Lake on Aug 25-25, 2017. We have a family of four, our kids are 9 & 12, we stay in a small travel trailer.

Even with craptastic weather, this campground proved to be one of the best I've ever experienced. This is what I envision when I think of a WI state park. All of the sites are wooded, many being quite private, and a few are totally secluded. Everything was clean, including the nicest pit toilet facilities ever. There's a huge/clean sandy beach with an awesome swimming area and no boats to constantly cruise too close.

The weather kept us from checking out the bike trail, but I've heard it's nice.

On a somewhat negative side: the playground wasn't that big, some sites can be very far from flush toilets and the available firewood isn't properly seasoned (which is a problem everywhere). Not even enough to make me take a star off my rating.

As a warning, there are no garbage cans at the beach. Be prepared to take out everything you bring in. Which is probably why...