LAINGSBURG — On a cool, sunny morning in mid-May, Sleepy Hollow State Park was living up to its name.
It was quiet enough that a wild turkey skittered across the road as a reporter and photographer walked in the area of the modern campgrounds. A few minutes earlier, a cottontail rabbit foraged in the north campground and a chipmunk scampered across an open area on its daily rounds.
The usual throngs of warm-weather campers at the picturesque, 2,600-acre park northwest of Laingsburg weren’t there. A couple of work crews were still in the park, finishing tasks from improvement projects that prompted the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to close the modern campground for all of 2025 and the first part of this year.
The park itself, including the walk-in campsites, swimming beach and other day-use areas, remain open. But the popular, 181-site modern campground won’t be fully reopened for another month.
Beginning June 1, the campground will be open from Thursday through Monday only, and then seven days a week beginning July 1, said Jodi Nieschulz, park manager.
The state booking system has been taking reservations for Sleepy Hollow, and most weekends were full for June, although a few openings remained as of mid-May, Nieschulz said.
Campers will find newly paved roads, spiffed-up shower/restroom facilities in the modern campground and an improved pump-out, or sanitation, facility with two stations, instead of one. The beach house at the swimming beach also was being upgraded.
The toilet and shower facilities dated to the 1980s, and the new ones are ADA accessible.
Craig Pavia, of DeMaria Building Company, the general contractor for the Sleepy Hollow work, said crews were finishing punch-list tasks, and the work will be done on time.
Other improvements are coming, thanks at least in part to a nonprofit group that helps out where it can.
The Friends of Sleepy Hollow State Park obtained a DNR grant to help it add a storage shed and new pavilion to the host site in the modern campground, said Marv Argersinger, the group’s president. The Friends group also plans to add a couple of permanent game structures, including a cornhole game, to another area of the park, he said.
The group has already held its spring Bingo fundraising events and will be back out in October to do its Halloween- and harvest-themed fundraisers, Argersinger said.
“We’re starting to plan for those now, so we’ll be back out again this year,” he said.
Michigan has more than 100 state parks and 140 state forest campgrounds. The Sleepy Hollow work had a price tag of about $4.3 million and was among more than 180 projects included in a program funded by the American Rescue Plan Act.
The vast majority of the work will be completed by this spring, with only a few projects that will need to be wrapped up by the end of this summer, said Joe Strach, a regional planner for the DNR.
Contact Ken Palmer at kpalmer@lsj.com. Follow him on X @KBPalm_lsj.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Modern campground at Sleepy Hollow to reopen after major renovations
Reporting by Ken Palmer, Lansing State Journal / Lansing State Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
