Renting campsites to eclipse travelers was a money-making opportunity for Madras landowners, but the money was by no means easy, or guaranteed.

Despite hosting hundreds of people, who paid $200 or more for tent sites and $300 or more for RV sites, campground operators interviewed by The Bulletin said they ran into unexpected expenses, and some of them struggled to find the right recipe for online marketing.

“We all had a great time at least,” said Damien Boynton, who created Solar Celebration on farmland north of Madras. He said he sold 200 campsites at $150 each and broke even because of the unexpectedly high cost of portable toilets. He and his business partner, landowner Christian Kowaleski, ended up buying toilets and plan to sell them to farmers in order to turn a profit on the event.

Others said they made money on the event, which drew a peak crowd of 100,000 people to Madras and surrounding farmland between Sunday and the eclipse on Monday, according to Madras eclipse coordinator Lysa Vattimo.

Two large sites, SolarFest at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds and Solartown, north of Madras Airport, were sold out months in advance, but the city of Madras eclipse website listed 25 more campgrounds in the Madras, Culver and Metolius areas.

RD Ranch northeast of Madras created one of the larger campgrounds with 500 to 600 sites, said Dawn Foss, who owns the ranch with her husband, Rick Foss. The couple’s goal was to earn enough money to replace a hay barn that burned down several years ago, she said. They met that goal, and they might have earned enough to start building a permanent wedding venue, Dawn Foss said.

“We really enjoyed doing this,” she said. “It would be cool to do this all the time.”

Many of the campgrounds were set up less than six months before the eclipse, and the operators had a lot to learn about online marketing.

SolarBear Events LLC began marketing its campground south of Madras in April but didn’t see many bookings until six weeks before the eclipse, co-owner Josh Gordon said. Changing the marketing strategy put SolarBear higher in Google search results, and they ended up selling 280 campsites, he said. That was enough to make the campground a profitable endeavor, even after buying portable toilets and paying a premium to have them pumped out, he said.

Running a campground was also incredibly time-consuming.

“There was just five of us that hosted this and took care of all these people,” said Di Green, who sold 50 tent-camping sites at Di’s Family-Friendly Solar Eclipse Camp northeast of Madras. “We were the security. We were the toilet paper getters. We were the water getters for the wash station. We were the trash dumpers.”

Green said the campground definitely earned enough to cover the major expenses, and she wasn’t especially concerned about her bottom line. “It was an amazing and great experience,” she said. “I cannot thank our whole entire community enough for the outstanding job they have done.”

Gordon said he and his partner, Brett Wooderson, and their three helpers each put in 70 hours over the four-day weekend, and they didn’t have any incidents.

“I really enjoyed the crowd that was there,” Gordon said. “To have almost 1,000 people on your property and not have a complaint, it exceeded my expectations.”

With predictions of chaos on the rural highways, event planners asked eclipse travelers to arrive early and stay late, but campground operators said there was high demand for single-night stays. Two months before the eclipse, RD Ranch decided to offer a single night of camping and reservations took off.

“That’s when it went crazy,” Dawn Foss said.

This week her email inbox is full of thanks from people who otherwise couldn’t afford to travel, she said.

While widespread media coverage of huge crowd predictions scared off some travelers, many others drove to the Madras area on Sunday with plans to sleep in their cars. And they were well-prepared. Anita Sutton, who set up an RV campsite on 5 acres south of Madras near U.S. Highway 97, said she initially turned away the car campers because she didn’t have toilets.

“Then people started calling me,” she said, “telling me they had their own camping toilet.”

—Reporter: 541-617-7860, kmclaughlin@bendbulletin.com