Home · Camping near Wausau
Aniwa · north-central Wisconsin

Camping near Wausau

Twenty minutes east of the city and a long way from it. Two hand-built A-frame cabins, a canvas yurt, six woodland tent sites, a wood-fired sauna and two ponds, all on a working butterfly sanctuary. Firewood is free.

Getting here

How far is it, really?

The mailing address says Aniwa, but the land sits west of the village: closer to Wausau than the town name suggests. Road distances below; times are the honest ones, not the optimistic ones.

Driving distance and time to The Wellness Retreat
FromBy roadDrive
Wausau19 milesabout 20 minutes
Antigo18 milesabout 20 minutes
Shawano48 milesabout 50 minutes
Stevens Point50 milesabout 55 minutes
Appleton80 milesabout 1 hour 20
Green Bay83 milesabout 1 hour 30
Madison159 milesabout 2 hours 45
Milwaukee177 milesabout 3 hours
Minneapolis204 milesabout 3 hours 30
Chicago262 milesabout 4 hours 30

Address: 177852 County Hwy Z, Aniwa, WI 54408. Open the pin in Maps.

What you can book

Cabins, a yurt, or a patch of woods

A-frame cabins

Two hand-built cabins · $55/night

Cedar shingles, a deck, and the woods at the door. No power and no water at the cabins. The shared kitchen has both.

See the cabins

The Wood Turtle Yurt

Canvas bell tent · May to September · $40/night

Glamping in the meadow, and the only stay with its own electricity.

See the yurt

Tent sites

Six woodland sites · from $35/night

Off-grid, primitive camping on a wooded pad. Pitch your own tent.

See the sites

The whole campground

Group retreats & family reunions · by inquiry

Take the entire retreat (every cabin, every site, the yurt, the sauna and the ponds) for a reunion, a workshop or a gathering.

Rent it all
Why here

What you won’t find at a state park

It is a butterfly sanctuary first and a campground second. There is a butterfly house you can walk into, meadows we let go to wildflowers on purpose, and milkweed left standing for the monarchs.

There is a wood-fired sauna under the oak, two small ponds with a canoe and kayaks, walking trails, and a green-roofed corn crib with a fire in it and the lights on after dark.

Firewood is free. So is the sauna, the canoe and everything else on the grounds. There is nothing here that costs extra once you have booked.

It is genuinely rustic. There is no indoor plumbing, and no power at the cabins or the tent sites. Drinking water is hot and cold from a dispenser in the shared kitchen, and washing up happens at an outdoor sink. If that sounds like the point rather than the problem, you will like it here.