Madrone Campground

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

16 ft

Sites

10

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Drive-in

Nightly rate

Free

Season

Open year-round

Elevation

Not published

Dump station

No

Potable water

No

What is actually on site

• Shade canopy
• Vault toilets
• Picnic tables
• Fire rings

Nearest public camera

Salt Creek · I-5 — about 13.8 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

Located east of Shasta Lake, these remote campsites offer the perfect spot to relax. Forested and shady, this is a perfect home base for your OHV adventures! ... This campground is very popular in the fall during hunting season. ... Fenders Ferry is a rough, unimproved dirt road. There is no lake access from this facility. Potable water is not available at this site.

Getting there

This campground is closed. What follows describes the access for when the order lifts, and for the sake of anyone who reaches this page while planning around the closure. From Interstate 5, take Highway 299 east for 31 miles to Fenders Ferry Road, which is Forest Road 27. Turn onto Fenders Ferry Road and drive approximately 18 miles. The Forest Service's own warning about that 18 miles is short and unambiguous: "Fenders Ferry is a rough, unimproved dirt road." It is not a paved forest highway with a gravel finish. Eighteen miles of it, after 31 miles of state route, puts this camp well over an hour from the freeway in good conditions and further in wet ones. Trailers are not recommended, and the 16-foot figure carried by aggregators should be read as a warning about the road rather than a spec about the sites. There is no potable water and no fee. There are vault toilets. There is no reservation system — when it is open it is first-come, first-served — and no gate, no host and no phone signal: the carrier reports we have for this location show none working. Whatever you need over the whole stay, you carry in, and whatever you generate you carry out. The Forest Service page for Chirpchatter carries the same first 18 miles and then keeps going: past the Madrone turning by roughly five miles, left at a bridge, then a final mile to the campground. So the 18 miles is the leg out to this area rather than a precise marker for either camp, and Chirpchatter is the further of the two — about four miles south of here in a straight line. While the order stands, entering is a violation. The exemptions listed are narrow: people holding a Forest Service permit specifically allowing it, federal, state and local officers, and organised rescue or firefighting personnel on official duty. Everyone else is excluded until 31 December 2026 or until the Forest Service lifts the order early and says so.

40.92446, -122.09443 · Driving directions

Local deep dive

Start with the thing that decides your trip: Madrone is closed, and has been since 23 November 2024. Forest Order 14-24-25 shuts it "to provide for public safety" through 31 December 2026. There is no published reopening date earlier than that, and the Forest Service's own recreation page for the site carries the alert. The reason is the Shoe Fire. It started at 1:18pm on 9 October 2024 on Fenders Ferry Road, adjacent to this campground, and burned 5,124 acres before it was fully contained on 9 November. CAL FIRE's incident record lists the cause as "Undetermined". What makes the closure notable is what happened next: the broad Shoe Fire area closure issued on 18 October 2024 was terminated, reopening the rest of the burn scar to the public. Madrone alone stayed shut. When a forest reopens everything around a site and keeps that one site closed for another two years, the hazard is at the site itself — burned trees over the camping area is the usual reason, though the order does not say so and we are not going to put words in it. One more piece of chronology, because it gets muddled online. The 2025 Green Fire is a different fire. Its closure of campgrounds and trails north of the Pit River expired at the end of January 2026. That order is finished. Madrone's is not, and it predates Green by nine months. Now the thing almost every listing gets wrong: this is not a Shasta Lake campground. The Forest Service states flatly that there is no lake access from this facility. It sits east of the lake, eighteen miles up an unimproved dirt road, and the water it is near is a creek, not the reservoir. If you came here from a Shasta Lake search expecting to launch a boat, this is the wrong page — Jones Valley and Hirz Bay are the arms you want. What it actually is, in the Forest Service's own words, is a remote, forested and shady camp pitched as "a perfect home base for your OHV adventures", and the same page notes it is "very popular in the fall during hunting season". That is an unusually candid piece of official writing and it tells you the real clientele: quad riders and hunters, not families with a ski boat. It is free, first-come, with vault toilets and no potable water. The specifications below need a caveat. The Forest Service does not publish a site count or an elevation for Madrone. The ten sites shown here come from secondary listings and the 16-foot trailer figure from an aggregator, not from the Forest Service; we show them because they are the only figures that exist, not because we can vouch for them. The elevation we have left blank altogether — the 1,500 feet you will see quoted around the web traces to nothing we could find. And while the campground is closed there is nobody to phone and check with. If you want this profile and you want it now, look at Chirpchatter. It is the sister campground further down the same road — about four miles from here in a straight line, and five or six more road miles past the Madrone turning — and the Forest Service gives it word-for-word the same description. It has no closure order against it, the Forest Service lists it as open year round, and unlike Madrone it appears in Exhibit A of the 2026 fire order, so campfires are still permitted there.

Madrone sits in the Shoe Fire burn scar, southwest of Big Bend, on Fenders Ferry Road east of Shasta Lake. The 2024 fire ran to 5,124 acres and was managed by the Forest Service rather than CAL FIRE, which is why the incident record is thin on cause: "Undetermined" is where it still stands. The campground has a sister. Chirpchatter Campground sits about four miles south of here in a straight line, further down Fenders Ferry Road, and the Forest Service gives it word for word the same description — remote, forested and shady, pitched at OHV riders, popular in fall during hunting season — along with the same absence of potable water, the same vault toilets, the same lack of fees and the same blunt note that there is no lake access. Its directions are not identical: they carry Madrone's first 18 miles and then add roughly five miles past the Madrone turning, a left at a bridge and a final mile in. Two differences matter. Chirpchatter carries no closure order and the Forest Service lists it as open. And Chirpchatter appears in Exhibit A of the 2026 fire restrictions order, where campfires remain permitted; Madrone does not appear at all, which is consistent with a site nobody is allowed to enter. If Madrone is what you wanted, Chirpchatter is the substitute, and it is worth knowing that the two are near-identical on paper. The wider area is OHV country. The Forest Service's own framing for both camps is that they are a home base for OHV adventures, which is a very different proposition from the lakeside campgrounds forty road miles west. Big Bend and the upper Pit River drainage are the landscape here: steep, forested, and thinly served. Fall hunting is the season the Forest Service singles out. Both camps are described as very popular in the fall during hunting season, which for a free, ten-site, first-come campground means the practical constraint on a September or October trip is arriving early, not booking. Two things this campground does not have, and no source suggests otherwise: lake access, and drinking water. The first is stated outright by the Forest Service. The second is stated as "potable water is not available at this site". At eighteen miles up a dirt road, both matter more than they would elsewhere. We could not establish a site count or an elevation from any Forest Service source. The ten sites shown here come from secondary listings and we cannot corroborate them; the 16-foot trailer limit is an aggregator figure rather than an official one. The elevation is blank because the widely quoted 1,500 feet traces to no source we could find. We would rather flag all of that than let the numbers imply an authority they do not have. Finally, the timeline, because it is misreported elsewhere. Shoe Fire: October 2024, 5,124 acres, adjacent to this campground. Madrone closure order 14-24-25: 23 November 2024 to 31 December 2026, still in force. Broad Shoe Fire area closure: issued 18 October 2024, since terminated. Green Fire: a separate 2025 incident whose closure north of the Pit River expired at the end of January 2026. Only one of those four is still operative, and it is the one closing this campground. A note on the name of this arm. We label it the Sulanharas Creek Arm. Until 2022 the creek and the arm carried a name built on a slur; the Department of the Interior's Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force retired it on 8 September 2022, and the replacement — Sulanharas, from the Wintu language — was recommended by the Wintu Tribe of Northern California. Older maps, guidebooks and some agency pages still carry the previous name. If you are searching for it, that is why you may not find a match.

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Shasta-Trinity National Forest — Madrone Campground (description, directions, no lake access, no potable water, closure alert) · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Madrone Campground Closure alert, Forest Order 14-24-25, 23 Nov 2024 to 31 Dec 2026 · checked 2026-08-31
• CAL FIRE — Shoe Fire incident record: 9 Oct 2024, 5,124 acres, 100% contained 9 Nov 2024, cause Undetermined, adjacent to Madrone Campground · checked 2026-08-31
• KRCR — Forest Service closes Madrone Campground for safety after Shoe Fire impacts; wider 18 Oct 2024 area closure terminated · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Chirpchatter Campground, the open sister camp with identical official text · checked 2026-08-31
• InciWeb — Green Fire (2025), the separate later incident often confused with this closure · checked 2026-08-31
• Redding Record Searchlight — Shasta-Trinity closes campgrounds and trails north of the Pit River until January 2026 (Green Fire order) · checked 2026-08-31
• USFS — Forest-wide camping stay limits order 14-25-24 · checked 2026-08-31