Gregory Creek Group Campground

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

16 ft

Sites

18

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Drive-in

Nightly rate

$160 / night

Season

May 10 – Sep 12

Elevation

1085 ft

Dump station

No

Potable water

No

What is actually on site

• Shade canopy
• Dog friendly
• Flush toilets
• Swimming
• Fishing
• Picnic tables
• Fire rings
• Cell service
• Food storage required

Nearest public camera

Antlers Bridge · I-5 — about 0.8 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

A single group unit on the east shore of the Sacramento Arm, four miles up Salt Creek Road from Interstate 5, taking up to 100 people and 20 vehicles. The Forest Service describes one loop of 18 site pads, moderately to thickly wooded with a mix of oak and pine giving over 80 percent canopy cover — the shadiest campground on this arm. Each site has a picnic table, fire ring, grill and tent pad on a paved back-in spur. Flush toilets. The Forest Service states that potable water is not available, though Recreation.gov says drinking water is provided. No hookups, no showers, no dump station. Recreation.gov records the site as lakefront. Reservable as one unit only, May 10 to September 12, and gated — call for the combination a week ahead.

Getting there

From Interstate 5 take exit 698, signed Salt Creek/Gilman Road, turn LEFT at the end of the off ramp and follow Salt Creek Road — also signed Gregory Creek Road — for four miles. One guide says four and a half and puts the campground 22 miles north of Redding. Note the direction carefully, because this one exit serves three different destinations. Turn left and go north on Salt Creek Road for Gregory Creek. Turn right and go east on Gilman Road for the entire McCloud Arm. Go west about a mile for Nelson Point. It is easy to commit to the wrong one in the dark. Ignore one line on the Forest Service's own page. It states that the campground is 15 miles northeast of I-5 on Gilman Road, which cannot be reconciled with the "follow Salt Creek Road for 4 miles" in the very next sentence. The same 15-mile sentence appears verbatim on the Gregory Beach page, so it reads as boilerplate copied across the district's Gilman Road sites. Four to four and a half miles is the figure to use. The four miles from the freeway to the campground are paved, per campers who have driven it. What they describe as rough — dirt, rocks, washboard, deep ruts, almost single lane with a precarious cliff section — is the spur that continues down to Gregory Beach, past the campground. Do not transfer those reports onto your approach. That said, the paved road is winding, narrow and unlit by the same accounts, and with a 16-to-20-foot spur limit and back-in-only paved parking this is not a big-rig destination. Call 530-275-8113 at least a week ahead for the gate code. There is a locked gate and no way around it. Bring your own drinking water regardless of what any source says about the taps here — the Forest Service says there are none. There is no dump station. Plan on storing food in your vehicle, since no official page lists bear boxes at this campground.

40.88797, -122.36815 · Driving directions

Photos of the area

2 more photos

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Local deep dive

First, an ambiguity worth clearing up, because it trips people up. The Forest Service's Recreation Facilities Guide lists "Gregory Creek" with 18 sites, while Recreation.gov sells something called "Gregory Creek Group". These are the same place. Recreation.gov offers exactly one bookable campsite — Site 001, the whole loop — and the 18 is the number of individual pads inside it. There is no separate family campground here. Gregory Beach, on the shoreline nearby, is a different thing again: undesignated dispersed camping, first-come, pay on site, and that is where the swimming beach is. What you are booking is the shadiest campground on the Sacramento Arm, and the Forest Service is specific about it: moderately to thickly wooded with a mix of oak and pine that provide plenty of shade during the summer, over 80 percent cover. Recreation.gov's site record simply reads "Shade: Full". On an arm that bakes, that is the single best reason to choose it. The Forest Service is equally specific about what grows underneath — manzanita, blackberries, poison oak, tree fern, wild grape and native grasses. Poison oak is in the campground's own understory, not a general forest warning. It is also candid about privacy, which is rare. Recreation.gov's point-of-interest page says the understory provides limited privacy between sites. One listing puts it less diplomatically: campsites are close and cuddly. For a hundred people in one loop, that is probably the point. Two things to sort out before you go. The gate: Recreation.gov's instruction is to call 530-275-8113 one week before arrival for the entry gate code. And the water, which is the sharpest conflict on this page — the Forest Service states that potable water is not available at this site, while Recreation.gov lists drinking water and four other sources agree with Recreation.gov. Worth knowing that the Forest Service says the same "no potable water" line about Antlers, Lakeshore East and Nelson Point too, so this looks like a district-wide change its own pages have made and Recreation.gov has not mirrored. Arrive with water and treat a working tap as a bonus. Bear boxes are the other gap. Neither official page lists them here, which is conspicuous because the Forest Service pages for Nelson Point and Antlers both name bear boxes explicitly in their facility lists. Absence of mention is not proof of absence, but plan to store food in a hard-sided vehicle. There are no reviews of this campground. The Dyrt has two listings for it and both are empty, Hipcamp has none, Campflare has none, CampsitePhotos has no photos at all. The only real camper reporting in this area is for Gregory Beach next door, and it is about the beach and the road down to it rather than the campground. One rule for the group: no amplified sound.

Gregory Creek sits on the east shore of the Sacramento Arm, four miles up a canyon from Interstate 5 — the busiest and most developed arm of Shasta Lake, though this campground is far enough up Salt Creek Road to be out of the immediate freeway corridor. Among its neighbours it is the group-only option and the shady one. Antlers and Lakeshore East are family campgrounds taking 30-foot rigs; Nelson Point is a hybrid with vault toilets and no water; Gregory Beach is undesignated shoreline. Gregory Creek is the only campground on this shore that books as a single unit for up to 100 people, and at over 80 percent canopy it is comfortably the shadiest of them. It is also genuinely lakefront by Recreation.gov's own site attribute, where the Forest Service says of Antlers that direct access to the water is very difficult. On the shoreline itself the Forest Service is unusually candid about what drawdown does: when the lake level is high the bank is moderately sloped to provide access to the water, and as the lake level drops it exposes a step drop off to the water. Recreation.gov adds that the drop-off is particularly pronounced near Gregory Beach. No source gives a distance from the sites to the waterline at any level. Check the live level at the top of this page. Campers at Gregory Beach in 2022 described the lake as about 150 feet below normal, which is the kind of season that turns a sloped bank into a cliff. Is there actually a creek? The campground is named for the drainage and there is a Gregory Creek inlet where it meets the lake, but no source we could find describes the creek itself or whether it runs through the summer. We would rather say so than guess. The season carries an unusual caveat. The Forest Service notes that the operating season is subject to change for bald eagle habitat protection, citing Forest Order 14-58-40. We could not locate the text of that order — it does not appear on the current alerts index — so its scope and dates are unverified. Shasta Lake holds around 30 nesting pairs and the nesting season runs January through July. The 2021 Salt Fire came through this drainage. It started on 30 June at Gilman Road and Coal Creek Road, burned 12,660 acres and destroyed 41 structures before containment on 19 July. Incident updates described fire activity concentrated around the Salt Creek and Gregory Creek areas east of Interstate 5, and Gregory Creek Road was closed at the I-5 overcrossing with residents evacuated. Evacuation orders for Gregory Creek were lifted on 9 July 2021. Whether the campground itself was damaged, no source we found records — and we are not going to assert either way. What we can say is that it is listed in Exhibit A of the 2026 fire restrictions order as an active developed site where campfires remain permitted, it has a published 2026 season, and no current Forest Service alert affects it. The 2018 Delta and Hirz fires burned in the wider region but no source connects either to this drainage.

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Shasta-Trinity National Forest — Gregory Creek Group Campground (80% canopy, understory, drawdown drop-off, no potable water, eagle order) · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — facility 273375, gate code, drinking water, no amplified sound · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — group site 104249, 100 people / 20 vehicles / 20 ft, paved back-in, lakefront, full shade · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — Gregory Creek POI 238385, limited privacy between sites · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Recreation Facilities Guide, Shasta-Trinity NF (18 sites, 16 ft) · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Gregory Beach Shoreline Area, the separate dispersed area next door · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Antlers Public Boat Ramp, nearest launch and the Sugarloaf handover · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — 2026 Fire Restrictions Forest Order 14-26-07, Gregory Creek named in Exhibit A · checked 2026-08-31
• The Dyrt — crowd-verified per-carrier cell coverage, August 2026 · checked 2026-08-31
• Campendium — Gregory Beach camper reports on the access road and lake levels · checked 2026-08-31
• YubaNet — Salt Fire incident updates, Gregory Creek closures and evacuation lifts · checked 2026-08-31
• California Data Exchange Center — Shasta Lake elevation, gauge SHA · checked 2026-08-31