Hirz Bay Campground

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

50 ft

Sites

46

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Drive-in

Nightly rate

$28–$56 / night

Season

Open year-round

Elevation

1100 ft

Dump station

No

Potable water

Yes

What is actually on site

• Boat rampHirz Bay ramp, about 1 mile. Three ramps for different lake levels — three lanes to 75 ft of drawdown, two lanes to 95 ft, then closed. 61 lighted parking spaces and a courtesy dock.
• Shade canopy
• Dog friendly
• Pull-through
• Flush toilets
• Vault toilets
• Potable water
• Swimming
• Fishing
• Picnic tables
• Fire rings
• Cell service
• Food storage required

Nearest public camera

Salt Creek · I-5 — about 4.9 mi from the campground

Camera operated by Caltrans District 2

Frame refreshes about every 4 min · feed last verified 4 days ago

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

Facility info

Forty-six sites — 36 single, 10 double — spread through pine, oak and madrone on a hilltop above the McCloud Arm, ten miles east of Interstate 5 down Gilman Road. It is the largest campground on the arm and the one people pick for space: sites are genuinely far apart and several reviewers describe real privacy. Flush toilets, bear lockers at every site, a pay phone, and an amphitheatre where the Hirz Bay Trail starts. No hookups and no dump station. Open year-round, reservable roughly mid-May to mid-September and first-come the rest of the year.

Getting there

From Interstate 5 take exit 698 — signed Gilman Road from the south, Salt Creek from the north. Turn east and follow Gilman Road roughly ten to eleven miles to the campground. Sources disagree on the exact mileage: the Forest Service says nine, the boat ramp guide says ten, Recreation.gov says eleven. Plan on ten or eleven. The number that actually matters is the time. Campers consistently report about thirty minutes for those ten miles — a sustained twenty miles an hour on pavement, which tells you everything about the curves. Expect continuous winding with limited sight lines and effectively nowhere to pass. It is paved the whole way, including the campground loops and every parking spur, and no source reports any gravel or dirt. For a thirty-foot rig there is no published length, width or weight restriction on Gilman Road, and no grade warnings anywhere in the Forest Service record. It is a two-lane forest road that handles a thirty-foot rig fine at a patient pace. The real hazards are the curve count, boat-trailer traffic on summer weekends feeding the ramp's 61 parking spaces, and the fact that the ramp closes in severe weather — which should tell you something about winter conditions on the road in. Arrive with empty tanks and full water. There is no dump station on site and the nearest is about fifteen miles away at Lakehead. About twenty miles northeast of Redding, and roughly forty-five minutes door to door.

40.86644, -122.24936 · Driving directions

Photos of the area

7 more photos

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Local deep dive

Forty-six sites is a lot of choice, and the per-site records reward reading them. Site 9 is the standout for anything long — 50 feet, paved, double-rated, and one of only two true pull-throughs on the whole campground. Site 10 is the other. Everything else is a back-in, and the sites are not all level, so bring blocks. The ten doubles are 9, 20, 27, 29, 35, 36, 40, 42, 45 and 46. Site 27 has a repeat visitor who has booked it three years running and calls it the most spacious. Site 46 gets named for privacy and for sitting close to both water and bathrooms. Site 35 is the only one the Forest Service itself labels secluded — though reviewers also report yellow jackets and bear activity there specifically. Site 45 sits right at the Hirz Bay trailhead. Site 21 is the one people complain about. Twenty-four sites carry a full shade rating, which in a place that regularly hits 100°F is the single most useful filter. Sites 16, 18, 24, 26, 28, 37, 39, 43 and 45 are nearest the trail down to the water. Two things to know before you book. The bears here are habituated and active — one camper watched a roughly 500-pound black bear work the lockers at 4am, another party left early after repeated visits, and several people report finding broken lockers. Check yours on arrival and report it if it does not latch. And the poison oak is genuinely everywhere, including inside the sites, which matters most on the unmaintained scramble down to the lake. The other recurring complaint is late-night noise from other campers. Site 6 is designated as the host site, but reviewers repeatedly describe it as unstaffed, and quiet hours going unenforced. On water: the Forest Service page says no potable water is available, while Recreation.gov says there is, and eighteen individual site records mention a faucet next to the site. Campers report working spigots. The infrastructure is clearly there — but the manager's own page says otherwise, so carry your own and treat a working tap as a bonus. The ranger station is 530-275-1587.

Hirz Bay is the quiet one, and that is not marketing — it is geography. Antlers sits half a mile from exit 702 and Bailey Cove about a mile from exit 695, and both campgrounds are dominated by Interstate 5 noise in review after review. Hirz Bay is ten miles east down Gilman Road, and across six review platforms there is not a single mention of freeway or traffic noise. If road noise is what has put you off Shasta Lake camping, this is the answer. What you trade for it is water access. The campground sits on a hilltop and there is no waterfront site — the lake is down a trail. At or near full pool that is a short walk. At the drawdown Shasta reaches by late summer it becomes a steep descent over exposed red clay and a genuinely strenuous climb back, and campers describe both the ten-minute walk down and the clay that stains everything. Sites 16, 18, 24, 26, 28, 37, 39, 43 and 45 are the ones closest to the trailhead. Worth correcting a figure that circulates: this campground is not 300 feet above the water. Full pool is 1,067 feet and the campground sits around 1,090 — about 25 vertical feet above a full lake. The steepness people describe is drawdown, not elevation. The Hirz Bay ramp is about a mile away and it is one of the better ones on the lake: three separate ramps for different levels, three lanes usable to 75 feet of drawdown and two lanes to 95, then closed. That is far deeper than Bailey Cove at 50 feet or Antlers at 75. Check the live lake level on this page before you tow. The Hirz Bay Trail runs 1.6 easy miles from the campground amphitheatre along the shoreline to Dekkas Rock Campground, crossing several shaded creeks on two bridges with lake views most of the way. One piece of history worth knowing: the 2021 Salt Fire started at the mouth of Gilman Road, near the exit 698 offramp, and Gilman Road residents were evacuated. No source maps the perimeter against the campground itself, and nothing currently restricts access. The area also burned in the 2018 Hirz Fire, which took its name from this bay.

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Shasta-Trinity National Forest — Hirz Bay Campground · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — facility 232762, per-site limits and shade ratings · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Hirz Bay Public Boat Ramp, 95 ft drawdown limit · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Boat Ramps at Shasta Lake, drawdown table · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Shasta Lake Trails Guide, Hirz Bay Trail · checked 2026-08-31
• The Dyrt — camper reviews and carrier coverage · 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