Six Rivers National Forest

34 camps mapped · 17 free · 16 fee · 1 unpriced · tap a dot for its page

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Camp here — Six Rivers National Forest

34 camps mapped in this forest, 17 of them free. Tap one for its topo and aerial, the weather, the water, and how far you will be from fuel and a shower.

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Where dispersed camping is listed — Six Rivers National Forest

The Forest Service lists dispersed camping as an activity at these 6 places. That is the agency saying it is allowed somewhere in the area — not a campsite we have mapped, and not a spot we can put a pin on. Read their page, then check the district for the rules that apply on the day.

Dry Lake
Dry Lake, encompassing 3.25 acres, lies in a quiet setting of willow, alder, oaks, firs, and myrtles (bay). The lake is currently stocked with rainbow trout. Maximum depth is nine feet. Dry lake is located off of County Road 405.
the Forest Service page for it →
Orleans Ranger District
The District is one of four on the Six Rivers National Forest, encompassing approximately 500,000 acres. Located about 30 miles from the Northern Coast of California and subsequently under a coastal influence that produces a long…
the Forest Service page for it →
Smith River National Recreation Area
Recreational activities abound in the Smith River National Recreation Area or NRA. The beautiful Smith River offers fishing for steelhead, trout, and salmon. During the summer months, the pure, clean waters of the Smith River are…
the Forest Service page for it →
Ukonom Ranger District
The Ukonom Ranger District, while within the geographic boundary of the Klamath National Forest, has been administered by the Six Rivers National Forest since September 1999. This was done through an agreement between the two…
the Forest Service page for it →
W. Persido Bar River Access
Persido Bar (sometimes incorrectly called Persidio Bar) is a high-use, popular take-out for river floaters. There is a graded gravel road to the large cobble bar and a flat road to the water's edge. There is a permanent restroom…
the Forest Service page for it →
X. Ti Bar River Access
The road off Hwy 96 down to the cobble bar at Ti Bar will accommodate RV's. There is an information sign, permanent restroom, ample parking and shaded dispersed camping area. Large rigs should check for overhead clearance when…
the Forest Service page for it →

Where the camps cluster

The place

Six Rivers National Forest is the wet side of northwestern California -- a narrow band of country about 140 miles long, running south from the Oregon border through Del Norte, Humboldt, Trinity, and Siskiyou counties. The Forest Service's own public figure is close to a million acres, and the ground climbs from nearly sea level to just under 7,000 feet. Headquarters are over in Eureka, out on the coast west of the forest. If you know this corner of California for its redwood parks, know that those are mostly park-service and state ground -- this forest is the country behind them: inland conifer, steep canyons, and rivers. Lots of rivers. It rains here in a way it does not rain almost anywhere else in the state, which is the whole reason the place looks like it does. One thing worth knowing before you read a map: the boundary drawn around a national forest is bigger than the forest itself, and there's private ground inside the lines.

History

This is one of the younger national forests -- President Truman established it in 1947 out of pieces of the neighboring Klamath, Trinity, and Siskiyou national forests, so the country is old but the outfit is not. The name is the good part: it's called Six Rivers because six of them drain it -- the Smith, Klamath, Trinity, Mad, Van Duzen, and Eel -- and the name is generally credited to Peter B. Kyne, a novelist, which is a better origin story than most forests get. Long before 1947, and still, this is the homeland of the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Tolowa, Wiyot, and Chilula peoples; the Hoopa Valley Reservation sits next door. The biggest fight in the forest's history was over a road. The Forest Service wanted to finish a route between Gasquet and Orleans -- the G-O Road -- straight through high country that Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa people used, and still use, for religious purposes. Tribes and conservation groups sued. Congress designated the Siskiyou Wilderness in 1984 but deliberately left the road's corridor out of it, so the fight went on; in 1988 the Supreme Court decided Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association in the government's favor. The road was finally stopped anyway in 1990, when the Smith River National Recreation Area Act folded that corridor into the wilderness. It was never built.

Wildlife & plants

Roosevelt elk are the animal people hope to see here -- big, heavy-antlered, and more often found in the openings and along the river bottoms than up in the timber. Black bears are common; keep your food put away. Black-tailed deer are everywhere, and mountain lions are around, though you'll read them in tracks long before you see one. The forest is also home to some of the animals that make Pacific Northwest timber country famous in a courtroom: the northern spotted owl, the marbled murrelet -- a little seabird that flies inland to nest on mossy old-growth limbs -- and the Pacific fisher, a big member of the weasel family that most people never lay eyes on. But the fish are the heart of it. Chinook and coho salmon and steelhead run these rivers, coastal cutthroat hold in the smaller water, and green sturgeon -- an old, strange, bottom-feeding fish -- come into the Klamath. The trees are worth slowing down for too: Douglas-fir and tanoak through most of it, Port Orford cedar along the wet ground on the north end (it's been hit hard by an introduced root disease, which is why you'll see signs asking you to wash mud off your tires), and Brewer spruce, the weeping one, up in the Siskiyou high country. On the serpentine bogs, look for the cobra lily.

Notable features

The Smith River is the crown jewel. Congress created the Smith River National Recreation Area in 1990 to protect it, and the reason is simple: the Smith runs from its headwaters to the Pacific without a single dam -- the only major river system in California that still does. More than 300 miles of the Smith and its forks are protected as Wild and Scenic, and the water runs a clear, hard green that people drive a long way to look at. There's a piece of six wilderness areas here. Four of them the forest splits with its neighbors -- the Siskiyou, the Trinity Alps, the Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel, and the Marble Mountain -- and two are its own: the North Fork Wilderness and the Mount Lassic Wilderness, the latter a small one out near Ruth Reservoir that Congress added in 2006. Ruth Lake, on the Mad River district, is the forest's big flatwater. Orleans Mountain, around 6,180 feet, is commonly cited as the high point. And the rain is a landmark in its own right: Gasquet, up on the Smith, averages something over 90 inches a year, which puts it among the wettest spots in California.

camps mapped

free to camp

1.3M

acres inside boundary

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Acreage is the area inside this forest’s administrative boundary (U.S. Forest Service), which takes in private land as well. National Forest System land inside it is usually less.

Six Rivers National Forest is a long, narrow, rain-soaked band of northwestern California -- close to a million acres running roughly 140 miles south from the Oregon line, named in 1947 for the six rivers that drain it: the Smith, Klamath, Trinity, Mad, Van Duzen, and Eel. This is salmon and steelhead country, steep and green and wet, and the Smith still runs without a dam from its headwaters to the Pacific -- the only major river system in California that can say that. One more thing you'll want to know around the fire: the word "Bigfoot" took off from a set of tracks found on this forest at Bluff Creek in 1958, and the famous 1967 film was shot in the same drainage.

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Cool to know

The word "Bigfoot" got its start on this forest. In 1958, a road crew working at Bluff Creek found large tracks, a plaster cast got made, and the Humboldt Times ran the story that put the name into American English. Nine years later, in 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin shot the famous strip of film -- the one everybody has seen -- in the same Bluff Creek drainage. What was actually out there is not our department; that the name and the film both come from this ground is just history. (Stories about a wild man in these mountains are much older than the newspaper, and belong to the tribes who have always lived here.)
There's a plant here that eats bugs. The cobra lily -- Darlingtonia californica -- grows in the serpentine seeps and bogs, hooded like a snake about to strike, with a little forked tongue at the opening. Insects crawl in following the light, can't find their way back out of the hood, and fall into the tube. It grows in soil so poor in nutrients that trapping insects is easier than pulling a living out of the dirt.
This forest is younger than the Second World War. Most of the national forest system goes back to Theodore Roosevelt's day, around the turn of the last century -- but Six Rivers wasn't carved out of its neighbors until 1947, a good forty years later. The country is ancient. The outfit is not.
The Klamath-Siskiyou country this forest sits in is one of the great conifer neighborhoods on Earth. The serpentine soils here are harsh -- heavy in metals, thin on the nutrients most plants want -- and instead of sterilizing the place, that hardship let a remarkable number of cone-bearing trees carve out their own corners. Botanists come from a long way off to walk this ground.

Camps are sourced from public U.S. Forest Service recreation data and have not been personally visited. Roads shown are Forest Service passenger-car routes (maintenance level 3–5) and may be seasonal or gated. Always confirm access, fees and fire rules with the ranger district before you go. Found a fee where we show free? Tell us on the contact page.