Highway 28 gets you through Cascade in about forty seconds at the speed limit. A bar, a pizza place, a gas station, a bridge over the north branch of the Milwaukee River, and then farmland again. Most people never slow down, which is exactly how the best things to do in Cascade have stayed quiet. Almost none of them are in the village. They are in the thirty thousand acres of glacial hills that start about five miles west of the last building, and along the county highways running out to meet them.
The village of 722 is the base. The forest is the reason. Here are nine of them, roughly in the order a first visit tends to go.
Start with the forest, because that is what you came for
The Northern Unit of the Kettle Moraine State Forest covers roughly 30,000 acres across Sheboygan and Fond du Lac counties, and Cascade sits on its eastern boundary. It took 572,379 visitors in 2024. The forest is open 6am to 11pm daily, and a Wisconsin state park admission sticker is required, which catches people out more often than it should.
Long Lake Recreation Area is the closest piece of it, 7.6 miles west on Division Road, and it holds the biggest beach and campground in the whole unit. There is a large day-use area, so an afternoon swim needs no booking and no plan.
Climb Parnell Tower
Parnell Tower is a 60-foot wooden observation tower standing on the highest point of elevation in the Kettle Moraine State Forest. On a clear day the view runs about 25 miles in every direction, over forest and the farmland beyond it. Trailhead parking is on County Highway U, five miles north-west of the village, and the tower is free to climb once you have the park sticker on the windscreen.
The postal address says Plymouth. Ignore it. Plymouth is 6.4 miles away, the tower is 5 miles from Cascade, and the USGS map sheet it appears on is named Cascade. Rural Wisconsin mail routes and rural Wisconsin geography have never agreed with each other, and this is one of the places it shows.
Go in October if the timing is yours to choose. Of the two genuine articles anyone has written about this tower, both are about the colour, which tells you what locals already know. The observation tower at Parnell is worth the stairs in any season, but autumn is when people make the drive on purpose.
Eat where the village eats
Five rooms, four of them within half a mile of the Madison Avenue junction. Nobody here would call it a dining scene and you should not either. It is five places that each do one thing properly and have done it for a long time.
Sipp's Bar -N- Grill at 507 Madison does fish dinners, perch and bluegill, alongside homemade plates and a dessert list longer than an old-school pub and grill has any need for. Nevvo'z Pizza, a few doors down at 302, builds a crispy cracker crust and will put a bacon cheeseburger on it if you ask. They have catered graduation parties here for years, which in a village of 722 means they have fed most of the people you will pass on the sidewalk.
Further out, Parnell Tavern holds the crossroads of County A and V, 4.6 miles west. A rustic country bar in a country setting, and the only food within five miles of the tower, which makes it the natural end of a hiking afternoon rather than a destination in itself.
Where the village eats comes down to those five rooms and not one more, so it is a short list worth knowing properly.
Drink mead at SoLu Estate
SoLu Estate Winery & Meadery sits on County Road F, 4.9 miles west, making wine, mead and distilled products on the property. Mead is fermented honey wine, and it is not something most Wisconsin wineries bother with, which is half the reason to go.
Find the hula hoop tree
There is a tree on County Road F, about three and a half miles west of the village, hung with hula hoops. Nobody sells tickets. There is no sign, no car park and no explanation. You drive until you see it, and then you understand why people stop.
Walk Nichols Creek
Nichols Creek State Wildlife Area covers 612 acres north of the village and it is the quietest thing on this list by some distance. Coldwater seeps and spring runs feed the creek, which then becomes the North Branch of the Milwaukee River. Brook trout reproduce in it naturally, without stocking, which is rarer in this part of the state than most people assume.
Closer in, Mill Pond Park sits half a mile north of the Madison Avenue junction, which is about as far as anything in Cascade is from anything else. Vu's Garden grows dahlias out on Tipperary Road and sells them straight off the farm, cut that morning. Neither will take you an hour. Both are the kind of thing you only find out about by living somewhere, or by being told.
Shoot at Highland Sportsmen's Club
Highland Sportsmen's Club on County Road A, five miles west, runs long-distance shooting, close-quarters courses and gun dog training programmes. It is a genuine club rather than a range you wander into off the road, so call ahead about what is open to visitors on the day you want to come. Turning up unannounced is how you waste a drive.
Sleep on the water
Four places to stay in Cascade, three of them on a lake. That ratio tells you most of what you need to know about why people come.
Hoeft's Resort & Campground on Crooked Lake has been a family destination for generations and runs everything from tent sites to cabins, with an arcade and a snack bar for the days the weather turns. Larson's Resort, closer in on Ellen View Road, takes a 38-foot fifth wheel on a powered site and keeps a lending shelf of books, games and videos. That last detail tells you more about the place than any photograph would.
Four Seasons Resort rents cottages on a small quiet lake further west, with boats available to guests and a bar close by. And if canvas is not the plan at all, The Inn at Three Ponds & a Stream is an adults-only bed and breakfast on 300 acres with three ponds, hiking trails and bike rentals thrown in.
All nine options, including the state campgrounds out in the forest, sit in camping around Cascade.
The practical village, for when you are based here
Cascade is small enough that its useful addresses fit in a paragraph, and knowing them saves a drive to Random Lake. The bp on Madison Avenue runs 24 hours with a restroom, and R-Store next to it does convenience goods seven days a week from early morning to evening. Between them they are the whole of retail.
Quality Cut Meats on Milwaukee Avenue does custom meat processing, which is the sort of business a farming village keeps and a suburb loses. If you are cooking at a campsite rather than eating out, it is the best thing in town. K.A.R.S. & Cascade Service Center on Madison handles car and truck repairs, which matters more than it sounds when the nearest alternative is eight miles away.
Cascade Village Hall on 1st Street doubles as an event venue and the seat of village government. There is no grocery store, no pharmacy and no bank. Plan accordingly, and do the big shop in Plymouth or Sheboygan on the way in.
Drive County A, slowly
County Road A heading west out of the village is the Kettle Moraine Scenic Drive. It does not announce itself with much signage, and most people driving it have no idea the road they are on carries a name at all.
It runs over kettles, kames and eskers, which are the three shapes a retreating glacier leaves behind: a hole where a buried block of ice melted out, a mound where meltwater washed gravel into a crack, and a ridge where a stream ran underneath. Once somebody points them out you cannot stop seeing them, and a farm field stops looking like a farm field. The drive through the kettles is the single best hour available here and it costs nothing but fuel.
What is nearby once you have done all nine
Greenbush is 9.6 miles north-north-west on Highway 23 and holds an 1849 plank-road stagecoach inn standing on 240 acres. It is a Wisconsin Historical Society site with a carriage museum, and the season matters: it drops to Saturdays only from early November. The Wade House at Greenbush is the one genuine museum within ten miles.
Random Lake is 7.8 miles south-south-east, built round a 212-acre lake with five parks, a working forge and a pickleball court inside an art gallery. There is a day in the village round the lake if Cascade runs short, which is not a high bar but is sometimes the point. Plymouth is 6.4 miles north-north-east. Sheboygan and Lake Michigan are 16 miles east-north-east, and Milwaukee is 43 miles south.
One last thing, because it is the fact people here lead with. In June 2010 Cascade became the first community in Wisconsin to power its municipal wastewater treatment plant entirely with locally produced wind, using two 100-kilowatt turbines. A village of 722 did that before anywhere else in the state managed it. They are visible from the road on the way in, and the drive up from Milwaukee, forty-odd miles of it, ends with them turning over the treatment plant, which is how you know you have arrived.
Frequently asked questions
Published September 14, 2026
