A nice little slice of heaven
This campground is a nice little find, and we stayed 6 nights. We arrived on a Thursday evening, and it was maybe half full. However, by Saturday morning (Easter weekend) all but 5 sites had cleared out and we had the place nearly to ourselves for the rest of the stay. Fantastic hiking right from the entrance to the campground, so there's no need to hop in the car. The sites are quite spaced out from each other and are probably the biggest I've seen in Illinois, but I do wish there was some brush or smaller trees between the sites for additional privacy. The grounds and pit toilets were remarkably clean, and I saw no trash or broken glass anywhere. The bathroom was restocked with toilet paper of better-than-normal campground quality while we were there. I would have rated this place 5 stars, but my biggest complaint is the water pump did not work, and there was no mention of this on the forestry website. We can plan for places without water if we know ahead of time, but we were not expecting this, so we had to hop back in the car and drive 14 miles each way to stock up. Some of the sites are a little close to the road, but it didn't matter, as the road only serves to get traffic to Bell Smith Springs trailheads and dead-ends just down the road from the campground entrance, so very little traffic and it's all pretty slow-moving due to the shape of the road. 0 cell signal, which is just what we look for while on vacation. I did get a little irritated by the number of people with off-leash dogs that did not stay in their sites, but that's no reflection on the campground itself.