What is Temple Bar Campground?
Most of Lake Mead’s campgrounds are strung along the Nevada shore within an hour of the Strip. Temple Bar is the exception: the Park Service’s only developed campground on the Arizona side, at the end of a 26-mile paved road that leaves US 93 in the Joshua trees north of Dolan Springs and dead-ends at the water. The basin takes its name from the Temple, a flat-topped butte across the bay that spends its evenings changing color for campers.
The campground is 71 paved sites (69 listed on recreation.gov) at about 1,315 feet, laid out in loops under palms, oleanders and old cottonwoods that give real shade and some privacy. 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 scattered through the loops, with a dump station and water fill at the entrance. There are no showers and no hookups. Next door, a concessioner runs Temple Bar Marina, with rental boats, fuel on the water, a store selling snacks, drinks and charcoal, a seasonal cafe and a 10-site RV park with hookups.
The thing that distinguishes Temple Bar now is the ramp. The lake’s two-decade decline closed launch ramps across the park, and Temple Bar’s was shut for a time too. It reopened on a concession-managed Mobi Mat with a minimum safe elevation of 950 feet, the lowest of any ramp on Lake Mead. What you get is a paved site, a working ramp and a dark sky. What you do not get is a beach, a shower or anything for sale on the way in.
How to camp Temple Bar right
Reserve, then pay twice. $20 per night, $10 with a Senior or Access pass, reserved on recreation.gov; since 2024 all Park Service campgrounds at Lake Mead require reservations, though same-day bookings are allowed and the limit is 30 nights. The $25 Lake Mead entrance fee per vehicle (1 to 7 days) is collected separately; the $45 annual pass is worth it on a second visit.
Get there. About 4 hours 35 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 50 more miles north on US 93 past Dolan Springs to the signed Temple Bar Road, 18 miles short of the Hoover Dam bypass bridge. Turn right and drive 26 miles through Joshua tree desert to the entrance station and the campground. Fuel the truck in Kingman or Dolan Springs; marina fuel is for boats and priced like it. Nothing on Temple Bar Road sells anything, so bring firewood too.
Pick your site. Book an outer site on the lake side for the view of the Temple, which goes orange and then purple at sunset; the inner sites are closer to the restrooms and the oleander hedges but see only each other.
Pick the season. Camp October through April. Winter days run in the 60s, nights near freezing. May and September are around 90; June through August is over 100 for three months, and the campground is for boat storage.
Bring a boat. There is no beach at Temple Bar; people swim and wade from boats in the coves. Rent at the marina or bring even a kayak, and paddle the shoreline east of the marina in the morning before the wind; those coves are empty on a weekday in a way nothing on the Nevada side ever is. Walk the Temple View Trail for the land view.
Check the ramp. Read the park’s Changing Lake Levels page the week you go, because ramp status moves with the lake and the campground does not refund you for a closed ramp. The shoreline mud exposed by falling water has trapped vehicles and people elsewhere in the park; test the ground. Clean, drain and dry your boat for quagga mussels.
Look up. There is nothing between you and the Grand Wash Cliffs, and Las Vegas is 80 miles away behind a mountain. See the stargazing guide for what to look for.
Dogs. Leashed.
Skip it if you are coming without a boat or a reason to want the dark: it is four and a half hours each way for a campground quieter but not prettier than Boulder Beach. Katherine Landing on Lake Mohave is about 40 minutes closer, and Windy Point in the Cerbats near Kingman is the cool-weather pine alternative.
A gold bar under Lake Mead
Before it was a lake, this was a canyon of the Colorado River, and before it was a recreation area it was somebody’s country. The Park Service dates human use of the region to 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, when it was wetter and cooler. In historic times the river was a boundary: Hualapai country on the south side, where Temple Bar sits, and Southern Paiute country to the north. The 1883 order that set aside the Hualapai reservation still runs its boundary to the Colorado, upstream in the Grand Canyon.
The name comes from mining. The Temple is the butte; the bar was a gravel bar on the river below it, and in the 1890s a placer company worked it for gold, hauling timber from Kingman for its tunnels because the river’s driftwood would not hold. One local history says the butte was first called the Mormon Temple by an early settler on the river; the Park Service says only that the formation gave the area its name. Either way, nobody would remember the bar if Hoover Dam had not drowned it.
The dam began backing up the river on September 30, 1935, and over the next six years Lake Mead rose to 1,200 feet and filled Temple Basin. The government set aside the Boulder Dam Recreation Area around the new lake in 1936 and renamed it Lake Mead National Recreation Area in 1947; in 1964 Congress made it the first national recreation area in the country. Temple Bar’s resort life began right after the war, with guest cabins in 1947 and a floating store in the early 1950s, by the marina’s own account The Park Service campground came later; the park does not publish the year it opened, and none turned up in research for this guide.
The lake hit its record high of 1,225 feet in the summer of 1983. Then the drought arrived. Through the 2000s and 2010s the water fell, ramps were extended and then abandoned, and marinas on the Nevada side were moved or closed. On July 28, 2022, Lake Mead reached 1,040.58 feet, its lowest since it was filling in 1937. Temple Bar’s ramp closed for a time and then came back on a concession-run mat rated to 950 feet, which is why, on today’s lake, the quietest launch on Mead is also the one most likely to be working.
Why it matters
Temple Bar is the Arizona half of Lake Mead, and it tells the lake’s story more clearly than the busy Nevada shore does: a river canyon in Hualapai country, a gold bar nobody remembers, a dam that drowned it, a post-war fishing resort, and now a reservoir that has spent two decades shrinking. It is also a fair measure of what the drought has done, a ramp engineered to chase the water down. For a Scottsdale camper it is a long drive with a specific payoff: a $20 paved site, a working launch, coves you can have to yourself on a weekday and a sky with almost no light in it. Come between October and April with a boat or a kayak, check the ramp status before you leave, and it is the best night on the lake.