What is Cottonwood Cove Campground?
Halfway down Lake Mohave, where the canyon walls of Black Canyon finally fall back and the reservoir widens into open water, a paved road arrives from the mining town of Searchlight and ends at a sandy cove. Cottonwood Cove has been the Nevada side’s lake resort since the 1950s: a motel with covered patios on the beach, a cafe, a store, a six-lane launch ramp with two docks, fuel on land and water, slips, dry storage and a marina that rents everything from kayaks to houseboats. The Park Service’s campground sits just back from it, about 45 paved sites for tents and RVs without hookups under cottonwoods and oleanders, with tables, fire pits or grills, water spigots, flush restrooms and a dump station, and a separate 75-site RV park with full hookups beside it. The lower loop, nearest the water, is the one worth asking for. It is about 800 feet above sea level and 4 hours 45 minutes from Old Town.
Since January 1, 2024 the concessioner, Cottonwood Cove Resort & Marina, has run the campground as well as the resort, which means you book by phone with them and not on recreation.gov, and the rate is theirs to set. The lake itself is the reason to come: Lake Mohave is Hoover Dam’s tailwater, cold and clear, and at Cottonwood Cove it is wide enough and shallow enough along the beach to be swimmable from May. Free loaner life jackets hang at the beach. Box Cove and Ski Cove are a short walk; dozens more are a short boat ride.
What you get is a beach, a boat ramp, a motel and a cafe as backup, and the warmest water on a cold lake. What you do not get is a published price, showers in the campground, groceries closer than Laughlin, or any reason to be here in July without a boat.
How to camp Cottonwood Cove right
Call before you drive. The camping rate is set by the resort and changes with the season; call 702-297-1464 or 877-262-8212 for the figure and to book, and ask whether the cafe is open. The $25 Lake Mead entrance fee per vehicle (1 to 7 days; $45 annual) is paid at the entrance station regardless, and an America the Beautiful pass covers it. Senior and Access passes take 50 percent off Park Service camping and lake-use fees.
Get there. About 4 hours 45 minutes from Old Town, all paved. Loop 101 west to US 60 to Wickenburg, US 93 north to Kingman, SR 68 west 30 miles to Bullhead City and across Davis Dam to Laughlin, NV 163 west 18 miles to US 95, then north 20 miles to Searchlight. Turn east on Cottonwood Cove Road and drive 14 miles of straight, empty highway down to the lake. Coming from Las Vegas it is an hour south on US 95. Searchlight has fuel and a casino diner; real groceries are in Laughlin or Henderson.
Pick the season. October through April for comfortable camping; May and September are 90s with warm water; June through August is over 100 and the cove is a boat ramp with tents. Holiday weekends from Memorial Day to Labor Day fill the ramp with Las Vegas boaters; winter weekdays are nearly empty.
Ask for the lower loop. It is the one closest to the beach and the water, and the one the owner of this site pinned separately for a reason. The upper sites are fine and farther from the ramp noise.
Water and facilities. Spigots, flush restrooms with sinks, dump station and water fill, store, cafe. No showers in the campground; hookups in the RV park only. Confirm shower access with the resort if it matters.
Use the water right. Swim at the beach, where the lake has spread in the sun for 40 miles and the shallows warm from May; life jackets are free. In a kayak, wear one; the afternoon wind and the wake boats are serious. Head north, where the coves between here and Nelson’s Landing are empty on weekdays, and in spring the stripers run along the drop-offs. Clean, drain and dry your boat for quagga mussels, which are established in both lakes. The drought entry explains why the lake level here barely moves while Lake Mead’s does.
Dogs. Leashed, and off the swim beach.
Skip it if you want showers, a bigger marina or a shorter drive from Arizona: Katherine Landing is 45 minutes away on the Arizona side with all three. For Lake Mead proper, Boulder Beach and Temple Bar are on recreation.gov with published rates. For a free night on the way, the BLM land around Nipton is 40 minutes west. For sand, warm water and fewer people, this is the better cove.
A gold camp’s cove on a lake that did not exist until 1951
The Colorado below Black Canyon was Mojave country, the river of the Pipa Aha Macav, “the people by the river,” who farmed the floodplain each spring after the flood and crossed the river where it slowed and widened. Cottonwood Island, a long, cultivated island in the river a few miles from where the cove is now, was one of their places, and it was there, in 1867, that the Army put a short-lived outpost to guard the crossing and the stock using it, in the years when steamboats worked the river up to the mouth of Black Canyon and the Mojave were being pushed toward the reservation at Fort Mojave. The island was farmed and grazed by others afterward, and it is now under the lake.
Searchlight gave the cove a reason to have a road. In May 1897 a prospector named George Frederick Colton found gold in the hills 14 miles west of the river, and the camp that grew up around the strike was, for a few years, bigger than Las Vegas; between 1907 and 1910 it held about 1,500 people, with a railroad to carry its ore and a stamp mill on the river below to crush it. The boom was short. Searchlight declined after 1917, US 91 bypassed it in 1927 and the population fell to about 50, and the last gold mine closed around 1953. Harry Reid, who would run the United States Senate, was born there in 1939, in a town with no reason to exist except the one that was about to arrive.
That reason was a dam. Hoover Dam, finished in 1936, made Lake Mead and, with it, the Boulder Dam Recreation Area, whose boundaries already took in the river lands below the dam where a second lake would form. The 1944 water treaty with Mexico required the United States to regulate the water it released from Hoover, and the answer was Davis Dam, completed in 1951 near what became Bullhead City and Laughlin. It backed the Colorado up 67 miles to the foot of Hoover, drowned Cottonwood Island, and made Lake Mohave, a cold, clear reservoir of Hoover’s deep-drawn tailwater. Southern California found it immediately. Searchlight’s old mining road to the river became the road to a beach, and through the 1950s Cottonwood Cove was developed as the lake’s Nevada-side resort, with the ramp, the motel, the marina and, behind them, the Park Service’s shaded campground. In 1964 the recreation area was renamed Lake Mead National Recreation Area, and Cottonwood Cove became one of its three Lake Mohave marinas, with Katherine Landing and Willow Beach on the Arizona side.
Little of the shape has changed since; the management has. The resort passed through a succession of concessioners, and on January 1, 2024 the current one, Cottonwood Cove Resort & Marina, took over the Park Service campground as well, so that the campground left recreation.gov and its nightly rate became the resort’s to set and the visitor’s to ask about. The lake, unlike Lake Mead above it, barely moves: Mohave is a regulating pool, kept near full so that Davis Dam can meter the river to Mexico, which is why the ramp here works every year while Lake Mead’s have been chased downhill by the drought. The water is the same 50-degree tailwater it has been since 1951, and the cove is where it has had 40 miles to warm.
Why it matters
Cottonwood Cove is a lake resort built on a treaty obligation, at the end of a road built for gold, on a cove the Mojave used before any of it. It explains Lake Mohave better than the dam does: a regulating pool kept full for Mexico, cold because it is Hoover’s bottom water, swimmable here because the canyon finally lets the sun at it. For a Scottsdale visitor it is nearly five hours and the far side of a long weekend, worth it for the beach in May or October and for a boat week any time it is not July. Call for the rate, ask for the lower loop, shop in Laughlin, and point the kayak north.