Hirz Bay 1 Group Campground

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

30 ft

Sites

1

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Drive-in

Nightly rate

$170 / night

Season

Apr 1 – Sep 30

Elevation

Not published

Dump station

No

Potable water

No

What is actually on site

• Vault toilets
• Swimming
• Fishing
• Picnic tables
• Fire rings
• Food storage required

Nearest public camera

Salt Creek · I-5 — about 4.8 mi from the campground

Camera operated by Caltrans District 2

Frame refreshes about every 4 min · feed last verified 6 days ago

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

Facility info

Hirz Bay 1 group camp has a maximum capacity of 120 people. The camp has the following; two (2) large pedestal grills; one (1) large fire ring; two (2) large sinks with faucets and a paved parking lot with 21 spaces. The parking area is separate from the sleeping/camping area.

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 along the McCloud Arm. The Forest Service says approximately 10 miles for this camp. Recreation.gov says 11. For reference, the Forest Service gives 9 miles for the main Hirz Bay Campground, which sits just short of here, so 10 to 11 is coherent either way. Allow 30 to 35 minutes: campers on this road consistently report about half an hour for the first ten miles, which is a sustained twenty miles an hour and tells you exactly what the curves are doing. Do not set off without the gate code. Call Shasta Recreation Company on 530-275-8113 at least a week before you travel and ask for the combination. Bring your reservation confirmation number or letter as well — Recreation.gov requires it at the site. Arrive with water. All of it. The Forest Service states there is no potable water at this campground, and while the same page lists two large sinks with faucets, no source confirms what comes out of them is drinkable. For 120 people over a weekend that is several hundred gallons, and it is the single biggest planning item on this booking. Arrive with empty tanks too. There is no dump station here; the nearest reported is at Lakehead, roughly fifteen miles west. Bring firewood bought locally rather than hauled from home, and expect to need your own bear-proof containers: the Forest Service inventory for this camp lists no bear lockers, unlike Hirz Bay 2, and food storage is required across this forest regardless of what is provided. Trailers: Recreation.gov's campground page gives a 30-foot maximum, while the underlying site record for unit 89727 says 40. We publish the conservative 30. If you are towing something between the two, phone the concessionaire — a group booking is an expensive thing to arrive at and be turned around from. One caution on the last stretch. The parking lot is paved and separate from the camping area, so bring something to carry gear the last few dozen yards; nobody publishes the exact distance between the two.

40.86817, -122.25163 · Driving directions

Photos of the area

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Local deep dive

Hirz Bay 1 is the larger of the two group camps at Hirz Bay, and it has the strangest published inventory of any group site on this lake. The Forest Service description is short enough to quote in full: "Hirz Bay 1 group camp has a maximum capacity of 120 people. The camp has the following; two (2) large pedestal grills; one (1) large fire ring; two (2) large sinks with faucets and a paved parking lot with 21 spaces. The parking area is separate from the sleeping/camping area." Read that list again and notice what is not in it. There is no picnic table count. Hirz Bay 2, its smaller sibling for 80 people, is credited with nine tables. Dekkas Rock, for 60 people, gets eight large tables. For 120 people here, the Forest Service lists none at all. We cannot tell you whether that means there are no tables or simply that nobody wrote the number down, and there is no camper account anywhere that settles it. If your group needs tables, phone before you book. Now notice what is in it: two large sinks with faucets. On the same official page, the Forest Service states that potable water is not available at this site. Both statements are current and both are official. The likeliest reading is that the sinks carry non-potable water for washing dishes, but the Forest Service does not say that, and we are not going to say it for them. Bring every drop your group intends to drink — for 120 people that is a real logistics problem, not a footnote — and treat any tap you find here as wash water until somebody official tells you otherwise. The third thing to plan around is the cooking. One large fire ring and two large pedestal grills, for up to 120 people. That is one fire ring for a group the size of a wedding. Groups of this size that have booked here and cooked well have almost certainly brought their own propane; nothing in the terms forbids it, and the Forest Service does not provide anything beyond the ring and the two grills. Parking is the quiet catch. The Forest Service says 21 paved spaces. Recreation.gov's record for the single bookable unit — site 89727 — permits 25 vehicles. Plan against the 21 you can see rather than the 25 you are technically allowed, and remember the lot is deliberately set apart from the sleeping area: pleasant at two in the morning, tiresome when you are carrying 120 people's coolers. At $170 a night for the whole camp, this is the cheapest group site per head we have costed on Shasta Lake — about $1.42 per person at capacity, against $1.75 at Hirz Bay 2 and $2.83 at Dekkas Rock. If your group is genuinely large, the arithmetic points here. Two rules to pass to your people before you book. There is a locked gate, and you must call Shasta Recreation Company on 530-275-8113 about a week ahead for the combination — the same arrangement as Hirz Bay 2, Dekkas Rock, Moore Creek and Pine Point, so it is the norm on this road rather than a quirk. And Recreation.gov's terms for this site say, in capitals, no amplified sound. For a 120-person booking that is worth saying out loud before somebody loads a PA into the truck. The honest caveat, and it is a large one. Hirz Bay 1 has zero reviews on The Dyrt, zero on Campendium, and zero on every other major camping platform we checked. We found three entries on one smaller site, two of which contradict each other. Everything above comes from the Forest Service and Recreation.gov. Nobody has published a first-hand account of staying here, so if you read a confident description of what this camp feels like, ask where it came from.

Hirz Bay is a complex rather than a single site. The Forest Service describes it as including Hirz Bay Campground, the Hirz Bay Trail, the Hirz Bay public boat ramp and group camps 1 and 2. This is the up-arm end of it, and Group 1 is the further of the two group camps from the water. Nobody official publishes a distance from either group camp to the ramp. Aggregators quote roughly a mile for Group 1 and half a mile for Group 2, which cannot both be right — the two camps' own published coordinates put them about 300 yards apart. Measuring straight-line from the published coordinates ourselves, this camp is roughly 0.4 miles from the ramp and Group 2 is roughly 0.2. Walking or driving it will be further, and we would rather show you our arithmetic than repeat a figure we cannot source. The ramp itself is the good one on this arm. Three paved lanes for varying lake levels, in service to 75 feet of drawdown on three lanes and 95 feet on two, with 61 lighted paved parking spaces, a courtesy dock and flush toilets — but no drinking water there either. Fee figures differ between the Forest Service page and Recreation.gov; budget $18 per vehicle per day. Check the live lake level and ramp status at the top of this page before you tow. The walk from here is the Hirz Bay Trail, and the Forest Service's trails guide calls it a scenic walk following the shoreline, crossing several cool, shady creeks with lake views most of the way, recommended on warm summer evenings or cool mornings. Its length is genuinely disputed: the trails guide says 1.6 miles, Recreation.gov says 2, AllTrails says 3. It runs between the Hirz Bay area and Dekkas Rock. A note on the amphitheatre, because other sites mention one. An older edition of the Forest Service trails guide names a "Hirz Bay amphitheater" as the trail's western terminus. The current official pages for Hirz Bay Campground, both group camps and the boat ramp do not mention an amphitheatre at all. We could not confirm one still exists, so do not plan a presentation around it. Campfires are currently permitted at this camp. The 2026 fire restrictions order, running July through December 2026, bans fires outside listed developed sites and names "Hirz Bay Group Camp No. 1" in Exhibit A — which is precisely why the fire ring here stays usable while dispersed fires are banned. Penalties run to $5,000 for an individual. Camping in a developed recreation site is capped at 30 days per 12 months under the forest-wide stay-limit order. Bears are real here. The one credible first-hand review we found of the neighbouring Hirz Bay 2 describes a bear tearing open the garbage containers overnight. Group 2's inventory lists bear lockers; this camp's does not. Bring hard-sided containers and use them. On fire history: the 2018 Hirz Fire burned 46,150 acres near Lakehead and takes its name from Hirz Mountain and Hirz Bay, immediately west of here. The 2021 Salt Fire started near the Salt Creek exit at the foot of Gilman Road and forced evacuations along that road. No source we could reach records damage to or closure of this campground in either fire, and we are not going to assert one. The Forest Service currently lists the site as open with no alert against it. Cell service is thin and carrier-dependent: Verizon is reported working here, AT&T and T-Mobile are not. Treat the gate code as something you write down before you lose signal, not something you look up on arrival.

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Shasta-Trinity National Forest — Hirz Bay 1 Group Campground (capacity, inventory, no potable water, 21 spaces) · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — facility 233096, gate code notice, 30 ft trailer limit · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — group site 89727, 120 people / 25 vehicles, 40 ft site record · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Hirz Bay Campground, the neighbouring family campground at 9 miles · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Hirz Bay Public Boat Ramp, lanes, drawdown limits and the Hirz Bay complex · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Hirz Bay 2 Group Campground, for the inventory comparison · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Shasta Lake Trails guide, Hirz Bay Trail · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — 2026 Fire Restrictions Forest Order 14-26-07, Hirz Bay Group Camp No. 1 in Exhibit A · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Forest-wide camping stay limits order 14-25-24 · checked 2026-08-31
• Shasta Recreation Company — concessionaire, gate code line 530-275-8113 · checked 2026-08-31
• California Data Exchange Center — Shasta Lake elevation, gauge SHA · checked 2026-08-31