What is Katherine Landing Campground?
Lake Mohave is the 67-mile reservoir behind Davis Dam, the stretch of the Colorado between Hoover Dam and Laughlin where the river water arrives cold from the bottom of Lake Mead and the canyon walls of Black Canyon give way, near the south end, to open water and sand. Katherine Landing is the National Park Service’s main developed area on the Arizona side, a few miles above the dam, and its campground is the largest on either lake: 173 sites on landscaped, shaded loops at about 730 feet, each with a concrete table and a fire ring with grill, served by modern restrooms, showers, laundry and a dump station.
The whole complex is run by a concessioner, which is why it has things the Park Service’s own campgrounds on Lake Mead do not: hot water, a bar and grill, a store with bait, a 51-room lodge, an eight-lane launch ramp, fuel on land and water, rentals from kayaks to houseboats, and a swim beach. A separate 24-site RV park with full hookups sits next door. Fisherman’s Trail and Lake View Trail lead from the landing to Turkey Cove, Sand Cove and Arizona Telephone Cove; the park says 198 coves are reachable from here, most by water only.
What you get is the most comfortable camping in a 1.5-million-acre recreation area, on a clear, cold lake, within sight of a casino skyline. What you do not get is solitude, a reservation, or any shade you did not bring on the inner loops. It is a resort campground, and it is honest about it.
How to camp Katherine Landing right
Show up early; you cannot book it. $30 per night, $15 with a Senior, Access or military pass, first come, first served through the concessioner. The lake-view sites on the outer loops go first, and the snowbird crowd in January is real, so arrive on a weekday or by noon on a winter Friday. The RV park, $55 with full hookups, and the lodge take reservations on the concessioner’s site; nothing here is on recreation.gov.
Budget the gate. The $25 Lake Mead entrance fee (1 to 7 days) is charged at the entrance station on top of camping; the $45 annual pass pays for itself on a second trip, and America the Beautiful passes work.
Get there. About 3 hours 55 minutes from Old Town, all paved. Loop 101 west to US 60 (Grand Avenue) to Wickenburg, US 93 north about 130 miles to Kingman, then SR 68 west 30 miles over Union Pass and down the long grade to Bullhead City. Turn north on SR 95 toward Davis Dam, then onto Katherine Spur Road, pass the entrance station and follow it to the landing. Laughlin’s casinos are 7.5 miles away across the dam; Bullhead City has every service.
Pick the season. October through April is the camping season, with winter days in the 60s and nights near freezing. May and September are 90s. June through August is over 100 and the campground becomes a parking lot for boats; the lake is the only reason to be here then.
Use the facilities. Spigots, flush restrooms, showers, laundry, dump station, store. This is as civilized as camping gets in the recreation area, and the showers are the reason to pick it over the Park Service campgrounds across the dam; bring quarters and flip-flops. Ask for a site away from the ramp road if you sleep lightly, because bass tournaments launch in the dark.
Respect the lake. Cold, clear and busy with powerboats on weekends. Wear a life jacket in a kayak; the wakes and afternoon wind are no joke. Launch at first light, paddle north toward the coves, and be back by eleven. Clean, drain and dry anything that goes in the water; quagga mussels are established here. The Colorado’s drought barely shows on Mohave, which is held near full as a regulating pool, so the ramp works in every year.
Dogs. Leashed in the campground and on the trails. The lodge charges a pet deposit and nightly fee.
Skip it if you want quiet. It is a resort campground with a resort’s noise, and four hours is a long way for one. Cottonwood Cove, 45 minutes up the Nevada shore, is the same lake with half the people, and Temple Bar on Lake Mead is emptier still. For pines and a cool night on the way, Hualapai Mountain Park above Kingman is 40 minutes back up the road. If you want showers, a ramp and a cheeseburger in January, this is the one.
A gold mine’s name on a reservoir’s shore
The river here belonged to the Mojave, the Pipa Aha Macav, the People by the River, who farmed the Colorado’s floodplain on the spring flood and whose reservation, the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation, still spans the river a few miles downstream of Bullhead City in three states. The Army built Fort Mohave on their land to guard the river crossing; the reservation that replaced it was carved from the old post in 1890. Everything that happened at Katherine afterward happened on the hills above their river.
Gold came first. Prospectors had worked the Union Pass country since the 1860s, but the claim that named this place was made in September 1900, when S.C. Bagg, a teamster hauling ore to a mill at Sheeptrails, panned samples from a granite outcrop, filed on it and called it the Catherine Mine. The spelling drifted to Katherine within a generation; nobody we found can say for certain who she was. The mine changed hands twice, closed in 1904, reopened in 1907 for two years, and then rode the Oatman boom that began in 1915. The Katherine Gold Mining Company took it over in 1919, sank a shaft to 950 feet, and in June 1925 finished a cyanide mill that started at 75 tons a day and grew to 250. A townsite with a post office stood beside it from 1925 to 1929. In December 1929 the company went bankrupt with the rest of the district.
The mill outlived the mine. The Gold Standard Gold Mining Company bought the water rights in 1933, rebuilt after a fire in September 1934, acquired the mine outright in 1935 and ran it from 1937 to 1940; the mill kept processing other mines’ ore until the War Production Board closed it on April 15, 1943. Over four decades the Katherine produced less than $2 million in gold and silver, and the mill about $3.6 million. What is left on the hill northeast of the marina is a scatter of concrete pillars and foundations.
The dam came next and changed what the hills were worth. The Bureau of Reclamation began Davis Dam, originally Bullhead Dam, in 1942, stopped for the war, resumed in 1946 and finished in 1951: a 200-foot earth-fill dam whose job is to re-regulate Hoover’s releases and deliver water owed to Mexico under the 1944 treaty. Its construction camp became Bullhead City. The lake it made, Lake Mohave, covers about 26,500 acres and reaches 67 miles up Black Canyon to the foot of Hoover Dam, and the mining camp of Tri-state, across the river from the future landing, went under it. Because the water comes from the bottom of Lake Mead, Mohave runs cold year-round, which is why there are trout in the upper canyon and why the swim beach is bracing in April.
Recreation was federal almost from the start. The land around Lake Mead had been a recreation area since 1936 and carried the Lake Mead name since 1947; in 1964 Congress made it the first National Recreation Area created by statute and added Lake Mohave and its shoreline. The Park Service laid out Katherine Landing as the lake’s Arizona hub, with a concessioner to run the marina, lodge and campground, and the eight-lane ramp, the 173 landscaped sites and the showers are the result of six decades of that arrangement. Laughlin, which did not exist when the dam was finished, grew into a casino town across the river, and its buffets and fuel, 7.5 miles away, are now part of what the campground offers.
Why it matters
Katherine Landing is the lower Colorado in one view: Mojave farmland, a gold mine that never quite paid, a federal dam that turned a canyon into a cold lake, and a concession campground that gives the Valley’s snowbirds hot showers beside it. It is also the plainest lesson on how the river works now. Mohave is a regulating pool held near full so that Hoover’s water can be metered downstream to California, Arizona and Mexico; the lake you swim in is a schedule. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple. It is four hours for a resort campground, so go in winter, go midweek, take a kayak into the coves at dawn, and understand that the cheeseburger and the shower are the amenities you drove for.