Forestville Mystery Cave State Park

Forestville, Minnesota

Forestville Mystery Cave State Park is a favorite with locals as a place to come with their horses. People come in to ride the trails for the day or camp overnight. On the weekend, every campsite was full, so make sure you have a reservation.

Google maps will mess up the directions as it directed us to take Lonesome Road. Lonesome Road takes you to a private hog farm and dead-ends at a locked gate at the campground. DO NOT TAKE LONESOME ROAD! Luckily, we met the hog farmer just as we made the turn. We turned around and took County Road 5 and then Hwy 118 into the park.

You are allowed to put up fencing around the highlines, so we put up our corrals for the horses.

The campsites are electric. There are two water faucets for the entire equestrian campground, so we used our portable water tank to carry water back and forth. Our Winegard worked fairly well. There is an RV dump and a shower house in the main campground. There are also cabins for rent.

The trails are pretty, not wide enough for buggies. They are mostly sand and gravel. We put boots on Mercy because he has been complaining about rocky trails. No water crossings that we found, but some downed trees here and there.

Overall, the trails are suitable for beginner riders.

We did side trip to visit Mystery Cave. There is a lovely river that flows through the cave. The cave got it’s name from one of the workers who was helping to excavate the cave for tours. He said, “It’s a mystery why anyone would want to do this type of job.”

The guide used a black light to show how calcium and plant deposits in the rock create a luminescent effect in the dark. This is the first cave tour we have been on to see this, but the guide says you can see this in most caves, if you turn off the lights and use a black light.

This large raccoon was hanging around our campsite for most of our stay. We had to stow our grain bins inside the trailer as he tried to open them. He would scavenge through the hay the horses left on the ground looking for seeds to eat.

We did a side trip to Rochester, Minnesota to the local Tractor Supply to get some supplies for the horses and saw the famous water tower - one of Rochester’s tourist attractions, a water tower painted and shaped to look like an ear of corn.