Riverside RV Park - Kemmerer

Riverside RV Park in Kemmerer, Wyoming, is a scenic riverside campground on Ham's Fork River with more than 50 years of welcoming travelers to the Lincoln County fossil country and the Star Valley's outdoor recreation corridor — a long-established Wyoming campground in the town where J.C. Penney opened his first store in 1902 and where the Green River fossil beds of Fossil Butte National Monument preserve the most complete Eocene-era freshwater fish fossils in the world. Kemmerer's Lincoln County position on US-189 at the junction of Ham's Fork and Hams Fork River tributaries gives the campground the specific southwestern Wyoming character of a historic mining and railroad town at the edge of the Green River Basin's fossil-rich Eocene lake sediments in one of the most paleontologically significant landscapes in the Rocky Mountain West. Riverside RV sites along Ham's Fork River with the complete practical campground infrastructure give Riverside RV Park the scenic river setting and the over-50-year operational continuity that the Kemmerer camping market has sustained as the practical overnight base for Fossil Butte National Monument visits, the Hams Fork River fishing, and the Star Valley's outdoor recreation corridor that Lincoln County's long-axis position between the Wyoming Ranges and the Salt River Range enables. The campground's riverside position on Ham's Fork gives guests the specific western Wyoming river character of a campground on a trout stream in the high desert sage basin. Pets are welcome. Fossil Butte National Monument, 10 miles west of Kemmerer on US-30 in Lincoln County, protects the world's most significant Eocene fossil fish locality — the 52-million-year-old Green River Formation's laminated limestone that preserves the freshwater fish, palm fronds, insects, and birds of the Eocene-era Fossil Lake in extraordinary completeness and in the highest fossil density of any Eocene-age deposit in the world. The Knightia herring fossils, the Mioplosus bass, and the rare Lepisosteus gar preserved in the Green River Formation's paper shales give the monument's visitor center the specific paleontological collection of a world-class natural history museum in a national monument whose fossil quarry sites are actively worked by NPS paleontologists. The J.C. Penney birthplace of the national department store chain in Kemmerer's historic downtown on Pine Street is the original Golden Rule store that James Cash Penney opened in 1902 as the first cash-only dry goods store in the rural Wyoming mining town — the restored store gives Kemmerer the specific retail history landmark of the chain whose 860 stores in the 21st century grew from the single Kemmerer dry goods operation that Penney's credit refusal and cash-only policy gave its competitive advantage in the Wyoming coal mining community. Riverside RV Park serves guests through Lincoln County's Wyoming camping season from May through October, with the summer Fossil Butte paleontology visits and the Wyoming license plate fossil fish art — the Green River Formation fossil fish that licensed commercial quarries in Fossil Basin have supplied to the natural history museum market and the souvenir fossil trade since the 1870s — sustaining the fossil country tourism market through the summer months. Star Valley, 40 miles north of Kemmerer on US-89 in Lincoln County, is one of Wyoming's most productive dairy farming and cheese making valleys — the Pine Creek Cheese and the Periodic Spring's intermittent natural spring near Afton give Star Valley its specific agricultural and geological curiosities. Reserve sites ahead for the summer Fossil Butte season and peak Wyoming travel.