Jones Valley Inlet Shoreline Campground

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

Not published

Sites

20

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Dispersed

Nightly rate

$0–$17 / night

Season

Open year-round

Elevation

1067 ft

Dump station

No

Potable water

No

What is actually on site

• Dog friendly
• Swimming
• Fishing
• Cell service
• Food storage required

Nearest public camera

Fawndale · I-5 — about 4.7 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

Twenty numbered dispersed camping sites and twenty day-use picnic sites on the shoreline of the Pit River Arm, about two miles from the Jones Valley boat ramp. This is shoreline camping, not a developed campground: no potable water, no hookups, no tables or fire rings at the camping sites, and portable restrooms and trash receptacles provided seasonally only, roughly March 1 to October 31. Informal mooring is allowed when water levels are sufficient. Fees are charged per vehicle rather than per site, and winter use is free with pack-in, pack-out sanitation. First-come, first-served with no advance reservations.

Getting there

Jones Valley is reached from the Redding side rather than off one of the I-5 lake exits, and the two official sources describe the drive differently. Recreation.gov: 15 miles north of Redding, exit I-5 at Oasis Road, right at the stop sign for about 3 miles, right on Bear Mountain Road for about 5 miles, left at the stop sign, then right on Jones Valley Road. The Forest Service: from exit 687, Old Oregon Trail for 3 miles, then Bear Mountain Road for 8.5 miles to the Dry Creek Road junction, then left about 2 miles. It calls the area 9 miles east of Shasta Lake City. They disagree on the Bear Mountain Road distance — 5 miles against 8.5 — and on whether the last road is Dry Creek Road or Jones Valley Road. Both describe the same drive; the final stretch changes name. Recreation.gov also calls Jones Valley "north" of Redding when it is properly northeast. Allow 40 to 50 minutes and follow the Jones Valley signs once you are on Bear Mountain Road. The Dyrt notes that access here involves rough roads requiring careful navigation, and carries a rough-road warning for neighbouring Lower Jones Valley advising low-clearance vehicles and large RVs to check with the Forest Service first. No source publishes a rig length limit for this shoreline area, and no source states whether you may drive a vehicle or RV onto the shoreline itself — we looked, and it is simply not addressed anywhere. Treat that as an open question and ask the host or the ranger station. Come completely self-sufficient. There is no potable water, no dump station, and outside roughly March to October there are no restrooms and no trash service either. Bring drinking water for the whole stay, a way to pack out your own waste in winter, a hard-sided food container, and cash or a check for the iron ranger — cell coverage here is disputed and app payment may not work. If you plan a campfire you need a California campfire permit during fire season, and the fire must be at least 50 feet from any vegetation and within 10 feet of the water's edge.

40.72878, -122.23006 · Driving directions

Local deep dive

Start with the thing that confuses everybody. The Forest Service publishes ONE page called "Jones Valley Inlet Shoreline Campground." Recreation.gov publishes TWO separate facilities: Jones Valley Inlet Dispersed Area (10157273, this page) and Jones Valley Inlet West Dispersed Area (10157316). Each holds twenty numbered dispersed camping sites and twenty day-use picnic sites. No source reconciles the one against the two. If you are paying by app, check which facility the sign in front of you names, because they are billed separately. The fee here is per vehicle, not per site. Recreation.gov states it outright — "this area is vehicle specific and charges for each vehicle." That changes the maths for a group arriving in three cars, and it is different from how the developed campgrounds down the road work. Winter is free, and that is the genuinely useful thing to know. From roughly mid-September to mid-May no fees are due. The catch is that the portable restrooms and trash service are seasonal too — the Forest Service gives that window as March 1 to October 31 — so free winter camping is pack-in, pack-out camping with no facilities at all. Sanitation is your responsibility from November 1 through the end of February. Now the contradiction we cannot resolve for you, and it is on a single official page. The Forest Service says this area is "open to shoreline camping year round." The same page says camping anywhere below the high water mark "is prohibited between November 1st and March 1st." And the same page again says camping may close December 1 to 31. Those three statements do not fit together. Recreation.gov meanwhile describes free winter dispersed use across exactly that period. If you are planning a winter trip, call the Shasta Lake Ranger Station on 530-275-1587 rather than trusting any of it, including us. Informal mooring is allowed when the lake is high enough, which is the real draw — you can beach a boat at your camp. When it is not high enough, campers describe a long walk: one wrote that the water was very low and another that it was a trek across the road and down the hill. There are no refunds for low water, and Recreation.gov says so explicitly. Bring a hard-sided food container. Recreation.gov's standing note for every Jones Valley facility is that wildlife is frequent and all food must be kept in approved containers, and no official listing shows bear boxes at these dispersed sites. Poison oak is abundant throughout this forest — that is Recreation.gov's wording, on this facility's own page.

This is shoreline camping on the Pit River Arm — the eastern reach of Shasta Lake, reached over Bear Mountain Road from Redding rather than off Interstate 5. You are camping on the bank, not in a laid-out campground, which is the whole appeal and also the whole catch: what the site is like depends entirely on where the water is that week. The Jones Valley boat ramp, about two miles away by Recreation.gov's reckoning, is the reason this corner of the lake stays useful when others do not. It has four ramps built for different lake levels and works to roughly 210 feet of drawdown: four lanes to 50 feet below full pool, two lanes to 140, one lane to 210. Bailey Cove shuts at 50 feet, Antlers at about 69, Hirz Bay at 95 to 97. Jones Valley and Centimudi are the two deepest-drawdown ramps on Shasta Lake. Check the live level at the top of this page against those thresholds before towing. Two marinas serve the arm. Jones Valley Resort runs small boat rentals and houseboats about twenty minutes from Redding. Silverthorn Resort is the full-service option — houseboats, lakeside cabins, small boat rentals, moorage, a pro shop and a convenience store, with restrooms, a pumpout, water on the dock and parking for around 125 car-and-trailer rigs. The landscape here was rewritten by fire. The Jones Fire of October 1999 started on the Clikapudi Trail between Bear Mountain and Backbone Ridge, burned 26,200 acres and destroyed 954 structures including at least 128 homes. It was accidental and human-caused, and investigators ruled out a campfire. One camper listing notes that conifer shade in this area is reduced in places because of past fire activity — that is the Jones Fire you are looking at. Worth correcting, because it circulates: the 2021 Salt Fire did not touch Jones Valley. It burned near Lakehead on the upper Sacramento Arm off the Salt Creek exit, on the far side of the lake. The local one was the Hidden Fire in June 2024 — 45 acres off Bear Mountain Road, contained in three days, no campground closures. The Clikapudi Trail is the walk from here: a 7.5-mile loop with its trailhead 50 yards east of Lower Jones Valley Campground, open to hiking, mountain biking and horses, with a separate one-mile advanced bike loop. There is no water on the trail and the summer heat is severe. Before launching, note the forest order prohibiting the transport of golden, zebra and quagga mussels — an invasive mussel-free certification is required before your boat goes in. One data problem we are going to show you rather than paper over. Recreation.gov runs this and Jones Valley Inlet West as two separate bookable facilities, 10157273 and 10157316, and its own text says the ramp is about 2 miles from this one and about 1 mile from West — which implies roughly a mile between them. But the coordinates published for the two facilities are 8 metres apart. Every source that carries coordinates, including the aggregators, reproduces that same near-identical pair, because they all mirror the same federal record. The two overviews are byte-identical apart from the inserted word "West", and the driving directions differ by a single character: 15 miles for this area, 16 for West. No source publishes a distinct location for West at all. So the two are administratively distinct and, by the agency's own mileages, physically about a mile apart — but nobody has published where West actually is. We are showing the official coordinates for both rather than inventing an offset, which is why they may sit on top of each other on the map. The Forest Service has only one page for the Jones Valley Inlet, and it covers this area rather than West. Worth knowing too that Recreation.gov does not use the name on this page. It calls facility 10157273 "Jones Valley Inlet Dispersed Area"; "Shoreline Campground" is the Forest Service's name for it.

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Shasta-Trinity National Forest — Jones Valley Inlet Shoreline Campground · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — facility 10157273, per-vehicle fees, mooring, winter free use · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — facility 10157316, Jones Valley Inlet West, the sibling area · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Jones Valley Public Boat Ramp, four ramps and drawdown limits · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Boat Ramps at Shasta Lake (ROG PDF), lake-wide drawdown table · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — 2026 Fire Restrictions Forest Order · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Clikapudi Trail · checked 2026-08-31
• The Dyrt — camper reports on low water and access · checked 2026-08-31
• California Data Exchange Center — Shasta Lake elevation, gauge SHA · 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