Forestville Mystery Cave State Park

We camped here 3 nights, Memorial Day weekend. We weren't sure what to expect because we'd never heard anyone talk about this park. It was fantastic!

- Great proximity to the caves (remember to reserve your tour tickets in advance)
- Nearby Lanesboro for biking
- Great tree canopy that is both beautiful and keeps it cool (it was at least 10 degrees cooler than outside the park!)
- Beautiful wild flowers
- No bugs
- Nice shower house (you may have to walk a bit to get there)
- Well maintained, cleaned and lighted pit toilets
- Good ranger station with firewood and other odds and ends
- Good sites (some more private than others! 12 was great. Avoid 16 bc it's right by the toilets)

All said, totally exceeded expectations and would go back!

FYI absolutely no cell service (yay)

Ok so I grew up going to this state park as a kid. Every single summer this was our family vacation, so I am probably biased. I will say this—when I grew up and started to explore the state park systems in other states, I realized how lucky I had been, and how lucky we are in Minnesota (and Wisconsin) to have such amazing state park systems. Forestville is well-managed, clean, and has all the aspects you’d want for a few easy days camping away from your phones and other screens.

If you trail ride and own horses, get them shod on the front at least (the trails are mostly gravel), and go. You won’t be disappointed—the horseback riding is amazing. And hey, the trails where the horses go are shared with hikers—this is really an awesome park for hiking.

The camping itself is chill. It is a state park, so it is “developed.” If you want the isolation of a National Forest dispersed camping location, this is not it. But it is easy and fun camping along a beautiful little river. The bluffs and prairies and dense woods of this park are magical.

Fairly secluded little park with beautiful hills and woods to wander through. A great river too with plenty of fishing opportunities. We booked a non-electric site for our 17.5 foot trailer and loved it. Very spacious sites that are surprisingly far apart form each other. This also made the park very quiet. The trees are thick, so don't count on solar. We loved the Cave Tour, it's must even at the higher than expected price. Skipped paying for the Forestville tour and just walked around the site on our our own. Nice, but nothing must see. There are also a number of neat little towns that are worth visiting too. We liked Lanesboro best. There is absolutely no cell service in the park. Also, it's the number one horse park in Minnesota, so stick to trails for hikers only, or you'll have to skip lots of horse droppings. Oh, and use the GPS link from their homepage, or you may be routed to a bridge that hasn't allowed cars to cross in decades.

This is a lovely state park with lots of hiking, and the campground was pretty nice. Lots of picnic areas in the park, too. A lot of the RV sites are hit-or-miss on quality – some have great privacy, others you can see people across the road or trails come up next to your site. If it's not busy and there's no chance of it filling up, I think it's worth checking out the campground before selecting a site. 30A electric worked fine. I drove around the non-electric loop, and there are some fantastic sites with great shade and good privacy there.

No highways anywhere nearby, so it's very quiet and very dark here.

The reservation system lists the maximum rig length for each spot - it varies by site.

There is no cell service at the campground on Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile. However, with an external window-mounted antenna on my hotspot, I was able to get one bar of AT&T LTE at about 1mbps down/0.08mbps up from the campground. Casual browsing and emails were fine on that, but uploads/sending photos was very slow or failed. I did notice Verizon LTE came in on some hikes, including while walking around the Forestville historic area (which is well worth a visit). And once you exit the park and go back up in elevation, service is fine.