Bailey Cove Campground

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

45 ft

Sites

7

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Drive-in

Nightly rate

$28–$60 / night

Season

Open year-round

Elevation

1085 ft

Dump station

No

Potable water

No

What is actually on site

• Boat rampTwo-lane paved ramp beside the campground, but usable only to 50 feet of drawdown — the shallowest cutoff of any major ramp on Shasta Lake.
• Shade canopy
• Dog friendly
• Flush toilets
• Swimming
• Fishing
• Picnic tables
• Fire rings
• Food storage required

Nearest public camera

O'Brien · I-5 — about 0.7 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

Seven sites on the McCloud Arm — five single, two double — with a two-lane paved ramp right beside the campground and the Bailey Cove Loop Trail starting from the day use area. It is the smallest developed campground on the arm, which is why it fills first. Currently no potable water.

Getting there

From Interstate 5 take exit 695, O'Brien / Shasta Caverns Road. Turn right at the end of the offramp, follow Shasta Caverns Road four tenths of a mile to the Bailey Cove junction on the right, then Bailey Cove Road six tenths of a mile to the campground. About one mile of surface road from the freeway, paved the whole way. Nineteen miles north of Redding, roughly twenty-five minutes. That last six tenths of a mile is the whole problem for a big rig. One camper who has towed for years put it bluntly: steep, narrow and twisty, and someone without a lot of trailer experience should avoid it. Another brought a 31-foot trailer through in October 2024, made it, and still called the road not big-rig friendly. It is doable at 30 feet. It is not relaxing. Every site is a back-in. There are no pull-throughs. At 30 feet or more, target site 1 or site 7 — both rated 45 feet — because sites 2 through 6 are rated 35 and leave you no margin. The asphalt spurs are not level, so bring blocks; site 7 is the exception and sits nearly flat. Parking is tight, extra vehicles are awkward, and the extra vehicle fee is $12 a night. Do not put the Forest Service's Redding administrative address into a navigation app — it will send you to the wrong place. Use the coordinates, or 20086 Bailey Cove Road, Lakehead.

40.80030, -122.31915 · Driving directions

Photos of the area

8 more photos

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Local deep dive

Seven sites, one loop, and they are not equal. Sites 1 and 7 are the two rated for 45 feet; everything else is 35. Site 7 is the best on the loop and it is not close — double-wide, nearly level, two picnic tables, no neighbours on either side, and close to the restrooms. Site 1 is the quiet one, furthest from the freeway. Site 4 is the private one and picks up shade from about 3pm in July. Site 3 is large and shaded by about 4:30pm, and one family has been booking sites 2 and 3 together for over twenty years. Site 5 has a tent pad too small for a real tent — campers have arrived and left. Sites 3 and 4 draw repeat complaints about noise and unclear boundaries. Now the thing every other guide leaves out: you will hear Interstate 5. The campground sits about six tenths of a mile from the freeway with no ridge in between, and jake brakes carry at night. It is the single most common complaint across every review platform, and it is not universal — plenty of people sleep fine — but if quiet is why you camp, book site 1 or go elsewhere. Bring water regardless of what any page says. The Forest Service lists potable water as available; its own day use page for the same complex says it is not; and the concessionaire's site says flush toilets and water spigots in one sentence and "currently has no potable water" in the next. Campers reported an outage through 2022 and 2023 and working flush toilets again in 2026. Call the ranger station at 530-275-1587 before you rely on it. Heat is the real enemy here — 109°F has been logged in August, dropping into the 70s after sundown. Mosquitoes are bad at dusk, poison oak is abundant right up to the sites, and foxtails come in with the dry grass. Bear boxes at every site are not decorative.

Bailey Cove is a boater's campground for the first half of the season and a hiker's campground for the second half, and the reason is the ramp. It works only until the lake drops 50 feet below full pool. Antlers goes to 69, Hirz Bay to 97, Sugarloaf to 153, Centimudi and Jones Valley past 200. Full pool is 1,067 feet, so Bailey Cove's ramp goes out of service around 1,013 to 1,017 feet. In late August 2026 the lake sat at 991.5 feet — more than twenty feet past the cutoff, and a camper in August 2025 described the ramp as just dirt with minimal incline and large potholes. Check the lake level on this page before you tow a boat here. The Forest Service also advises skipping this ramp on summer weekends because of congestion, and pointing at Packers Bay instead. The same drawdown decides whether you can swim. The campground sits about 300 yards from the water even at full pool, so there is never a walk-out-your-tent shoreline. In May and June it is a genuine swimming spot. By late August in a drawdown year it is a steep, muddy walk down to the water, and reviewers have arrived to find the cove dried out entirely. What is reliably good is the Bailey Cove Loop Trail, which starts from the day use area and circles a peninsula. The Forest Service calls it 3.1 miles; GPS tracks come in at 2.7 to 2.9 with 350 to 600 feet of cumulative gain. The best thing about it is the contrast between the two sides — sunny south slope of oak, manzanita and knobcone pine, shaded north side of Douglas fir, incense cedar and ferns, including the rare Shasta maidenhair fern. There is a 270-degree lake viewpoint at the southeast tip looking up the McCloud Arm. Dogs are welcome on leash — Hipcamp's listing says no pets, and that is simply wrong. Watch the drop-offs, and carry water. For boaters: a Forest Service order against golden and zebra mussels covers Shasta Lake and all its ramps from December 2025 to December 2027, with fines up to $5,000. Clean, drain and dry before you launch. One fee to know about before you park. There is no entrance fee anywhere in Shasta-Trinity National Forest — unlike Whiskeytown down the road, where the Park Service charges $25 a vehicle just to come in, nothing is owed here simply for being on the lake. Your campsite fee is the whole of it. But the Bailey Cove Day Use Area, immediately beside this campground, is a separate fee site at $12 per vehicle per day, and the campground page says nothing about it. Dekkas Rock Day Use Area and Fisherman's Point, the other two day-use sites in this corridor, are both free. So Bailey Cove is the one place on Shasta Lake where a camper can walk into an unexpected charge, and it is right here.

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Shasta-Trinity National Forest — Bailey Cove Campground · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — facility 232760, booking and per-site limits · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Boat Ramps at Shasta Lake (drawdown limits) · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Bailey Cove Trail · checked 2026-08-31
• Shasta Recreation Company — concessionaire · checked 2026-08-31
• Campendium — camper reviews and carrier signal tests · 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
• USFS — Bailey Cove Day Use Area, a separate $12 per vehicle per day fee site beside the campground · checked 2026-09-01