Douglas City Campground

Douglas City Campground, a BLM area, is one of the nicest public campgrounds I’ve seen. The paved road and pads throughout the park couldn’t be more than 2-years old. The restrooms are new and nice. The shower is nice. It’s like the park had a complete makeover last year or the year before. Impressive. The pads are (mostly) level side-to-side, and easily adjustable front to back. They fit all sizes of trailers and RVs; a 40’+ pulled in this afternoon. My site, and a few others, back right up to the Trinity River. Seriously, not more than 50’ from the back of my trailer. All the sites have sun/partial to complete shade. The closest town is Weaverville, about 10-miles north. There’s water, but no hookups and no dump station. (Dump stations are scarce in this area, it seems.) No internet, spotty cell service, oddly, cell service only during daylight hous. The river is accessible from any site, some small rapids in spots, slow water in others, with occasionally deeper pools here and there. Beautiful site to see, beautiful sound to hear camping, especially when dozing off to sleep. This campground is tucked down from the road and into a fairly narrow canyon. The trees are mostly oak, madrona, fir and pine, with the occasional mountain ash. Lots of bushes (don’t know name of bushes too well), and poison oak, Himalayan blackberry, grasses, etc., relegated to the mostly sunny spots. They have bear safes (metal boxes with doors having bear-proof levers/latches) to store food. Haven’t seen any nor have I seen signs of bear. Lots of critters though: deer, lizards, flies, MOSQITOS, butterflies. I tried fishing over a couple of days, and gold panning over a couple of days, didn't have luck with either, no worries though, the site and campground made up for it. The camp host, Russ, was absolute pleasure to meet and speak with (he's a public drinking water guy like me!

My husband and I were desperate to add a couple days on to the end of our scheduled vacation to the Dunsmuir, CA area as we didn't have to be home until Sunday, but had to check out of the Railroad Park RV Resort on Friday, and there were zero campsites available in Siskiyou County.
We stumbled on the Douglas City Campground using a great brochure/map we got at the Whiskeytown Information Center.
We have a 25' pull-behind trailer, so our boondocking options were very limited as most in that area that we could find were set for tenters or very small rv's.
The incline down to the campground at Douglas City is very steep - maybe a 12% grade, and we didn't have a clue what sort of place we would end up at. Wow, were we pleasantly surprised! A small, cozy campground with host, right on the Trinity River, for $10/night! We grabbed the one pull-through site, but many are easily backed into, and all are nicely paved and mostly level. There are some cute tent sites as well. The days were very hot - probably 100° - and there are no hook-ups so we siesta'd in the afternoons. The river is gorgeous, cold, clean, and refreshing. The Trinity River is popular for rafters so we had fun waving at rafts full of happy people floating by. The night temps dropped nicely after the sun went down behind the mountain, so we were able to cool off. We watched a bat aerial show in the evenings, and listened to the many bird calls as well. The moon and stars were well visible as their is no light pollution in that area.
I would have given the campground 5 stars except - they have two lovely looking bathroom/shower buildings that are locked up tight with notices that they are closed due to Covid-19, but they supplied the campground with 2 portapotties instead. (??!) I took a star away for that lack of common sense. 😁 We are self-contained so it didn't affect us too much, but tenters would have more of an issue with it.
All in all - it was a wonderful stay, and we will definitely stay again. 2 take-aways - the river is filled with iron lyrite/fool's gold, and is really pretty when the glakes sparkle in the sun. Also, there is a decent amount of poison oak here and there, so beware. Leaves of 3, let it be!