Antlers Campground

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

55 ft

Sites

59

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Drive-in

Nightly rate

$28–$58 / night

Season

Mar 1 – Oct 31

Elevation

1100 ft

Dump station

No

Potable water

No

What is actually on site

• Boat rampFour-lane paved ramp half a mile east of the exit, usable to 75 feet of drawdown. Past 75 ft it closes completely and launching moves to Sugarloaf.
• Shade canopy
• Dog friendly
• Pull-through
• Flush toilets
• Vault toilets
• Fishing
• Picnic tables
• Fire rings
• Cell service
• Food storage required

Nearest public camera

Antlers Bridge · I-5 — about 0.5 mi from the campground

Camera operated by Caltrans District 2

Frame refreshes about every 5 min · feed last verified 4 days ago

Useful for road surface, smoke and haze — not for checking your site.

Facility info

Fifty-nine sites — 43 single, 16 double — on a bluff above the Sacramento Arm, in oak, pine and manzanita that give real shade and spacing. There are no hookups, no dump station and no showers; water comes from shared spigots. Three loops run on different calendars: Loop 1 is open March through October, Loops 2 and 3 only from May 10 to September 12. An amphitheater hosts weekend interpretive programs between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The Forest Service is direct about the tradeoff: the views are excellent and there is no practical way down to the water.

Getting there

From I-5 take exit 702, Lakeshore Drive / Antlers Road, at Lakehead. Head east off the interchange, turn right onto Antlers Road, and follow it just under a mile to the entrance on the right. About 22 miles north of Redding and 35 miles south of Mount Shasta. Paved the whole way, including every parking spur. The one hazard worth planning around is inside the campground, not on the road in. A full-timer in a 40-foot coach describes one tight tree-bordered turn at the beginning of the campground and calls it not really doable for anything bigger than 40 feet. A traveller in a truck camper said he would have been extremely nervous attempting it with a 28-foot fifth wheel. At 35 feet you are fine. At 40 you are at the documented limit. Know your specific site length before you commit, because they are not uniform — 22 feet to 55 feet across the campground, and the loop layout does not follow site numbering. Every site is back-in; there are no pull-throughs. Sites rated 45 feet or more are 023, 025, 027, 029, 035, 037, 038, 039, 043, 046 and 050. Do not arrive after dark. More than one camper reports it being hard to find the entrance at night. And arrive with full fresh water and empty tanks — there are no hookups, no dump station and no showers, and campers report the shared spigots will not take a hose.

40.88904, -122.37551 · Driving directions

Photos of the area

7 more photos

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Local deep dive

Three loops, three different seasons, and Recreation.gov hides which loop a site is in — the loop number only appears buried in each site's description text. Loop 1 is the shoulder-season loop, the only one open in March, April and October. Loops 2 and 3 run May 10 to September 12 only. Loop 2 is the best all-round loop. Six of its fourteen sites are explicitly described as shady, it holds the only two sites described as being near the trail to the lake view — 015 and 018 — and it contains site 046, the longest in the campground at 55 feet. Loop 3 is the big-rig loop, with four sites at 50 feet plus 029 and 035 at 45. Site 037 in Loop 3 gets singled out as very spacious and isolated. Loop 1 is where the freeway complaints cluster. The three angriest reviews about I-5 name sites 4, 5 and 9, and all three are Loop 1. Site 059 is literally described as "near exit". If you are booking Loop 1 for the shoulder season, take the noise seriously. The sixteen doubles are 006, 007, 009, 013, 017, 019, 022, 030, 031, 033, 041, 042, 045, 049, 051 and 057 — that is 16 doubles plus 42 reservable singles plus the host site at 002, which reconciles exactly to the official 59. Site 009 is a double rated for only 22 feet, which is a large group in a small hole. Site 022 is the best big-rig double at 40 feet. Watch the short ones: 009 at 22 feet, then 024, 044 and 058 at 25, and 007 at 26. Sites 034 through 042 along Antlers Road are reported as too uneven for larger rigs, and site 021 has trees close enough to interfere with slides and awnings. The camp hosts get unusually consistent praise here — by name, repeatedly, across years. The host sits at site 002 and sells firewood. Two hazards the Forest Service posts officially: bears frequent the area and every site has a locker, and poison oak grows in the campground. Poison oak is the second most repeated complaint after noise. Add June bugs, mosquitoes, dust, and real heat — this sits at about 1,100 feet, so 90°F in June and worse in July.

Antlers is a viewpoint campground, not a waterfront one, and Recreation.gov says so outright: there is no access to the water from this campground. The Forest Service softens it slightly — some sites border the shoreline but direct access is very difficult. What sits between you and the lake is a bluff of steep rock, and at drawdown the gap grows by exactly however far the lake has dropped. In late August 2026 that was about 75 feet of additional exposed, steep bank. Two sites, 015 and 018, are described as near a trail to view the lake. That is a view, not a route down. If you want to swim, drive. Locals point to the Sugarloaf ramp area when the lake is high, Charlie Creek toward Lakehead as the most drawdown-resistant option, and Gregory Creek off exit 698 down to about 60 feet of drawdown. The Antlers ramp is a four-lane paved launch half a mile east of the exit, and it works down to 75 feet of drawdown — then it stops entirely. There is no partial service. Past 75 feet, launching moves to the Sugarloaf low-water ramp, which runs from 75 all the way to 160 feet down. Full pool is 1,067 feet, so Antlers goes out of service around 992 feet. Check the live lake level on this page before you tow. Then there is the noise, which is the defining feature of camping here. Recreation.gov posts it as an official notice: the campground is right off I-5 and trains are frequent. Freeway noise carries through every loop. The trains are the worse half — one camper logged three during the night, including one that stopped near the campground for thirty minutes at 3am. Another describes train activity around the clock plus periodic diesel smell from the adjacent rail access. Plenty of people say it never bothered them. But there is no quiet corner here, and if silence is why you camp, this is the wrong campground at any price. For boaters: a Forest Service order against golden and zebra mussels covers Shasta Lake and its ramps from December 2025 to December 2027. Clean, drain and dry, and expect to need certification to launch.

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Shasta-Trinity National Forest — Antlers Campground · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — facility 232753, per-site limits and loop assignments · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Antlers Public Boat Ramp, drawdown limits · checked 2026-08-31
• Shasta Recreation Company — concessionaire · checked 2026-08-31
• Campendium — camper reviews and carrier signal tests · checked 2026-08-31
• Wheeling It — big-rig review from a 40 ft coach · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Shasta-Trinity Recreation Facilities Guide, the source of this campground's published elevation; its elevation column reports a small set of round, lake-referenced values across all Shasta Lake facilities rather than surveyed figures · checked 2026-09-01