What is Boulder Beach Campground?
When the Bureau of Reclamation built Boulder City to house the dam workers in 1931, it planted trees. The Park Service kept planting, and Boulder Beach Campground is the result: 135 paved sites under palms, oleanders and big old cottonwoods on a bench above the Boulder Basin of Lake Mead, with many sites looking across the water to Fortification Hill, the black lava mesa that anchors every Lake Mead postcard. For a campground in the Mojave Desert it is startlingly green, and the shade is the reason it is full every weekend from October to April.
The campground is Park Service-run and plain in the good way: each site has a table and a fire pit or grill and room for eight people and one RV or trailer; water spigots and flush restrooms are spread through the loops, a dump station and water fill sit at the entrance, and there are no showers or hookups. Five tent-only group sites for 12 to 30 people sit nearby at $80. Next door, the concession Lake Mead RV Village has 115 full-hookup sites and pay showers for people who want them. The surroundings are what the Nevada campgrounds on the lake have over Temple Bar. Boulder Beach, a rocky swimming beach, is a 15- to 20-minute walk. Hemenway Harbor, with the launch ramp, two marinas, boat rentals and dockside dining, is a mile or two away. The paved River Mountains Loop Trail runs past the gate for more than 30 miles around the mountains and connects to the Historic Railroad Trail, whose five tunnels carried the dam’s construction trains and now carry walkers to the Hoover Dam. It is for a Hoover Dam weekend, a Las Vegas trip with a tent instead of a hotel, and for cyclists who want a paved loop out the gate.
What you get is shade, a lake view, flush toilets and a town ten minutes away. What you do not get is a shower, a hookup, silence, or a shoreline where it was in 2000.
How to camp Boulder Beach right
Reserve, and pay twice. $20 per night, $10 with a Senior or Access pass, $80 for group sites, all on recreation.gov with same-day bookings allowed and a 30-night limit. The $25 Lake Mead entrance fee (1 to 7 days) is separate; annual $45. Las Vegas treats this as its backyard campground, so for any weekend between October and April book the day the window opens.
Get there. About 4 hours 40 minutes from Old Town, all highway. Loop 101 west to US 60 (Grand Avenue) to Wickenburg, US 93 north through Kingman and over the Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman bridge above the Hoover Dam, down into Boulder City, then follow the signs for Lakeshore Road to the Boulder Beach entrance of the park. The campground is 2 miles in on the left. Boulder City has groceries, fuel, a hardware store and a brewery ten minutes from your tent; Henderson is twenty.
Pick the season. October through April. Summer highs top 100 for three months, the lake is over 80 degrees, and the shade does not fix that. In 2026 loops A and B are closed May 26 to August 31, reopening September 1; the rest stays open.
Pick the site. The cottonwood sites toward the lake side of the loops are the shadiest in the park, and some look straight down the basin to Fortification Hill. Study the recreation.gov map before you choose.
Water and facilities. Spigots, flush restrooms, dump station and water fill. No showers in the NPS loops; the RV Village next door sells them.
Walk to the dam. Take the River Mountains Loop Trail east to the Historic Railroad Trail at first light and go through the five tunnels to the Hoover Dam parking garage; roughly 4 miles each way from camp, nearly flat, and the best free thing on Lake Mead. Bikes are fine.
Respect the shoreline. The lake has dropped more than 150 feet since 2000, and the exposed mud flats look solid and are not; they have swallowed trucks. Stay on the beaches, wear water shoes at rocky Boulder Beach, and clean, drain and dry boats for quagga mussels. The drought entry explains why the water is where it is.
Dogs. Leashed, in camp and on the trails.
Skip it if you want solitude. It is a city campground with a lake, popular and never silent, and nearly five hours from Scottsdale. Drive on to Temple Bar or Echo Bay for quiet shores, or down the river to Cottonwood Cove and Katherine Landing on Lake Mohave for a warmer, smaller lake with marinas.
A garden city’s campground on a shrinking lake
The trees came before the lake. When Calvin Coolidge signed the Boulder Canyon Project Act on December 21, 1928, the Bureau of Reclamation needed a town for the thousands of men who would build the biggest dam in the world, and it did not want another Ragtown, the tent camp already growing on the riverbank. In 1931 it laid out Boulder City on the hill above this campground to a plan by the Denver landscape architect Saco de Boer, with a greenbelt, parks and street trees that earned it the name Nevada’s Garden City. Gambling was banned, a gatehouse controlled who came in, and the federal government ran the place until 1959; the town incorporated on January 4, 1960, and still bans casinos inside its limits. The trees that shade the campground are the Park Service’s extension of de Boer’s idea onto the lakeshore.
The lake arrived fast. Six Companies finished the dam more than two years early; Franklin Roosevelt dedicated it on September 30, 1935, water began backing up the same day, and the structure was handed to the government on March 1, 1936. The reservoir was named for Elwood Mead, the Reclamation commissioner who had run the project and died that year. On October 13, 1936, the lake and its shores became the Boulder Dam Recreation Area, run by the Park Service under an agreement with Reclamation. The water kept rising; the Mormon farming town of St. Thomas, Nevada, lost its last resident in 1938. In 1947 Congress restored the name Hoover Dam, which the Roosevelt administration had dropped, and the recreation area became Lake Mead National Recreation Area. In 1964 Congress established it by statute, adding Lake Mohave below the dam, and it became the first national recreation area created by law, about 1.5 million acres today.
Boulder Beach was the swimming shore closest to the town from the start, and the campground grew on the bench above it as the Park Service planted cottonwoods, palms and oleanders through the postwar decades. The lake reached its record high, 1,225 feet, in the summer of 1983, when it spilled over the dam’s spillways for the first time since it filled. It has not been full since. The drought that began in 2000 has drawn the lake down more than 150 feet; it hit 1,040.58 feet on July 28, 2022, its lowest since first filling, and the ruins of St. Thomas came back into the open air. Hemenway Harbor’s marinas were relocated as the shore retreated and its fishing pier was lost to low water, which is why the walk from camp to the beach is longer than the old maps say and why the silt flats between are so dangerous.
The newest change is the road. US 93 ran across the dam crest for 75 years, through a security checkpoint and a two-lane bottleneck; the Hoover Dam bypass and the Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, 1,500 feet downstream, opened on October 19, 2010, and a Scottsdale camper now drops into Boulder City without ever stopping on the dam. Lake Mead counted about 6.4 million visitors in 2024, and this campground, with its 135 sites, is where the ones with tents and trailers sleep.
Why it matters
Boulder Beach is the oldest idea in federal recreation, a lakeshore the public could use because the government happened to have flooded it, planted with the same trees that made the company town above it livable. The lake’s rise and fall is the whole story of the Colorado River in one view from a campsite: full in 1983, down 150 feet since 2000, the drowned town back above water. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is practical rather than romantic. It is nearly five hours away and never quiet, but for a Hoover Dam weekend, a Vegas trip with a tent instead of a hotel, or a cyclist who wants a paved 30-mile loop out the gate, it is exactly right. Book a cottonwood site in the cool months, walk the railroad tunnels to the dam at first light, and stay off the mud.