Local campgrounds prepare for Labor Day weekend campers

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (KCAU) — Labor Day weekend is coming up, and many Siouxlanders may be wanting to spend the last weekend of summer in the great outdoors.

With cooler weather approaching, the Woodbury County Conservation Board is expecting a pleasant end to the 2024 camping season.

“The last couple days, they haven’t looked good because the humidity is so high,” executive director Dan Heissel said. “But I think as we get into Wednesday we start seeing the rush, people are starting to get out into the campgrounds and want to get their favorite spots.”

The Woodbury County Conservation Board is preparing to see packed campgrounds on Labor Day weekend, especially at Brown’s Lake – Bigelow Park and Little Sioux Park .

“The beaches opened up at both parks this past year,” Heissel said. “Brown’s Lake, we had our beach open with new concessions, and at Little Sioux Park, that had been closed for a couple years due to some depth issues and some safety issues, but with water levels getting back to normal we got rid of that.”

Despite the extreme weather seen this summer, Woodbury County’s campgrounds have had a successful camping season.

“It’s been a good summer, once we got past the rainy season, the floods that we had early on kept some of the people, they thought our parks were closed,” Heissel said. “We really weren’t too affected by the floods. We just had a week, week and a half where we were seeing some water issues.”

But over in South Sioux City, Scenic Park Campground has had to make some adjustments this camping season due to the June floods.

“It did flood the lower east side of the campground, so we do have 44 sites that had some damage to them,” parks director Gene Maffit said. “We have to replace all the electrical pedestals, so some work on the lift stations, so it will be out a while, but at least it wasn’t somebody’s home.”

Despite the reduced site numbers, Scenic Park is still expecting a fully booked campground to close out the summer this holiday weekend.

“It being packed this weekend won’t even be close to what we’ve had before when those 44 sites are of course working, but we always prepare well for these sites being occupied,” Maffit said.

Scenic Park officials say the last time their camping season was affected by floods was back in 2019.

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