I have to admit it.  I go nowhere near Devil’s Lake State Park on holiday weekends.  It tends to get just a bit crazy.  I’m sure if holiday weekends were my only opportunity I would, but being local it’s just much nicer to go to the park when it’s not so busy.  The photo above is from the fireworks display in Baraboo just outside the park.  This is the view from my front yard actually.

Meanwhile. . .

Drain??  People always ask if the park has a drain.  Well, no.  However as part of a restoration project a siphon was put in some time back.  It is still used now to help control the volume of the lake. Currently about 2-3 inches of water are being taken off per week.  You can see of course that if it really rains it can far overwhelm the ability to bring the water down.

Back To Nature??  Devil’s Lake is a beautiful natural area.  However "wilderness" might be over doing it.  Devil’s Lake is a very "urban" sort of park in some ways with heavy use, large public areas, it’s own law enforcement and paved trails.  You really have to get out on the periphery of the park to have your hike feel more "wild".

Questions??  Please post your questions to the forum and only comments on the blog.  The reason for this is often people are posting questions to old blog posts which I may not see.  Using the forum for questions really helps me to see them.

Webguy goes missing. . . I’m leaving for Door County on Thursday and will be gone for just over a week.  That means I will not be here to approve questions from non-registered users or answer others.  So I didn’t forget you, I’ll just be gone for a bit.

Spam! - I’m getting a bunch of SPAM registrations to the site and I have to pretty much guess if registrations are legit or not.  Most of the time the emails are obvious spam addresses from Russian account or gmail.  However, if I do delete you by mistake just send an email or leave a note in the forum.  logical user names and email addresses makes it easier for me to tell if you are real!

We’re always looking for new ways to show you around the park.  With that in mind we have now added a 360 Virtual Reality gallery.  At the moment I’ve added a few campground images, in the future I will add more from around the park.  The VR images use QuickTime Movie Viewer which most of you should have.  However you may need to shut off your ad-blockers to allow them to work.  Once loaded you can click on the image and drag to look around in all directions.  The images can be zoomed as well although the quality goes down a bit.  Here’s the VR Gallery Page. The appropriate images are also linked from the campground image pages as well.

Spring Run Off - Steinke Basin - Devil’s Lake State Park

I took the picture above last Sunday when I was out roaming around the park.  Summer IS on the way.  Which of course brings me to the new Message Board!  You guys who have been around this site awhile know I’ve tried mulitple times to keep a forum one the website.  For the first couple years all went well.  Then the Spam Monsters showed up.  Since then I’ve tried two different programs and both of them were just wildly unmanagable.  So we’re going to try it again.  I know the forum is a great feature and it’s something I want to provide.  Let’s just hope this one works.  Usually you guys have lots of great information to share!

Bicker & Banter - One new section I’ve added to the forum is a place to debate!  I’m not going to get too heavy handed there.  Just watch the language please.

Moderators - If you feel like an expert on the park and are online quite a bit I could certainly use help moderating.  Just register and then let me know it’s something you’d like to do.

I think that’s it for today!  Enjoy!

Hi.  I’ve not missed your notes requesting photos of Quarzite Campground & Group Camp sites.  However, at this point i just don’t have them.  We have to wait for the snow to melt before we can give you something useful. I’m glad that you find the photos that we do have useful.  I did go through my old files and came up with a few old shots but they really don’t give you much feel for quartzite.  Suffice to say the campsite is quite open compared to the others.  Although some sites may have a tree on the site or along the back (outside edge sites have woods behind), Quartzite campground is certainly not "private".

The photo above is of the showers/restooms in the Group Camp area on south shore.

The photo above is of campsite number 336 in the lower Ice Age loop.  If you’ve not seen them before we offer clickable maps with photos of about 70% of the campsites within the park.  Since moving to the new layout I’ve added back both the Ice Age Campground & The Northern Lights Campground images.  Click Here.  Adding the Quartzite images will take a bit longer as we never did have a good map set up and now’s a good time to do it. 

In addition you will find two new maps of available shelters added to the park shelters page and the large map of the complete park added to the information section as well (or just click here)

I think that’s about it for the moment.  Updating a website is much like moving into a new house.  In the beginning you can’t find anything.  Hopefully we’re in a bit more order.

All the best!

Finally!  After 5 days of being down we are back up.  I don’t even want to begin to tell you all the problems we had with the hosting server.  Well, at least we’re up and running now.   As I mentioned in the previous post, a lot has changed on the site.  Hopefully you’ll still find everything you are looking for.  And yes, the rates info has been updated for 2008.  For everyone who visits the park in the winter, keep in mind that we have entered the new year and it’s time again to purchase a new sticker.