Kettle Morraine State Forest- Northern Unit

The northern unit of the Kettle Moraine State Forest is 45 minutes north of Milwaukee and is open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. The Kettle Moraine State Forest – Northern Unit has more than 132 miles of trails, varying in difficulty, length, and permitted uses.
Features of the Northern Unit are Greenbush Recreation Area, with a group camping area and hiking trails; Parnell Observation Tower; Long Lake Recreation Area, with a campground, a beach and boat launch; Henry S. Reuss Ice Age Visitor Center, and Mauthe Lake Recreation Area, with a campground.
Such a great hiking area with amazing views! Totally worth the day trip, or why not stay awhile and make it an adventure!
Wisconsin is truly lucky to have this gem!!!

The hiking trails and abudant clear water makes this an excellent day trip from Milwaukee.
I’m not sure how clean the water is – the lakes have their standard mercury warning, of course – but when you look down from the fishing docks at Mauthe Lake you can actually see the bluegill swimming around amongst the seaweed.
The twisty roads up here would make a fantastic place for a motorcycle ride, but unfortunately I was trapped in a cage on the way up here because of my bike’s mechanical problems. Someday though, I’ll be sure to do this again on two wheels.
The village of Chinatown, just outside the forest’s borders, is a pretty weird sight to behold. There’s not much to it; I imagine it’s mostly tourist’s summer homes, but coming across the sign for the town is really surreal up in the middle of nowhere. Honestly, I’m just a little bemused by having come across it; I can’t help but imagine that it was an inside joke among the people who first built their homes up there.
Truly some of the best wilderness in Southern Wisconsin.

We stayed in the Southern campground #751, and it was great. $ 24 plus a $ 10 parking pass. No running water, but the spots were nice and very private. We also rented a canoe at the nearby lake for $ 20, which was a nice daytivity. Didn’t seem to be a lot of hiking trails in the immediate vicinity and for that price it would have been nice to have some sort of bath-​house with running water. But overall, great wilderness weekend getaway from Chicago or Milwaukee.

Okay, it is southeastern Wisconsin. I have a bad habit of comparing all my hiking to CA and CO, which I should not. For the midwest, I guess this probably is as good as it gets. You never feel as you are completely out in the wilderness, roads run close by the Ice Age trail at certain parts, motorcross is buzzing around, model airplanes are buzzing and many Harley’s abound. But the trail is kept up nice and blazes are easily seen. We stayed at Mauthe Lake. The campground was clean, had new nice hot showers and camping sites were fairly woodsy. Great place for families. Just don’t think you’ll come here to get away from it all, because EVERYONE is there too– huge RVs with electric sites, kids riding bikes all in the streets, BBQs with a 100 people per spot…

I really wasn’t impressed with this campground at all. Here are the positives:
–Nice beach and lake.
–Firewood was inexpensive.
–Staff was friendly in the office.
–Nice bathrooms with individual shower rooms.
and the negatives:
–Almost all of our campsite was gravel. Sleeping on gravel is bad news bears.
–The fire pit was a 30“x20″ box with a cooking grill affixed to one end of it. The grill was not movable, was only 8“x20″, and was gnarled so much that we couldn’t get a pan to lay flat over the fire.
–Any of the 4 campsites around us sounded like they were actually in our campsite.

Decent campground. Not sure if I will go back though. When we first arrived, there were TONS of dandelions all over our site. Even though we weren’t supposed to have cars on the actual camping area, we drove our cars around it just to stomp on all the dandelions. Obviously I’m not expecting the Ritz Carlton when I camp, but if you’re charging people to camp there, a little bit of upkeep would be nice.
It’s definitely roughing it here — no showers for about 12 miles (I didn’t care, some people did), and they only have vault toilets. The water pump was just OK — I’d recommend you bring PLENTY of water for drinking (unless you have a good filter).
For a group site, we definitely had plenty of room. I think we had more than 20 people at one point, but it never felt crammed.

What? You haven’t been up to Kettle Morraine North yet? What’s wrong with you?! Actually, that’s just fine by me, I like it less crowded. Actually, the 4^th Annual Nachos & Son campout at Long Lake found it more crowded than ever!
We didn’t mind having kids and people around, though, made our little campground feel like a neighborhood cul-​de-​sac! Bathrooms were super clean at our site and Rangers refill toiletry supplies often and patrol the grounds.
On Saturday morning we hit up the Talk with a Naturalist for kids. Erica was great with my son, had great creativity and patience, and I even learned something about nature! The same can be said for the Trees activity in the afternoon. After lounging on the beach making castles out of sand, my son got a little lesson on trees. And we both learned how to estimate tree age based on circumference and appearance. There are so many learning opportunities for kids and families every weekend, you can’t possibly do them all. Kudos, KM DNR!
We biked further along the tailored bike path between Long Lake and Mauthe Lake. Sunday morning is great for getting a jump on nature. As was proven by spotting a white-​tailed deer before he spotted us, also a heron, a groundhog, the rare club-​tailed dragonfly; it was all so beautiful, I’m sure we’ll be back again next summer for the momentous 5^th Annual!