Chappie-Shasta OHV Area

The facts that decide your trip

Max rig length

Not published

Sites

Not published

Hookups

Dry Camping (no hookups)

Access

Dispersed

Nightly rate

$0–$80 / night

Season

Open year-round

Elevation

Not published

Dump station

No

Potable water

Yes

What is actually on site

• Dog friendly
• Vault toilets
• Potable water
• Fishing
• Picnic tables
• Fire rings

Nearest public camera

Facility info

BLM: "Visitors to the rolling, brushy hills near Shasta Lake in northern California will find off-highway vehicle (OHV) riding challenges for all abilities." More than 250 miles of roads and trails (BLM's brochure and campground pages say over 200 miles, and 52,000 acres, 600 to 5,000 ft); open year round to motorcycles, ATVs and four-wheelers. Staging area: paved and gravel parking, accessible double vault toilets, accessible water hydrants, pavilion with picnic tables, benches and grills, information kiosk, elevated OHV loading area. The BLM page for the area does not mention camping at all. Shasta Campground: "Camp in one of 27 tent/trailer campsites near the Chappie-Shasta Off-Highway Vehicle (OHV) area. Each site offers fire rings and a picnic table. Vault toilets and a staging area are available." Ohl Olsen: "Ohl Olsen Group Campground provides 2 sites for group camping in the Chappie-Shasta OHV Area" — each with "a vault toilet, potable water, picnic tables, trash can, and campfire ring", no hookups.

Getting there

From Redding, take Interstate 5 north about ten miles to the Shasta Dam exit and head west on Shasta Dam Boulevard. BLM places the area "ten miles northeast of Redding, California, west of Shasta Dam". **To the campgrounds you cross the dam.** Follow Shasta Dam Boulevard to the dam, cross it, turn left, and the campgrounds are roughly a mile and a half (Ohl Olsen) to two miles (Shasta Campground) on. The crest is open 6am to 10pm only, you need a valid driver's licence and current vehicle registration, and the Bureau of Reclamation inspects vehicles, trailers and contents. Plan your arrival for daylight; there is no way onto that side after 10pm. The main staging area is on the west side of the dam and has paved and gravel parking, accessible double vault toilets, accessible water hydrants with paddle valves, a pavilion with picnic tables, benches and grills, an information kiosk with trail maps, and an elevated loading ramp for unloading machines. There is no fee for day use or riding. **Copley Mountain is the southern way in and skips the dam entirely** — Highway 299 to Iron Mountain Road to Matheson Road. It is day use only, with parking for fifteen to twenty vehicles, toilets, unloading ramps, kiosks and trail access. If you are arriving late, or towing something you would rather not put through a dam inspection, this is the alternative. A "Big Gulch" access point appears in older BLM-sourced material on the northwestern side. A "French Gulch" staging area is claimed only by a volunteer group and appears in no BLM source — do not plan around it. Two names that circulate and should not: **Coram** is a historic mining town site below the dam with no BLM camping connection, and **Muletown Road** is in the Clear Creek Greenway southwest of Redding, a different BLM Redding unit entirely. Bring a California campfire permit — free, online, and required even for a gas stove under the current order. Bring water if you intend to camp anywhere but the three campgrounds; the hydrants are at the staging area and the campgrounds. Bring a spark arrestor: both BLM orders require one on every internal combustion engine except registered street-legal vehicles. And bring a helmet if you are on an ATV — BLM requires a DOT-approved helmet for the operator and any passenger. Expect no phone signal. Recreation.gov's notice for Ohl Olsen states it plainly: no cell service. Camper reports from Shasta Campground are mixed, with several reporting nothing at all.

40.71248, -122.43633 · Driving directions

Photos of the area

10 more photos

Previous slideNext slide

Local deep dive

This is BLM land, not Forest Service, and that single fact changes every rule on this page. Forest Order 14-26-07, which governs campfires everywhere else around Shasta Lake, does not apply here. Two BLM orders do, and the operative one is blunt. **Campfires are banned across this area except in three named campgrounds.** BLM Fire Prevention Order CA-360-26-01, effective 28 June 2026 and running until further notice, prohibits "setting, building, maintaining, attending, or using any open fire, campfire, charcoal barbecue, or stove... except campfires within approved fire pits and grills already provided in the following campgrounds: Shasta Campground, Ohl Olsen Campground and Bohemotash Primitive Campground in the Chappie-Shasta OHV Area". If you pull off somewhere in the 52,000 acres and light anything, you are in violation. The one exemption is a portable gas, jellied-petroleum or pressurised-liquid-fuel stove, and even that needs a valid California campfire permit, which is free. The penalty language in the order runs to a $100,000 fine and up to twelve months. Which brings us to the thing this page previously got wrong, along with most of the internet. We had this listed as a free, facility-free dispersed camping area. It is not. **BLM publishes no camping policy for the Chappie-Shasta OHV Area at all** — the main BLM page for the area does not mention camping in any form, and the BLM brochure's only camping text describes the developed campground. Dispersed camping is permitted by default on California BLM land, at 14 days in any 28 with a 25-mile move afterwards, and nothing we found prohibits it here. But BLM does not affirmatively say it is allowed, publishes no map of where, and the fire order separately bans running an engine off designated roads and trails — so you cannot legally drive off-route to reach a spot anyway. What BLM does publish is three campgrounds, all named in its own fire order: **Shasta Campground** — 27 tent and trailer sites near the staging area, along Keswick Reservoir below the dam. Fire rings and a picnic table at each site, vault toilets, potable water, trash collection, camp host, quiet hours 10pm to 6am, dogs on leash. $20 a night. Note BLM's own site count disagrees with the volunteer group that supports the area, which says 22. **Ohl Olsen Group Campground** — two group sites, "large gravel lots, great for RVs, trailers", each with vault toilet, potable water, picnic tables, trash can and a campfire ring. No hookups. The fee is not flat: the Federal Register notice that set it, effective 12 November 2024, gives $60 a night for the lower site with a maximum of 30 people and $80 for the upper site with a maximum of 50. A mile and a half past the dam, with the camp host based at Shasta Campground. **Bohemotash Primitive Campground** — named in the fire order and labelled on BLM's 2026 route map, and that is the entire published record. No BLM web page, no site count, no fee, no coordinates. It is the closest thing to primitive camping BLM acknowledges here, and we can tell you nothing else about it. Two more things that will shape a trip. The dam crossing is a gate on your day: to reach Shasta and Ohl Olsen you drive across Shasta Dam, and the Bureau of Reclamation closes the crest from 10pm to 6am. Miss it and you are locked out until morning — Copley Mountain is the southern staging area that avoids the dam. You will also need a valid driver's licence and current vehicle registration, and vehicles are subject to security inspection. There is no permit requirement and no advance notice needed, despite an obsolete claim about a 72-hour permit that still circulates on OHV sites. And red sticker vehicles are barred from 1 July to 30 September. BLM's brochure says so, and California's OHMVR riding-season table lists Chappie-Shasta's season as 1 October to 30 June for those machines. If your bike is a 2003–2021 model that does not meet emission standards, check your sticker before you load it.

BLM describes the area as "the rolling, brushy hills near Shasta Lake" with riding challenges "for all abilities", open year round, for motorcycles, ATVs and four-wheelers. It sits between Shasta Dam and Keswick Reservoir, west of the dam. The size of it is genuinely disputed inside BLM's own material. The current OHV landing page says "more than 250 miles of roads and trails"; BLM's Shasta Campground page, its facility record and its printed brochure all say "over 200 miles" and give the area as 52,000 acres with an elevation range of 600 to 5,000 feet. Both figures are live on blm.gov at the same time. The 52,000-acre figure is consistent everywhere it appears, though it is absent from the main page. Minimum trail width is four feet, and BLM describes varying technical difficulty and steepness. Because it is a 52,000-acre unit spanning 600 to 5,000 feet, we show no single elevation. The 1,250 feet this page used to carry appears in no source we could find; the USGS elevation service returns about 815 feet at the coordinate we previously used. BLM's own published range is the honest figure. **This is shared, multi-use land and target shooting is one of the uses.** BLM's brochure lists hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding, target shooting and sightseeing alongside OHV riding. Under the current Redding fire order, recreational target shooting is prohibited "after 12:01 noon until half an hour before sunrise" — which means it is legal all morning, and spark-emitting or exploding targets are banned outright. BLM policy separately bans discharging firearms in developed recreation sites, so not in the campgrounds themselves. If you are camping out in the area rather than in one of the three campgrounds, plan on being within earshot of legal shooting until midday. It is also illegal to operate an OHV while carrying a loaded firearm. Registration and noise: a green sticker or a street-legal plate, with the plate displayed at all times including off-highway. California's sound limits are 96 dBA for machines built on or after 1 January 1986 and 101 dBA before that; BLM publishes no area-specific limit. A 64-inch width limit circulates on one aggregator and we could not verify it against any official source. Fire history: the 2018 Carr Fire burned much of this area, in BLM's own words, and the OHV area was closed and reopened on 5 October 2018 after crews removed hundreds of burned trees from roads and trails — with a warning that wind and rain could bring more down. The 2021 Fawn Fire is sometimes attached to this area online and should not be: it started east of Interstate 5 near Fawndale Road, and Chappie-Shasta is west of both the freeway and the dam. Two things BLM does not publish, which is worth knowing. There is no hazards section for this area at all — nothing on mine shafts, poison oak, rattlesnakes, ticks or heat. And the Iron Mountain Mine Superfund site sits adjacent to the southern Copley Mountain approach, with a long documented history of acid drainage into Keswick Reservoir; BLM publishes no visitor warning about it and no trail closure for it, so we present it as adjacent context rather than an agency warning. On the water: there is no lake or river access published from the OHV area itself — no shoreline access point, no beach, no hand launch — though BLM lists fishing as a use and the campgrounds sit along Keswick Reservoir. Centimudi is the nearest public ramp, and it is a Forest Service facility on Shasta Lake at the dam, about 1.6 miles straight-line from Shasta Campground but requiring you to re-cross the dam. It has four lanes at high water, three between 76 and 95 feet of drawdown and two down to 210 feet, with 105 parking spaces, flush toilets and a courtesy dock at higher levels. $18 per vehicle per day, day use only, no overnight camping. Finally, an honest note on evidence. There is no review corpus for camping out in the area — every review we found is either of Shasta Campground or of the riding. Fourteen reviews on one platform, three on another, six on a travel site for the OHV area itself, and seven trail status reports. The most useful is a 2025 camper: "Sites are small and perfect for our rig (Arctic Fox 990 Truck Camper). Would not recommend bringing large trailers, 5th Wheels or Class C's here... You do cross the dam to get to the campground and security did inspect... No cell service. Pit toilets and trash service available. There is water but only for jugs, not to fill tanks." Two questions we could not close and would rather flag than fudge: BLM's 2019 and 2026 route maps carry "OHV Regulations" panels whose text we could not extract, and they are the likeliest home of any published camping and noise rules. And no management plan or route-designation document for the area is findable online. The Redding Field Office is on 530-224-2100, with an OHV information line on option 7.

Questions people ask

Where these facts come from

• Bureau of Land Management — Chappie/Shasta Off-Highway Vehicle Recreation Area (description, 250+ miles, year round, staging area facilities, directions; no camping section) · checked 2026-09-01
• BLM Fire Prevention Order CA-360-26-01, Redding Field Office, effective 28 June 2026: campfires only in Shasta, Ohl Olsen and Bohemotash campgrounds; stove exemption; engine and target-shooting prohibitions · checked 2026-09-01
• BLM California Statewide Fire Prevention Order CA910-2026-001 — campfire permit requirement, spark arrestors, ammunition restrictions · checked 2026-09-01
• BLM — Shasta Campground: 27 sites, 52,000 acres, over 200 miles of trails, 600 to 5,000 ft, published coordinates · checked 2026-09-01
• Recreation.gov — Shasta Campground (BLM), 27 tent/trailer sites, fire rings, tables, vault toilets · checked 2026-09-01
• Recreation.gov — Ohl Olsen Group Campground: 2 group sites, facilities, dam crossing hours, no cell service, campfire permit notice · checked 2026-09-01
• BLM — Chappie-Shasta OHV Area brochure: red sticker closure 1 July to 30 September, staging areas, multi-use list, helmet and loaded-firearm rules · checked 2026-09-01
• BLM — 2026 Chappie-Shasta route map, north sheet (Bohemotash labelled) · checked 2026-09-01
• BLM California — recreation page: dispersed camping limited to 14 days in any 28 consecutive days, then a 25-mile move · checked 2026-09-01
• BLM — recreational shooting policy on public lands · checked 2026-09-01
• BLM — 2018 press release reopening the OHV area after the Carr Fire: "Much of the OHV area was burned" · checked 2026-09-01
• BLM — campground fee proposal setting Shasta Campground at $20 and Ohl Olsen at $60 · checked 2026-09-01
• Bureau of Reclamation — Shasta Dam access: crest closed 10pm to 6am, licence and registration required, vehicles subject to inspection · checked 2026-09-01
• California OHMVR — green and red sticker requirements · checked 2026-09-01
• California OHMVR — riding season table listing Chappie-Shasta as 1 October to 30 June for red sticker vehicles · checked 2026-09-01
• USFS — Centimudi Public Boat Ramp: lanes by drawdown, 105 spaces, $18 per vehicle per day, day use only · checked 2026-09-01
• Campendium — 14 reviews of Shasta Campground, source of the rig-size, dam-inspection, cell and water-jug accounts quoted here · checked 2026-09-01
• USGS 3DEP Elevation Point Query Service — about 815 ft at the coordinate previously used on this page · checked 2026-09-01