Devil's Lake is a spring-fed lake under 500 feet of quartzite bluff, and from the campground the rock fills the view, with trails climbing its face. Up top the rock breaks into pink and purple talus fields that spill toward the water, and nearly 30 miles of trail run along the bluffs on both sides. A family week parked under them falls into an easy rotation of a bluff climb, an afternoon on the beach at the 360-acre lake, and a day north in the Dells once the kids start bargaining for slides.
It's also the most-visited state park in Wisconsin, with over 2.5 million visitors a year and parking lots that often fill before 9 a.m. on weekends and holidays from May through October. The DNR's own advice is to come Monday to Thursday, and a week in the rig bends to that easily, with the bluffs and beach midweek and the Dells on Saturday. Devil's Lake as a campervan trip out of Madison is on the Madison campervan page.
Quartzite, Northern Lights and Ice Age campgrounds for a rig
Quartzite is the open campground, grass and scattered trees on what used to be a nine-hole golf course, with the bluff behind it. By the DNR's account it's where the largest RVs end up, with electric at 75 of its 100 sites and the gates open all year.
Northern Lights is the shady one, a wooded campground the Civilian Conservation Corps built in 1939, with 71 electric sites under the trees. Ice Age has no electric and runs mostly to tents and pop-ups, though RVs are allowed, which makes it the dry-night fallback when the electric sites are gone. For two people who'd rather sleep under the Northern Lights trees, a smaller rig from the Wisconsin campervan listings is the easier fit.
Book the campsite before the rig. In the state's busiest park the pad is the scarce half of the trip, so choose the campground first and rent the motorhome or trailer that suits it. State park rules allow one trailer or motor home per site, parked on the driveway, so two families in two rigs need two sites.
Quartzite and Northern Lights each have a dump and fill station, free if you're registered in the park, so a week on an electric pad doesn't need a trip outside the gate to empty tanks or top up water. The park also requires a vehicle admission sticker.
Wisconsin Dells resort parks and the waterparks
Just north of the park, Wisconsin Dells bills itself as the Waterpark Capital of the World, and the drive in is slides and waterpark rooflines, with Noah's Ark among them. Some families split the week, bluffs first and then the rig moved up to a resort with a pool for the second half.
The Wisconsin Dells KOA, off Exit 87, has pull-thru and back-in sites, several with full hookups and patios and the rest on water and electric. Evenings there run to the pool, the splash pad and the Kampfire singalong in summer, and the park keeps Halloween weekends going through October.
Delivery works listing by listing. Some trailer owners in the listings tow to a reserved site and set up, and the KOA lists RV rentals delivered to your campsite among its amenities, which lets a family that has never towed sleep in a trailer without hitching one. Reserve the site first either way.
If you'd rather stay in a state park on the Dells side, Mirror Lake sets sand pads under pines and oaks, with electric sites in its Sandstone Ridge and Cliffwood campgrounds. Door County and the state's other big RV weeks are on the Wisconsin RV page.