Dave Webb
September 25, 2024

There are not many places at Lake Powell where you can drive to the water and set up camp on the beach. The Staton Creek area near Bullfrog is my favorite such place. We camped there last weekend and found nice conditions and convenient access to the lake. It is a large primitive camping area with plenty of coves and spots for tent campers.

"Convenient" is relative, of course. The roads leading down to the water are rough and suitable only for high-clearance 4x4 vehicles. But people often challenge that recommendation and we saw plenty of crossover vehicles make it to the water's edge. Some people used bit pickup trucks to drag travel trailers down the rough roads, but that is difficult and can be hard on the trailers. In some spots, the roads are steep and have large rocks and deep sand.

The Stanton Creek area is not far from the main channel. It provides excellent access to Bullfrog Bay and is also convenient if you want to boat up and down the lake. From our campsite, it took only a few minutes to pull kids on tubes out of the bay and up into Moki Canyon. That's a very scenic ride.

Portable toilets are placed on the hill throughout the Stanton Creek area, where the road is good, but they are not close to the water. Some people camp near the toilets and walk to the lake. More often people camp near the water and bring their own toilets.

There is plenty of sand up on the hill and access roads go through deep sand. But the beach area is mud, not sand. That is unfortunate. If the beaches were sandy then Stanton Creek would be perfect.

The most popular place where you can drive in and camp on the beach is Lone Rock, near Wahweap. Lone Rock offers a very nice sandy beach and room for many campers, but it can crowded, noisy, and busy. And it is a long ride if you want to boat out of Wahweap Bay and access other areas on the big lake. If the Castle Rock Cut is open you can boat from Wahweap Bay into Warm Creek Bay and then head up the lake, but in recent years "The Cut" has been high and dry more often than it has been navigatable. If it is not usable then you have to boat up to the main channel and follow it around Antelope Island to get into Warm Creek - and that is a 10-mile boat ride. The main channel is often jam-packed, and boat traffic can churn up the water, so I try to avoid it if possible, particularly on summer weekends.

There are nice developed campgrounds at Bullfrog and Wahweap but they are not on the water.

Staton Creek and Lone Rock do not offer any facilities or services (other than portable toilets). 

I prefer to boat-camp up or down the lake, at some remove cove away from the marinas. I can take 5 people and camping gear on my boat. But we usually have a larger group and so we usually camp where there is vehicle access. Look for us at Staton Creek.