Chirpchatter Campground

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

24 ft

Sites

5

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Drive-in

Nightly rate

Free

Season

Open year-round

Elevation

Not published

Dump station

No

Potable water

No

What is actually on site

• Shade canopy
• Vault toilets
• Picnic tables

Nearest public camera

O'Brien · I-5 — about 11.4 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

Located east of Shasta Lake, these remote campsites offer the perfect spot to relax. Forested and shady, this is a perfect home base for your OHV adventures! Be aware, Fenders Ferry is a rough, unimproved dirt road. There is no lake access from this facility. This campground is very popular in the fall during hunting season. Potable water is not available at this site. Site Open, Year Round. No fees are required for this site.

Getting there

From Interstate 5, take Highway 299 east for 31 miles to Fenders Ferry Road, which is Forest Road 27. Drive approximately 18 miles. Then, in the Forest Service's own words: "Once you pass the Madrone Campground, drive approximately 5 miles past the intersection. Turn left at bridge, then drive 1 mile to campground." That is the important difference from Madrone, and almost every listing online gets it wrong. Both campgrounds' pages open with the same 18 miles, so the aggregators assume they are the same drive. They are not — Chirpchatter is another six road miles beyond, and about four miles south of Madrone in a straight line. Budget well over an hour and a half from the freeway. The Forest Service's warning about the road is one sentence: "Fenders Ferry is a rough, unimproved dirt road." It gives no seasonal closure, no snow guidance and no statement about whether a passenger car will make it. The only substantive published account of the road is that 1999 watershed analysis, which records that increased maintenance and repair had been required due to higher than normal precipitation and storm damage, resulting in damaged drainage crossings, multiple slumps and slides, and erosion along segments of the system. That was a quarter of a century ago and nothing more recent has been published. One naming trap to be ready for. The recreation pages call this Fenders Ferry Road, or Road 27. The forest orders call it 34N17. They are the same road — a Forest Service watershed document reconciles them directly — so a closure notice naming 34N17 is a closure notice about your access road. There was an emergency closure on a western segment of 34N17 running through 2025; it expired at the end of that year and has not been renewed. There is no current road closure. Bring everything. There is no potable water, no fee station, no host, no reservations and no cell signal we have any report for. There are vault toilets and picnic tables, and that is the full published inventory — no fire rings and no bear boxes are listed, which is an absence in the record rather than a statement that none exist. Campfires are permitted here under the current fire order, but a California campfire permit is required year-round on this forest, for stoves as well as fires, and fire danger for the Shasta Lake area is currently rated high. The one phone number worth having is the Shasta Lake Ranger Station on 530-275-1587. If you are driving three hours to a free campground with no reviews, a call about road condition is cheap insurance.

40.86873, -122.11975 · Driving directions

Local deep dive

Chirpchatter is the campground that is still open. Its twin, Madrone, four miles up the road, has been shut by Forest Order 14-24-25 since November 2024 and stays shut until at least the end of 2026. Chirpchatter carries no closure order, the Forest Service lists it as open year round, and it is named in Exhibit A of the 2026 fire restrictions order — which means campfires remain permitted here while they are banned across most of the forest. If you wanted Madrone, this is the answer. The Forest Service gives the two camps word-for-word the same description: "Located east of Shasta Lake, these remote campsites offer the perfect spot to relax. Forested and shady, this is a perfect home base for your OHV adventures!" It is the only official prose that exists about this place, and it tells you two useful things. This is an OHV camp, and it is not a lake camp — the same page states there is no lake access from this facility. The OHV claim is backed elsewhere. The forest's own off-highway vehicle guide names exactly three campgrounds as OHV-friendly bases: McCloud Bridge, Deadlun and Chirpchatter. The system they serve is the Bagley Area OHV Routes, described as a series of recommended loops appropriate for a variety of skill levels and OHV types. No official source publishes a staging area, route mileage, loop names or difficulty ratings for Bagley, and the Motor Vehicle Use Map is the document that legally controls where you can ride. Two restrictions worth knowing before you unload: the forest prohibits riding OHVs on county or state roads including the paved western end of Fenders Ferry Road and any part of Gilman Road unless signed otherwise, and the 2026 fire order separately prohibits operating an internal combustion engine off National Forest System roads and trails. The other documented use is hunting and fishing. A 1999 Forest Service watershed analysis for this drainage — the most substantive official document that mentions Chirpchatter at all — says the two dominant recreation activities are hunting and fishing, peaking in April for turkey season and the fishing opener, and again in the fall for deer. The campground page says the same thing more briefly: very popular in the fall during hunting season. On which deer zone that is, we will not guess. The boundary of CDFW's Zone C-3 runs along the Pit River, and we could not establish from any published source which side of it this campground sits on. Check CDFW's zone map before you buy a tag. Now the honest part, and it is unusually stark. We found zero first-hand accounts of Chirpchatter anywhere on the open web. Zero reviews on The Dyrt, zero on Hipcamp, zero on Campflare, nothing on Campendium, nothing on Reddit, no YouTube video, nothing on the hunting or OHV forums. Not one photograph. Every listing you will find is a reworded copy of the same Forest Service page. That matters because the numbers are soft too. The Forest Service publishes no site count and no elevation for Chirpchatter. The five sites shown on this page come from aggregators. The elevation is worse: one aggregator says 2,300 feet, which is suspiciously close to the summit of nearby Chirpchatter Mountain rather than the campground; the USGS elevation service returns about 1,259 feet at the published coordinates. We have left the elevation blank rather than pick one. The 24-foot trailer figure on this page is from the same aggregator, which frames it honestly enough — trailers up to 24 feet can be accommodated, though the road conditions make larger rigs impractical — but it is not a Forest Service number either. The nearest thing to an official capacity figure is that same 1999 analysis, which says both campgrounds are small and can accommodate approximately five to ten groups each — a range for the pair, not a site count for either. Read all of it as the road talking, not the sites. One last note from that document, because nobody else will tell you: in 1999 the Forest Service classified Chirpchatter as a dispersed recreation site rather than a developed campground, and described it as in a degraded condition due to past floods and encroachment of non-native vegetation. The 2026 fire order now lists it among developed recreation sites, so its status has changed on paper in the intervening years — but a camp that flooded once sits where it sat.

Chirpchatter sits beside Sulanharas Creek, roughly 25 road miles east of Shasta Lake and with no access to it. The Forest Service's 1999 watershed analysis for this drainage states that both of the forest's campgrounds here are located adjacent to the creek, and places the old guard station at the Fenders Ferry Bridge on its east bank — which is almost certainly the bridge in the driving directions, one mile short of the campground. A note on that name. Until 2022 the creek carried a name built on a slur. The Department of the Interior's Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force retired it on 8 September 2022, and the replacement — Sulanharas, from the Wintu language — was recommended by the Wintu Tribe of Northern California. Older maps, the 1999 analysis and some agency documents still use the previous name, and a 2025 forest order spells the new one differently again. If you are searching for this drainage, that is why you may not find a clean match. There is a Chirpchatter Mountain about a third of a mile from the campground, and the two obviously share a name — but which named which is not documented anywhere, and neither is where the word came from. No place-name reference, mining record or Forest Service naming file that we could reach explains it. Sources also disagree on the summit's height, roughly 1,959 feet on one and 2,221 on another, which is worth knowing because the higher of those figures appears to have leaked into at least one listing as the campground's elevation. The 2024 Shoe Fire is the reason Madrone is closed and Chirpchatter is not. The fire started on 9 October 2024 on Fenders Ferry Road adjacent to Madrone, burned 5,124 acres and was fully contained on 9 November. Its origin was under half a mile from Madrone and about four miles from here, and the incident reporting describes it progressing northward — away from this campground. Chirpchatter was not named in the emergency area closure issued that October, and it was not named in the campground closure that followed. We could not obtain the fire perimeter itself, so we cannot tell you whether the flames reached this drainage; what we can tell you is that no closure order has ever applied to this campground, which is a meaningful signal on its own. Campfires are permitted here, and that is not a small thing in a Shasta-Trinity summer. Forest Order 14-26-07 runs from 1 July to 31 December 2026 and prohibits building, maintaining, attending or using a fire, campfire or stove fire outside the developed recreation sites listed in its Exhibit A. Chirpchatter is on that list. Madrone is not — consistent with a campground nobody is permitted to enter. A California campfire permit is still required year-round across this forest, and it covers camping stoves as well as open fires. Stay limits come from Forest Order 14-25-24, running 30 September 2025 to 30 September 2027: a maximum of 30 days in any 12-month period inside a developed recreation site. Chirpchatter's classification has moved over the years — dispersed in 1999, developed in the 2026 fire order — but the 30-day figure is the one to plan against. What is not here is as important as what is. No lake. No potable water. No fee, and therefore no service you can call on. No reviews, no photographs and no trip reports from anyone who has been. For an experienced OHV rider or a hunter who already knows this country, that is the appeal. For anyone else, go in expecting to be on your own.

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Shasta-Trinity National Forest — Chirpchatter Campground (open year round, no fee, vault toilets, tables, no potable water, full directions past Madrone) · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Madrone Campground, the closed twin four miles north · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — 2026 Fire Restrictions Forest Order 14-26-07 (Chirpchatter named in Exhibit A; Madrone absent) · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Forest Order 14-26-07 signed PDF, Exhibit A developed recreation sites · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Shasta-Trinity alerts index, checked for any order naming Chirpchatter or Fenders Ferry Road · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Forest-wide camping stay limits order 14-25-24 (30 days per 12 months in developed sites) · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Current conditions: campfire permits required year-round, Shasta Lake fire danger high · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Off-highway vehicle recreation: Chirpchatter named as an OHV-friendly base, Bagley Area routes, road restrictions · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Squaw Creek Watershed Analysis, April 1999: campgrounds adjacent to the creek, 5–10 groups each, Chirpchatter managed as dispersed, road storm damage, hunting and fishing as dominant uses · checked 2026-08-31
• CAL FIRE — Shoe Fire incident record: 9 Oct 2024, 5,124 acres, origin adjacent to Madrone Campground · checked 2026-08-31
• InciWeb — Shoe Fire, progression northward from the origin · checked 2026-08-31
• CDFW — deer hunting zone descriptions, Zone C-3 boundary along the Pit River · checked 2026-08-31
• USGS 3DEP Elevation Point Query Service — approximately 1,259 ft at the published coordinates · checked 2026-08-31