Dry Creek Group Campground

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

Not published

Sites

2

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Walk-in

Nightly rate

$80 / night

Season

Apr 1 – Oct 31

Elevation

Not published

Dump station

No

Potable water

Yes

What is actually on site

• Shade canopy
• Dog friendly
• Vault toilets
• Potable water
• Swimming
• Fishing
• Picnic tables
• Fire rings
• Food storage required

Nearest public camera

Whiskeytown Visitor Center — about 3.3 mi from the campground

Camera operated by National Park Service, Whiskeytown NRA

Frame refreshes about every 1 min · feed last verified 6 days ago

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

Facility info

Recreation.gov, facility 232455: "This tent-only group campground is located on the southern shore of Whiskeytown Lake in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, 14 miles west of Redding, California." Facilities: "There are two spacious tent-only sites available at Dry Creek. Each site contains two large serving tables, numerous picnic tables, small and large charcoal barbecue grills, a cleared fire pit area, bear-proof storage lockers, vault toilets and drinking water." Need to know: "Gate to area is closed and locked. It will need to be opened by the reservation party so pay attention to the combo code sent with this reservation." / "Overnight RV camping is not allowed at Dry Creek campground. This campground is for tent camping only." / "Vehicles are not permitted in the tent area except for loading and unloading equipment. All vehicles must be parked in the gravel parking lot." / "Generators are not allowed" / "Entrance Pass Required - Whiskeytown is a National Park Service site and requires a vehicle entrance fee."

Getting there

Recreation.gov's directions are precise and, unusually for this park, easy: "From Interstate 5 in Redding, CA, take State Route 299 west and drive approximately 10 miles. Turn left onto Kennedy Memorial Drive at the Whiskeytown visitor center. Continue 5.6 miles on Kennedy Memorial Drive until the road ends at the access to Dry Creek Group Campground." John F. Kennedy Memorial Drive is paved the whole way and the campground is at the end of it, 14 miles west of Redding. This is the most straightforward access of any campground in the park — no gravel spur like Horse Camp, no steep entrance like Crystal Creek, no seasonal road closure like Sheep Camp. If your group is arriving in a convoy of ordinary cars, this is the one that will not cause trouble. The gate is the thing to prepare for. It is closed and locked, and opening it is the reservation party's job using the combination sent with the booking. Get that code onto more than one phone before you leave signal, and share it with anyone arriving separately. If it fails, the Whiskeytown Visitor Center is on 530-246-1225. Bring a card. Whiskeytown charges a park entrance fee on top of the $80 site — $25 per private vehicle for seven days, $20 for a motorcycle, $15 per person on foot or bicycle, free under 16 — and the park is cashless. For a 50-person group arriving in a dozen cars that is real money, so it is worth telling people in advance; a $55 Whiskeytown annual pass covers Lassen Volcanic, Crater Lake and Lava Beds too, and America the Beautiful passes are honoured. You do not need to bring water, which sets this apart from every primitive campground in the park: drinking water is provided. You do need to bring everything else. There are no hookups, no showers, no dump station and no electricity. Vehicles stay in the gravel parking lot except to load and unload, so bring a wagon or enough hands. Generators are prohibited outright, so if your group was planning amplified anything or a powered kitchen, plan again. Check-in is 1:00pm and check-out is 12:00 noon. The season runs early April to the end of October; the Superintendent's Compendium groups Dry Creek with Crystal Creek, Sheep Camp and Brandy Creek Primitive as the seasonal campgrounds, closed November to March. One conflict on stay limits, for anyone planning something long. Recreation.gov and the compendium both cap camping at an aggregate of 14 days between 1 April and 31 October; the Park Service's own campground data feed says the 14 days run 15 May to 15 September instead, and the compendium adds a 30-day cap "during any continuous 12 month period" where Recreation.gov says "per calendar year". Ask the park if it matters.

40.62556, -122.58083 · Driving directions

Photos of the area

8 more photos

Previous slideNext slide

Local deep dive

Dry Creek is the only group campground in Whiskeytown, and it is the one place in the park where a large party can camp on the lake itself. Recreation.gov puts it "on the southern shore of Whiskeytown Lake", and the practical consequence is buried in the fine print: boats may be launched at nearby Brandy Creek Marina and **moored at the campground**. No other Whiskeytown campground offers that. Two sites, not one — that is the first thing to get right when you book. Each takes a minimum of 20 people and a maximum of 50, so between them the campground holds 100. If your group is 15, this is not the campground for you; the minimum is real. The fee is $80 per site per night. That $80 has a small history worth knowing. When the Park Service announced the reservation system for these sites, the fee was $75, and at least one regional guide still quotes $75 today. Recreation.gov's own Whiskeytown gateway now says $80. Budget $80. The kit is unusually good for a park campground, and much better than the primitive sites elsewhere in Whiskeytown. Recreation.gov: "Each site contains two large serving tables, numerous picnic tables, small and large charcoal barbecue grills, a cleared fire pit area, bear-proof storage lockers, vault toilets and drinking water." Note that last item — **drinking water**, which none of the park's three primitive campgrounds have. For a 50-person booking that is the difference between a normal weekend and a logistics exercise. Three rules that will shape your event. There is no overnight RV camping: tent only. Generators are not allowed. And vehicles are kept out of the tent area entirely — "All vehicles must be parked in the gravel parking lot", with entry permitted only for loading and unloading. Plan your gear haul accordingly. There is also a locked gate, and Recreation.gov's warning is blunt: "Gate to area is closed and locked. It will need to be opened by the reservation party so pay attention to the combo code sent with this reservation." If you have issues with it, the number is 530-246-1225. One more piece of Recreation.gov housekeeping that says something about demand here: "Because of complaints from other guests trying to secure reservations, making multiple bookings with the intention of canceling all but one is not permitted at this campground." Two sites for the whole park will do that. On campfires, note the jurisdiction first. Whiskeytown is National Park Service, so none of the Forest Service orders that govern our Shasta Lake pages apply. The Superintendent's Compendium, effective 3 April 2026, permits fires in government-provided permanent fire grates, burning charcoal briquettes or natural firewood. But Recreation.gov's page for this campground carries an undated banner prohibiting campfires, charcoal and wood-burning stoves outright, gas or propane only — while its own campsite records for G01 and G02 both say campfires are allowed, and the Park Service's Alerts and Conditions page, updated 25 November 2025, lists no restriction at all. That is Recreation.gov contradicting itself inside its own site, on top of contradicting the park. Your site has a cleared fire pit area and charcoal grills. Whether you may light them is a call to 530-242-3400. Finally, the honest note. We could not find a single review of this campground anywhere — zero on The Dyrt, zero on Campendium, nothing on Reddit, no blog, no video. For a facility that takes 100 people and is hard enough to book that Recreation.gov polices duplicate reservations, that is a remarkable silence. Everything on this page comes from the operator and the Park Service.

Dry Creek sits at the end of Kennedy Memorial Drive on the south shore, which puts it closer to the water than anything else in the park's camping inventory. Recreation.gov's note that boats can be launched at Brandy Creek Marina and moored at the campground is the detail that makes it worth the drive for a group with boats — no other Whiskeytown campground publishes mooring. Whiskeytown Lake behaves nothing like Shasta, which is the adjustment to make if you have come from our Shasta Lake pages. Shasta is drawn down through the summer, which is why we publish a live level and ramp status for it. Whiskeytown is the afterbay for the Judge Francis Carr Powerhouse, and the Park Service describes it as having "two water levels, winter and summer, which minimizes shoreline erosion to two levels as compared to constant water level changes at other reservoirs." The lake looks essentially full all season. A widely repeated 1,210-foot figure with an 11-foot maximum drought drawdown comes from a regional blog with no official citation — the principle holds, the numbers are not sourced. All three launches, Whiskey Creek, Brandy Creek Marina and Oak Bottom, were listed open as of the Park Service's November 2025 conditions update. One rule specific to this campground that will not affect most groups but matters if it affects yours: the Superintendent's Compendium lists **Dry Creek Campground** among the places where pack animals are prohibited. Horses, burros, mules, camelids and goats are permitted on essentially all trails and areas in the park **except** a named list, and this campground is on it. If you are bringing stock, Horse Camp is the only campground in Whiskeytown that accommodates them. On the Carr Fire: nothing is published about this campground. The fire ignited in the park on 23 July 2018, and no Park Service release, Recreation.gov text or credible secondary source says Dry Creek burned, closed, was rebuilt or reopened. We are not going to infer it from the fire's size. On that size, the Park Service itself gives three different figures across three pages — an October 2018 release says 96 per cent of the park, a 2019 release says roughly 39,000 of 42,000 acres which is about 93 per cent, and the current Alerts and Conditions page says 97 per cent. All three are NPS. We show all three rather than choose. The documented hazards are the Park Service's, and they are more specific than the Forest Service publishes for our Shasta Lake sites. Across the burn scar: falling trees, broken or hanging limbs, burned-out stump holes, abandoned mine features and loose rocks, amplified by winter storms, with erosion and runoff accelerated by vegetation loss. Debris flows are flagged in several watersheds — Brandy Creek, Boulder Creek, Paige Boulder Creek and Mill Creek. Bears and mountain lions, with the instruction never to feed bears or leave food unattended even briefly. Rattlesnakes, dangerous to children and pets. And drowning, which the park averages about one of a year and attributes every time to the person not wearing a lifejacket — worth repeating to a group of fifty before anyone gets in the water. Under-13s must wear a Coast Guard-approved lifejacket on any moving vessel. Poison oak, ticks and heat do not appear on the park's safety page. That is a gap in the record rather than an all-clear. We show no elevation. Neither the Park Service nor Recreation.gov publishes one for any Whiskeytown campground, and the figures circulating on aggregator sites have no source behind them. Worth carrying away: Whiskeytown is administratively part of the Whiskeytown-Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area, and several booking platforms file it under that full name, which reads as Forest Service. It is not. Every rule on this page is National Park Service, and one of the four reviews of the park's Horse Camp shows a camper making exactly that mistake, calling the entrance pass a "national forest pass".

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Recreation.gov — facility 232455, Dry Creek Group: two tent-only group sites, facilities including drinking water, locked gate and combination, no RVs, no generators, vehicles out of the tent area, directions · checked 2026-09-01
• Recreation.gov — group site G01 (797), minimum 20 and maximum 50 people, lakefront, campfire allowed · checked 2026-09-01
• Recreation.gov — group site G02 (796) · checked 2026-09-01
• Recreation.gov — Whiskeytown gateway 2977, current $80 per night figure · checked 2026-09-01
• NPS — New Reservation Service for Whiskeytown Group Areas: the original $75 per night figure still repeated by secondary sources · checked 2026-09-01
• NPS — Camping At Whiskeytown, the park's own camping table (updated 30 October 2024) · checked 2026-09-01
• NPS — Whiskeytown Superintendent's Compendium, effective 3 April 2026: fires in provided grates, seasonal dates, stay limits, and the pack-animal exclusion naming Dry Creek Campground · checked 2026-09-01
• NPS — Whiskeytown Alerts & Conditions, 25 November 2025: no fire restriction listed, boat launches open · checked 2026-09-01
• NPS — Whiskeytown Fees & Passes: $25 vehicle entrance fee, $55 annual pass valid at four parks, cashless · checked 2026-09-01
• NPS — Whiskeytown Safety: post-fire hazard trees, debris-flow watersheds, bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, drowning and lifejacket rules · checked 2026-09-01
• NPS — Carr Fire update, 18 October 2018, stating 96 per cent of the park burned (one of three differing NPS figures) · checked 2026-09-01
• NPS — water quality monitoring at Whiskeytown Lake, and the two-level reservoir description · checked 2026-09-01
• The Dyrt — confirms zero reviews exist for this campground · checked 2026-09-01