What is Three Dunes Campground?
Lake Havasu is 45 miles of Colorado River backed up behind Parker Dam, and most of its Arizona shore is rock and sand with no road to it. Two agencies have turned that into campsites. The BLM runs 73 boat-in sites along 20 miles of shoreline north of Lake Havasu City; Cattail Cove State Park, 15 miles south of town, runs 32 more along its own 2,000 acres of shore. Three Dunes is one of the park’s, site 3 on the park map, a sandy pocket a mile or so north of the ramp with a picnic table, a stand-up grill, a shade ramada and a pit toilet within walking distance. The name describes the view: low sand hills behind the beach, with the Whipple Mountains across the water in California.
The arrangement is entirely first come. You drive into Cattail Cove, pay the day-use fee at the gate and the overnight parking fee for the truck and trailer you are leaving, fill out a boat-in camping envelope at the Iron Ranger, launch at the park’s ramp, and go find an empty site. Rangers check by boat. The park allows 14 nights, bans fires year-round and provides nothing you did not bring, including water and a way to carry out your trash. In return you get a beach of your own on one of the warmest, clearest lakes in the state, with the park’s 139-site developed campground, showers and store a mile behind you if anything goes wrong.
What you get is a private cove for the price of a parking fee and an envelope. What you do not get is a campfire, a tap, a reservation or a way in without a boat. It is a campsite only if you own one, and it is the best cheap beach night in western Arizona if you do.
How to camp Three Dunes right
Pay three fees before you launch. Day use $10 per vehicle for one person, $20 for 2 to 4; $5 per night to leave a vehicle and trailer in the lot; plus the posted boat-in camping fee in an envelope at the Iron Ranger. Arizona State Parks does not post the boat-in rate online, so call 928-855-1223. No reservations; 14-night limit. Rangers check envelopes by boat.
Get there. About 3 hours 20 minutes to the park. Loop 101 to I-10 west 130 miles to Quartzsite, SR 95 north 35 miles to Parker, then another 25 miles up the river road past Buckskin Mountain State Park to the signed Cattail Cove entrance on the left at about milepost 168. From the ramp, Three Dunes is roughly a mile north along the Arizona shore; the park map at the entrance station shows the sites and toilets. There is no road or trail to it.
Launch early. The boat-in sites nearest the ramp go first on a spring Saturday; Three Dunes is far enough north to be a second or third choice for lazy boaters, which is its charm. A sit-on-top kayak or paddleboard handles the mile in calm morning water. Do not plan a late paddle back with a loaded boat.
Pick the season. October through April to sleep comfortably; the water is swimmable April through October. Summer at 465 feet is 110 degrees and the ramada is the only shade. March weekdays are the sweet spot.
Bring everything. No drinking water. Nothing but the table, grill, ramada and a pit toilet. Pack out all trash. Fire is prohibited at boat-in sites all year; propane stoves and charcoal in the grill are fine.
Respect the wind and the wakes. Havasu is a powerboat lake. Paddle in the morning, wear a life jacket, and give yourself a weather margin for the trip back; the afternoon wind builds a real chop. The fishing for stripers and largemouth off the points is best at first light.
Dogs. Leashed, six feet maximum, attended at all times.
Skip it if you do not own a boat or want a campfire. Crossroads on the Parker Strip and the developed loops at Cattail Cove let you drive to your tent; Craggy Wash north of town is the free BLM option on dirt; and Alamo Lake, two hours back toward Phoenix, is the quiet state park lake where fires are allowed. If you want a beach nobody can walk to, this is how western Arizona does it.
A lake built for Los Angeles, parceled out by the state
The river here was a boundary before it was a lake. The Mohave held the valley to the north, and the Chemehuevi, a Southern Paiute people who had moved onto the river, held the country to the south and west; the Chemehuevi Reservation still fronts 25 miles of Lake Havasu’s California shore, directly across the water from the park, and the tribe runs the Havasu Landing resort there. Their floodplain farms went under the lake.
The lake exists because Los Angeles needed water. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California paid nearly the whole cost of Parker Dam, which the Bureau of Reclamation built from 1934 to 1938 to make a forebay for the Colorado River Aqueduct; half the dam’s power still runs the aqueduct’s pumps. Arizona objected to being flooded for California’s benefit. In 1935 Governor Benjamin Moeur sent the Arizona National Guard to the river to stop construction on the Arizona bank, and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes halted the work until the dispute was settled in court. The dam was finished anyway, and the reservoir behind it, Lake Havasu, holds about 646,000 acre-feet on 19,300 acres. Arizona got its own straw in the end: the Central Arizona Project lifts its water out of this lake at the pumping plant above Parker Dam, a few miles south of the park, and carries it to Scottsdale’s taps.
The parks came a generation later and by the state’s own initiative. At its fourth meeting, in Yuma on August 12, 1957, the newly created Arizona State Parks Board heard a presentation on the recreation potential of some 250 miles of Colorado River shoreline. The board studied the shore from 1961, proposed park sites in 1962, and sent a Lower Colorado Land Use Plan to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall in March 1963; he approved it on January 13, 1964. On January 14, 1965 the Bureau of Reclamation leased 13,072 acres of lakeshore to the State Land Department for fifty years, which subleased them to State Parks two weeks later. Development began at Cattail Cove that same year under its first manager, Glen Cross, while up the lake Robert McCulloch’s new company town, Lake Havasu City, created by Mohave County on September 30, 1963, was flying in prospective buyers and, by 1971, reassembling London Bridge.
The boat-in sites are a 1970s idea. Through that decade State Parks improved more than 250 shoreline campsites along the lake with ramadas, picnic tables, fire grills and nearby toilets, the formula you still find at Three Dunes, and Cattail Cove added a concession. A federal-state land exchange in 1986 shrank the park to 10,866 acres and moved Pittsburg Point to the State Land Department; the park was split into upper and lower units, and in January 1987 the lower unit became Cattail Cove State Park in its own right. In 1995 the Parks Board gave up its lease in exchange for patents and long-term leases, and Cattail Cove received title to 2,374.70 acres, roughly the park you camp in today. The fire ban at the boat-in sites and the Iron Ranger envelope are the later, cheaper management of a shoreline that was built out when the state had more money than rangers.
Why it matters
Three Dunes is a beach made by somebody else’s water. The lake is a forebay for Los Angeles and the intake for Phoenix, the shore was federal land until Arizona leased it in 1965 and bought it in 1995, and the campsite is a 1970s state parks idea maintained by an envelope. That is the lower Colorado in one cove: every acre of water is spoken for, and recreation lives in the margins. It also explains why western Arizona’s best camping is reached by boat, because the roads were never built and the state could not afford to build them. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple. If you have a kayak and a March weekday, pay the three fees, launch at seven, and take the cove farthest from the ramp; if you do not, camp at Crossroads and swim at the park beach.