Lower Jones Valley Campground

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

30 ft

Sites

11

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Drive-in

Nightly rate

$26–$56 / night

Season

Open year-round

Elevation

1085 ft

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
• Cell service
• Food storage required

Nearest public camera

Fawndale · I-5 — about 4.8 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

Eleven sites — nine single and two double — in a small canyon beside the Pit River Arm of Shasta Lake, about a mile from the Jones Valley boat ramp. Every site has a paved parking spur, a tent pad, a raised campfire ring with a grill, a bear box and a picnic table. Vault toilets, potable water and trash service; no hookups, no showers and no dump station. Open year-round, 24 hours a day, first-come first-served with no advance reservations. Oak trees give partial shade and most sites are spaced far enough apart for some privacy. Managed by Shasta Recreation Company under the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.

Getting there

Jones Valley is reached from the Redding side, not from the I-5 lake exits, and the two official sources give different routes and different mileages. The Forest Service version: from I-5 exit 687, take 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 to the campgrounds. It describes the area as 9 miles east of Shasta Lake City. Recreation.gov's version: 15 miles north of Redding, exit 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 to the entrance on the left. They disagree on the Bear Mountain Road distance (8.5 miles versus 5) and on whether the final road is called Dry Creek Road or Jones Valley Road. Both are correct pieces of the same drive — Bear Mountain Road is the long connector and the last stretch changes name. Plan on 40 to 50 minutes from Redding and follow signs for Jones Valley once you are on Bear Mountain Road. One guide gives the freeway exit as 267, which is simply wrong; Shasta County exits are in the 680s. Road condition is the open question. The Dyrt carries a rough-road warning for this campground and advises low-clearance vehicles and large RVs to check with the Forest Service first, while a camper at Upper Jones Valley reported no dirt roads at all on the way in. No source rates the approach for a 30-foot rig. Given the campground's own 30-foot average back-in, the sites are the tighter constraint, not the road — but this is a call-ahead item at 530-275-1587. Arrive with what you need. There is no dump station here and no source names the nearest one. There is potable water, which is more than the other Jones Valley sites offer. Come with cash or a check as a backup to the app, because you are paying on arrival at an iron ranger with poor cell signal.

40.72756, -122.22808 · Driving directions

Photos of the area

3 more photos

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Local deep dive

Lower Jones Valley is the only developed, reliably open campground in the Jones Valley cluster, and it is small — eleven sites, first-come, no way to book ahead. On a summer weekend that is a gamble; midweek and in the shoulder seasons it is the quiet corner of a busy lake. It is also the only one of the three Jones Valley facilities with drinking water. Upper Jones Valley's own Forest Service page says there is none, and the Inlet shoreline areas have none either. If you are camping this arm and want a tap, this is it. A naming quirk that will confuse you at the kiosk: Recreation.gov lists the nine single sites as "Standard Overflow Single" and "Standard Overflow Single 1" through "8." Nothing about this campground is overflow — that is Upper Jones Valley's role, and the label here appears to be a data artifact. The two double sites are not listed individually at all, so their site numbers are not published anywhere we could find. There is also an internal contradiction on Recreation.gov itself worth knowing before you drive out: the facility page says first-come only and no advance payments, while the individual site pages render a date-availability widget that reads as bookable. The Forest Service and the facility page agree it is first-come. Do not turn up expecting a reservation to have held. What you get physically: paved spurs and tent pads, which is a real step up from Upper Jones Valley's unpaved parking, plus a bear box at every site. The campground sits in a small canyon adjacent to the lake — the concessionaire puts the water about 300 yards away at full pool, and that walk lengthens as the lake drops. The Clikapudi Trail trailhead is 50 yards east of the campground. It is a 7.5-mile loop back to the boat ramp parking lot, open to hiking, mountain biking and horses, with a separate one-mile advanced bike loop. Carry water — there is none on the trail and the summer heat here is severe. The Forest Service spells it "Clickipudi" on one page and "Clikapudi" on another; same trail. Camper evidence is thin. The Dyrt has no reviews at all for this campground. An aggregator reports 3.74 stars across 54 reviews with recurring complaints about bathroom cleaning, night noise from parties and trash not being emptied — but that same aggregator gets the fees and the reservability of this campground wrong, so we would not lean on its numbers.

This is the Pit River Arm — the eastern reach of Shasta Lake, and a different proposition from the McCloud and Sacramento arms most visitors know. You approach from Redding over Bear Mountain Road rather than dropping off Interstate 5, which makes the drive longer but keeps the freeway noise that dominates Antlers and Bailey Cove entirely out of the picture. The real argument for camping this arm is the boat ramp. Jones Valley has four ramps built for different lake levels and stays usable to roughly 210 feet of drawdown — four lanes to 50 feet down, two lanes to 140, one lane to 210. Compare that with Bailey Cove closing at 50 feet, Antlers at about 69, and Hirz Bay at 95 to 97. Jones Valley and Centimudi are the two deepest-drawdown ramps on the lake, which means that in a dry late summer when half the ramps on Shasta are dry concrete, you can still put a boat in here. Check the live lake level at the top of this page against those thresholds before you tow. Two marinas sit on this arm. Jones Valley Resort runs small boat rentals and houseboats, about twenty minutes from Redding. Silverthorn Resort is a full-service marina with houseboats, lakeside cabins, small boat rentals, moorage, a pro shop and a convenience store, with restrooms, a pumpout and water on the dock, and parking for around 125 car-and-trailer rigs. The landscape here was shaped by a fire that started almost exactly where you will be walking. The Jones Fire of October 1999 began 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 human-caused and accidental, and investigators ruled out a campfire. The oaks you camp under are what has grown back since. One correction worth having, because it circulates: the Salt Fire of 2021 did not affect Jones Valley. It burned near Lakehead on the upper Sacramento Arm, on the far side of the lake off the Salt Creek exit. A smaller local fire, the Hidden Fire, burned 45 acres off Bear Mountain Road in June 2024 and was contained in three days with no campground closures. Before you launch: a forest order prohibits transporting golden, zebra and quagga mussels, and an invasive mussel-free certification is required before your boat goes in the water.

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Shasta-Trinity National Forest — Lower Jones Valley Campground · checked 2026-08-31
• Recreation.gov — facility 10157359, first-come rules and Scan & Pay · 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 — Clikapudi Trail · checked 2026-08-31
• Shasta Recreation Company — campground details and lake distances · checked 2026-08-31
• The Dyrt — per-carrier cell coverage and road-condition warning · 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