What is Echo Bay Campground?
The Overton Arm is the long northern finger of Lake Mead that reaches up toward the Virgin and Muddy rivers, and Echo Bay is the last developed place on it. Fifty years ago it had a marina, a motel, a restaurant, an airstrip and two full campground loops. The lake fell, the marina left, the motel closed, and today Echo Bay is a Park Service campground of about 34 bookable paved sites under palms and cottonwoods at 1,230 feet, a dump station, a small picnic area with a fish-cleaning station, a store that keeps its own hours, a concession RV park and a launch ramp that the Park Service has been extending to chase the water. The second loop is fenced off.
None of that is a reason not to come; it is a reason to know what you are coming for, which is the quiet. Echo Bay is 40 miles up Northshore Road from the Lake Mead Parkway entrance, far enough that the Las Vegas weekend crowd thins to nearly nothing, and the sky is as dark as anywhere in southern Nevada. The arm is sheltered kayaking water with striped bass in the coves. And Valley of Fire State Park, whose red sandstone is the best scenery within two hours of Las Vegas and whose campgrounds are booked solid, is 15 minutes north.
What you get is a paved site with a table, a fire ring, a spigot and a flush toilet within walking distance, on the emptiest developed shore of the biggest reservoir in the country, for $20 plus the park entry. What you do not get is a shower, a hookup, a dependable store, a marina, or a shoreline you can trust under a vehicle.
How to camp it right
Reserve, even today. $20 per night, $10 with a Senior or Access pass, on recreation.gov; same-day bookings are allowed and the limit is 30 nights. Book the sites along the outer edge of the open loop for lake views and the last shade of the day. The $25 Lake Mead entrance fee (1 to 7 days) is separate and collected at the Northshore or Lake Mead Parkway stations.
Get there. About 5 hours 40 minutes from Old Town, all paved. Loop 101 west to US 60 to Wickenburg, US 93 north through Kingman and over the Hoover Dam bypass to Boulder City, then into the park on Lakeshore Road and north on Northshore Road for about 50 miles of empty, excellent desert driving past the Bowl of Fire and Redstone. The signed Echo Bay Road turnoff is 40 miles north of the Lake Mead Parkway entrance station and 10 miles south of the Northshore entrance; the lower campground is 5 miles down it. Overton, 20 minutes north, has fuel and a grocery store. Bring all food and fuel from Henderson or Overton; do not plan around the store.
Pick the season. October through April. Summer highs top 100 from June through August and the campground is nearly empty for a reason. Winter nights are cold but rarely freezing at 1,230 feet, and the stars are the best of any developed campground on the lake; see the site’s stargazing notes for what to look for.
Water and facilities. Spigots and flush restrooms through the campground, a dump station and water fill at the upper campground entrance. No showers, no hookups in the Park Service loop; the concession RV park next door has its own terms.
Paddle the arm, early. The Overton Arm is the best kayaking water on Lake Mead, long, narrow and sheltered compared with the Boulder Basin, and the coves north of the ramp are where the striped bass run in spring. Launch in the morning before the north wind builds.
Check the ramp before you tow. The Park Service’s 2026 table shows Echo Bay open for motorized and non-motorized boats, closed for houseboats, and under construction for the rest of the year to extend the ramp below its 1,035-foot minimum safe elevation. Status changes with the lake; read the Changing Lake Levels page the week you go. Callville Bay, 30 miles south, is the fallback. For why the lake keeps falling, the Colorado River and the drought entry is the background.
Stay off the mud. Receding water leaves silt that looks like beach and is not; the Park Service’s own page says to test all ground before committing, and vehicles have been lost in it. Stay on the ramp and the established roads.
Make it a Valley of Fire trip. The Fire Wave and White Domes are 25 minutes away and the state park’s own campgrounds fill months ahead; Echo Bay almost never does. On the way out, drive all 50 miles of Northshore Road back rather than cutting to I-15 at Overton.
Dogs. Leashed.
Skip it if the lake is the whole point. Nearly six hours from Scottsdale for a campground that is a shadow of its old self is a poor trade unless Valley of Fire or Utah is on the itinerary; Boulder Beach is an hour closer and has more of everything, Temple Bar is the Arizona-side equivalent, and Cottonwood Cove on Lake Mohave still has a working marina.
The resort the lake walked away from
The head of the Overton Arm was farmed for more than a thousand years before it was flooded. Ancestral Puebloan families lived along the Muddy and Virgin rivers from roughly 300 BC to AD 1150, in the string of villages archaeologists named the Lost City, growing corn and cotton and mining salt from the caves above the river; the Southern Paiute held the valley when the first Spanish traders and then the Mormons came through. St. Thomas, founded by Thomas Smith’s party in 1865 where the Muddy met the Virgin, and Overton, settled in 1869, were the Latter-day Saints’ farthest southern outposts until a survey put them in Nevada rather than Utah and a Nevada tax bill sent the St. Thomas settlers home in February 1871. Others came back in the 1880s, and a railroad spur reached the town in 1912.
Hoover Dam ended all of it. Lake Mead began to form in 1935, less than a year before the dam was finished; the Boulder Dam Recreation Area was created on October 13, 1936, the first such reserve in the country, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built the Lost City Museum in Overton in 1935 to hold what archaeologists could pull from the pueblos before the water reached them. The last resident of St. Thomas, Hugh Lord, rowed away from his house on June 11, 1938. The reserve was renamed Lake Mead National Recreation Area in 1947, and in 1964 Congress made it the first national recreation area to carry that designation by statute, adding Lake Mohave below the dam.
Echo Bay belongs to the full-lake decades. In the years after 1964 the Park Service and its concessioners built out the Overton Arm’s resort here: a marina with fuel and rentals, a motel, a restaurant, an airstrip and two campground loops of paved sites under planted palms and cottonwoods, the whole apparatus of a mid-century lake vacation 60 miles from Las Vegas. The sites you sleep in, with their tables and grills and the spigots between them, are that era’s work. The Park Service’s own pages do not date the construction, and the exemplar of the period is simply the layout: two loops for a crowd that no longer comes.
Then the lake left. Through the 2000s the drought on the Colorado drew Lake Mead down year after year, and the ruins of St. Thomas, submerged since 1938, came back into the air; photographers were walking its foundations by 2007. At Echo Bay the shoreline retreated from the marina, the marina went, the motel closed, one campground loop was fenced, and the ramp became a construction project that chases the water downhill. By 2026 the Park Service listed the ramp open to trailered boats, closed to houseboats and under construction all year to extend it below its 1,035-foot minimum, and recreation.gov offered 34 sites where there had once been twice that.
What is coming depends on the river. The park’s 2007 to 2024 tally of 317 deaths, most of them in the water, and its blunt warning about silt that looks like beach are the present-tense reality of a reservoir in retreat. Echo Bay will be whatever the lake level makes it.
Why it matters
Echo Bay is the clearest place on Lake Mead to see what the drought has done, because it is the place the lake left first. A town drowned in 1938 has reappeared; a resort built for the full lake has emptied; a campground with two loops has one. For an Arizonan whose tap water comes partly from this reservoir through the Central Arizona Project, the half-closed developed area is not scenery, it is the water bill. The verdict for a Scottsdale visitor: come for Valley of Fire, sleep here because it is quiet and dark and cheap, paddle the arm at dawn, and understand that you are camping on the high-water mark of a century that is over.