We stayed in Daisy for the Eclipse weekend and expected this place to be crawling with people, so we were so happy to see it was still amazingly clean and quiet. We stayed in walk-in site #67, which was at the very end of the paved path from the parking lot. The site had a very level and massive gravel tent pad, as well as firepit, picnic table and lantern post. The hill in/out is quite steep, but the pavement makes it easy to haul with wagon, and I've rarely seen multiple water spigots in a walk-in area like that. Our neighbors were a little closer than we're used to for walk-ins, but we had glorious views of the lake and very little traffic walking past our site, which is a blessing when you have two somewhat barky dogs. The camp store sold firewood, ice and souvenirs and they were super-friendly, and one of the rangers even helped load the firewood in the car for me. My only complaint is that there's only one hiking trail in the park, and it's just a very short nature trail and doesn't really give you a good view of the lake or anything. However, there were many beautiful trails to be had within a 30-40 minute drive of the park.
We absolutely loved our stay in Site #11 in Campground A. The site was absolutely massive, and turned out to be even better than the one that we had initially picked out, but was already reserved. We were a little concerned about lack of shade in this site, as it only had one tree in it, but it shaded at least some of the site all day every day, and even provided a nice umbrella to hang out under during the brief bouts of rain. Hiking was fantastic, with each trail being dramatically different than the one before, and we did at least 7 of them in the 4 full days we were there.
Things I loved:
- no cell signal. They did offer ViaSat WIFI for a fee, but I love to unplug when I get the chance.
- the quiet natural beauty and dark sky
- very clean bathrooms, which were cleaned daily, even though there might have been a total of 4 sites occupied at any given time during our stay.
- frequent patrols by park rangers
- beautiful trails
Things I was not fond of:
- the park rangers that patrolled did nothing to enforce the rule that dogs must be on-leash, even when we know they saw this multiple times. Thanks to this, we had two dogs in the site next door that would randomly wander over to and through our site, much to the consternation of our two on-lead dogs. Thankfully, this couple left the day after we got there.
- the firewood was soaking wet when we purchased it, even though it was stored in a shed near the visitor's center. Decent price for the amount, but it was very difficult to start.
- a few more people than I would have expected during the week at this time of year. I would hate to see it on the weekends.
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.