Beehive Point Shoreline Area

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

Not published

Sites

Not published

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Dispersed

Nightly rate

$0–$17 / night

Season

Open year-round

Elevation

1067 ft

Dump station

No

Potable water

No

What is actually on site

• Swimming
• Fishing
• Food storage required

Nearest public camera

Sacramento Hill · I-5 — about 2.4 mi from the campground

Camera operated by Caltrans District 2

Frame refreshes about every 5 min · feed last verified 6 days ago

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

Facility info

USFS: "Shoreline camping area. There are no picnic table or fire rings. Campfire permit required." Recreation.gov: "Beehive Dispersed Camping/Day Use Area is located on the Sacramento River Arm of Shasta Lake, it has trash and portable restrooms provided in season. This is a shoreline area and doesn't have designated sites. This Campground is on a First Come - First Serve Basis, vistors are required to physically be at the campground to purchase and claim a site. You must also occupy the area the day you pay for it, no advance payments. ... Dispersed Area has no facilities and is pack in/pack out in winter months typically Mid September to Mid May - no fees are due during that time."

Getting there

Take Interstate 5 to exit 702, signed Antlers Road / Lakeshore Drive, at Lakehead — about 25 miles north of Redding. Turn left at the end of the off ramp, left again at the stop sign junction, and follow Lakeshore Drive to the entrance on the left. How far along Lakeshore Drive is genuinely unclear, and the confusion is the Forest Service's own. Its page for this site says, in a single paragraph, both "Located one mile west of I-5 on Lakeshore Drive" and "Follow Lakeshore Drive approximately 3 miles". Those cannot both be right. The reason appears to be that the whole paragraph is copied verbatim from the Forest Service's page for the Sugarloaf boat ramp, which is genuinely about three miles out. Recreation.gov gives the more consistent figure: "Turn left on Lakeshore Dr for about 1 mile to the dispersed area entrance on the left." Plan on about a mile and watch for the turning. No official source describes the entrance road. Every camper who has written about it describes the same thing: unpaved, rutted and washed out in places. "The road is severely damaged with huge washout potholes" (2018). "The entrance is a little rutted so if you bring a trailer just be cautious" (2019). "Can definitely be hard to get deep into the site without 4 wheel drive" (2023). People do bring 26- and 30-foot rigs down onto the beach; getting to the better spots is where clearance starts to matter. Bring your drinking water — the Forest Service states there is no potable water here. Bring a California campfire permit if you want any fire or stove at all; it takes a few minutes online and is required year-round across this forest. Bring hard-sided food containers, since the official page requires food to be kept in approved containers. And bring shoes you can wear on the beach: broken glass near the entrance is a repeated complaint. In season there are portable toilets and trash service. Outside it, roughly mid-September to mid-May, there is nothing and no fee — pack everything out. The exact service dates are not published for this site; Recreation.gov says only "typically Mid September to Mid May", while the neighbouring Gregory Beach page gives 10 May to 12 September, which is probably the same calendar. Payment is on arrival and only on arrival. Recreation.gov is explicit: you must be physically at the campground to buy and claim a spot, you must occupy it the day you pay, and there are no advance payments and no reservations. There is an iron ranger on site taking cash or check, or you can use the Recreation.gov app's Scan and Pay. Fees are quoted at $17 a night and $12 for day use on the Forest Service page; some listings still show $15, and one camper reported $15 in 2025. Budget $17, per vehicle.

40.84880, -122.40305 · Driving directions

Local deep dive

Beehive Point is a beach you camp on, not a campground. There are no numbered sites, no tables and no fire rings — you drive down onto the shoreline, find a flat piece of it, and pay at an iron ranger. In the service season that costs $17 a night and, in Recreation.gov's own words, "this area is vehicle specific and charges for each vehicle" — so it is per vehicle, not per site, which is the single most commonly missed thing about this place. Day use is $12. Outside the season, roughly mid-September to mid-May, it is free with no services at all. Two official sources describe it and they do not agree on what it is called. The Forest Service calls it Beehive Point Shoreline Area. Recreation.gov calls it Beehive Dispersed Area. Aggregators have invented a third, "Beehive Point Shoreline Campground", which no official source uses. Same place, three names. The thing that actually decides whether you enjoy this place is the lake level, and it cuts both ways. Too low and there is no reaching the water: one camper in July 2025 wrote that a few years earlier "the water was so low that we literally could not reach it, even after a long walk down, it just became too rocky". Too high and there is no beach to camp on: another, in May 2022, noted it "would be difficult access if Shasta was full". Beehive is at its best in the middle. Check the live level at the top of this page before you commit to the drive — it is the one number that matters here. Now the rule that will catch people out, and no aggregator carries it. Beehive Point is **not** listed in Exhibit A of Forest Order 14-26-07, the current fire restrictions order running 1 July to 31 December 2026 — none of Shasta Lake's shoreline areas are. Under that order, building or attending a fire outside a listed developed site is prohibited. But the order carries an exemption that fits this place precisely: a holder of a valid California campfire permit may build a fire "within 10 feet of Shasta Lake, Trinity Lake, Iron Canyon Reservoir and at least 50 feet from any vegetation". So a wood fire here is legal only if you have the permit and you build it down on the bare shoreline at the waterline. Camp back in the trees, where the shade is, and you cannot have one. The Forest Service's own page for this site says simply "Campfire permit required" — accurate, but not the whole story. A camper in July 2024 put the practical version well: "We went during a no burn period, so we were out of luck and ran out of camp." Two more corrections to what you will read elsewhere. There are toilets — portable ones, in season, along with trash service; they are removed in the off-season, which is why some reviews say there are none and others say there are. And there is a published food-storage requirement: Recreation.gov's page for this facility states that all food must be kept in approved containers. What you get in exchange for the roughness is a genuinely beautiful, cheap, waterfront pitch that big rigs can reach. A first-hand account from 2018: "The beach is massive (even though the water level was high!) and you can park any size rig on it. It's not very flat though." A 2025 camper made it in a 26-foot Class C. Several report needing high clearance to get to the better spots. The honest downside, from the campers themselves: crowds and noise on weekends and school holidays, with ATVs, generators and loose dogs; broken glass at the entrance, bad enough that one reviewer's dog was cut; wasps around fire pits in midsummer; and poison oak, which the official page confirms is abundant throughout the forest. One camper's summary of the wooded area: "Most everything up in the trees is poison oak."

Beehive sits on the Sacramento Arm at Lakehead, on the west side of I-5 — worth stating plainly, because the Sugarloaf and Antlers ramps and the shoreline areas on this stretch get muddled together constantly. The nearest ramp is Sugarloaf, and this is one of the few distances on this lake that comes from an official source rather than an aggregator. Recreation.gov: "A public boat ramp is located approximately 1 mile away at Sugarloaf (dependent on water level), but informal mooring is allowed if the water levels are sufficient." That parenthesis is doing real work. Sugarloaf is the low-water ramp on this arm — two lanes that open once the lake has dropped past 75 feet and stop working below 160 feet down. Antlers, half a mile east of the same freeway exit, is the high-water ramp: four lanes until 75 feet of drawdown, after which launching moves to Sugarloaf. Between them they cover most of a season, but which one you use depends entirely on the level the day you arrive. Check the ramp status at the top of this page. The two official fee figures also disagree — the Sugarloaf page says $17 per day at all public ramps, the Antlers page says $18 per vehicle per day. On elevation, a correction to what we published earlier and to what most listings say. We show 1,067 feet, and it is a genuine Forest Service figure: the Shasta-Trinity Recreation Facilities Guide prints 1,067 in its elevation column for Beehive Point. That it happens to equal the lake's full-pool elevation is not a coincidence and not a scraping error — the guide's elevation column carries only a handful of round values across all twenty-one Shasta Lake facilities, and it assigns shoreline areas the lake's own level. Read it as a lake-referenced approximation rather than a survey. The practical version is simpler: the campable ground here sits at or about full pool by definition, because it only exists when the lake is down. Figures elsewhere ranging to 1,122 feet have no published source. The name is a dead end and we would rather say so. There is no Beehive Point or Beehive Bluff in the federal geographic names database, no documented origin, and no Forest Service explanation. The only etymology anyone has published is a camper's joke about yellowjackets. Do not trust it, and do not trust us if we invented a better one. Officially documented hazards, all from the Recreation.gov facility page: poison oak is abundant throughout the forest; all food must be kept in approved containers; wildlife is frequent in the area; and the area is popular for water skiing and jet skiing, so treat the swimming water as shared with boat traffic. Forest-wide, Forest Order 14-25-29 requires clean-drain-dry mussel protocol on Shasta Lake and its ramps. Reported by campers but not documented officially: yellowjackets around fire pits in midsummer, mosquitoes at dusk, broken glass at the entrance, and weekend crowding with generators and ATVs. Rattlesnakes are mentioned nowhere for this site, so we are not going to warn you about them. Cell service is contested and we will not pick a winner. One 2022 account had AT&T streaming video while Verizon managed only texts. A 2024 account reports "little to no cell signal from Verizon or T-Mobile". A 2025 account says "pretty good cell reception here". Assume it is workable and variable. On fire history: no source connects either of the big local fires to this site. The 2021 Salt Fire burned east of Interstate 5 in the Gilman Road area — the other side of the freeway from here. The 2018 Hirz Fire is described only as burning near Lakehead, with no source naming an arm or a side. No review from 2019 onward mentions burned ground, which is weak evidence but the only evidence there is. Stay limits come from Forest Order 14-25-24, in force to 30 September 2027. Aggregators uniformly claim 14 days; that figure comes from an older dispersed-camping guide, not the current order, which sets different limits by area and does not name individual sites. Treat 14 days as unverified and the forest-wide order as what applies.

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Shasta-Trinity National Forest — Beehive Point Shoreline Area (no tables or fire rings, campfire permit required, $17/$12, no potable water, directions) · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — facility 10157490, "Beehive Dispersed Area (CA)": per-vehicle fee, portable toilets and trash in season, no designated sites, iron ranger, food storage, poison oak, 1 mile to Sugarloaf · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Shasta Lake recreation page, definition of shoreline camping areas and their seasonal services · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Forest Order 14-26-07 signed PDF: Exhibit A developed sites, and the campfire-permit exemption within 10 ft of Shasta Lake and 50 ft from vegetation · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — 2026 fire restrictions alert page · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Sugarloaf Public Boat Ramp: two lanes past 75 ft of drawdown, unusable below 160 ft, $17 daily ramp fee · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Antlers Public Boat Ramp: four lanes to 75 ft of drawdown, then launching moves to Sugarloaf, $18 per vehicle per day · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Forest-wide camping stay limits order 14-25-24 · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Shasta-Trinity current conditions: California campfire permits required year-round, including for stoves · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Shasta-Trinity dispersed camping guide (pack it out, general dispersed rules) · checked 2026-08-31
• The Dyrt — 16 first-hand reviews of Beehive Point, source of the lake-level, road, crowding, wasp and poison oak accounts quoted here · checked 2026-08-31
• Campendium — 6 reviews, including the poison oak observation · checked 2026-08-31
• Total Travelers — first-hand account, May 2018, beach size and rig access · checked 2026-08-31
• California Data Exchange Center — Shasta Lake elevation, gauge SHA · 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