Drive up to Lassen Volcanic National Park and sleep inside it, at Manzanita Lake, with Lassen Peak standing right over the water. The campground is reservation-only and opens up to six months out on recreation.gov, which makes the order obvious. Get the site, then get the van for those dates. Aim for summer or early fall, because the Lassen Park Highway that links the two ends of the park closes with the snow from about November through May or June.
Almost everyone camped at Manzanita drives that road south to Bumpass Hell and walks the boardwalk out over the mudpots and fumaroles, a three-mile round trip through country that hisses at you.
North of the park on CA-89, Burney Falls comes over a basalt cliff in a 129-foot curtain, with springs pouring straight out of the rock face rather than over the lip. It is a day run from a Lassen or Whiskeytown base. On peak-season weekends it takes a Friday-through-Sunday day-use reservation, May 15 to September 27 as of August 2026.
If you are picking up somewhere else in Northern California, the Chico campervan page reaches Lassen from the south end of the valley, and the California hub lists the rest of the state's bases.
Shasta Lake
For a water weekend, run I-5 north to Shasta Lake and camp on the bluff at Antlers, above the Sacramento arm with Mount Shasta on the skyline. The sites sit up off the water with no lake access of their own, no hookups, and no dump station, though you get drinking water and flush toilets. Singles run about $30, with Loop 1 open March 1 through October 31 as of August 2026. In a dry year, low lake levels can close parts of the shoreline.
Keep going north on I-5 and Mount Shasta fills the windshield, with the granite spires of Castle Crags rising right off the freeway below it. Both make an easy detour on a day you are already camped at the lake.
Whiskeytown
Roll into Redding too late to climb and pull west instead. Whiskeytown is about eight miles out on CA-299, with a swim beach and shaded waterfall trails right on the lake. Two campgrounds take rigs year-round on recreation.gov: Oak Bottom RV at $20 to $30 and Brandy Creek RV at $20 for self-contained vans only, as of August 2026. Entrance is $25 per vehicle for seven days on top of the camping fee.