Camping and hiking within a few hours of Scottsdale
Scottsdale sits at the bottom of a very large state, and the lists below run to its edges and a little past them. An hour east are the Superstitions; two hours north the pines start, and the Mogollon Rim, Sedona and Flagstaff sit above the heat all summer; two hours south is Tucson and the road up Mount Lemmon. Below are the 317 places we send people to when they ask where to camp or hike once they have done the Preserve: 188 places to spend the night and 85 trailheads, plus the lakes, swimming holes and ruins worth the drive, each with the drive time from Old Town, what it costs, when it is actually good, and the catch. For the trails inside the city, see every park and trailhead.
The state map
Every dot is a place on this page. Tap one to open its guide; the filters dim the ones that don’t match.
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317 of 317 places shown
Under an hour · 46 places
In and around the Valley
The Phoenix mountain preserves, the county’s big desert parks and the Lower Salt River: what locals do before work, and the only camping you can reach after dinner.
40th Street Trailhead
A paved lot with water, a restroom and a ramada at the east end of the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, where the L.V. Yates Trail (#8) and the Quartz Ridge Trail (#8A) climb gentle ridges toward Piestewa Peak and the 10.7-mile Charles M. Christiansen Trail (#100) runs through. It is the closest real desert trailhead to Old Town after the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, and most weekends you can park at nine.
Free
Piestewa Peak Summit Trail
A 1.2-mile staircase of switchbacks and rock steps that climbs about 1,200 feet to a 2,608-foot summit with the whole Valley laid out below. The city rates it extremely difficult, and it is: short, relentless and crowded, which is exactly why locals use it as a gym. No dogs, no shade, no shortcuts, and the lot is full by seven on a winter weekend.
Free; no parking fee
Shadow Mountain, Acoma Drive access
The Google Maps pin labelled only Park and Hike is the Acoma Drive access to Shadow Mountain, a 1,923-foot hill in the Phoenix Mountains Preserve that the city lists with two trails, no trailhead and no parking lot. You park on the street between houses, walk through a gap in the fence and have a small desert mountain mostly to yourself: a 1.6-mile Big Loop, a 0.8-mile Small Loop and an unofficial scramble to the top. It is the least developed peak in the preserve system, which is the whole appeal.
Free
Lookout Mountain Summit Trail
A small, steep neighborhood mountain with a 0.6-mile Summit Trail (#150) that gains about 470 feet to a top just over 2,000 feet, and a 2.6-mile Circumference Trail (#308) around the base. From the summit you see Piestewa, the McDowells, Four Peaks and, on a clear winter morning, the Bradshaws. It is the shortest honest summit in the Phoenix system and the lot is a gravel pad at the end of a residential street.
Free
Javelina Canyon Trail
A small lot at the north end of 46th Street shared by two trails: Javelina Canyon climbs about 465 feet up a mellow canyon to a saddle on the Ridgeline Trail, and Beverly Canyon (1.7 miles, 250 feet) comes back along the foothills, making a loop of roughly 3.7 miles and 600 feet. It is a mile from the Pima Canyon mob and feels like a different park: fewer people, more quail, and a ridge-top view of the East Valley and the Superstitions.
Free
Pima Canyon Trailhead
The big east-side gateway to South Mountain: a long paved lot with restrooms, water and ramadas at the end of Pima Canyon Road, where a dirt road leads up the wash to the National Trail and the Hidden Valley loop (about 6 miles and 850 feet to Fat Man's Pass and back) and the Desert Classic Trail heads 9 miles west along the south face. It is the closest South Mountain trailhead to Scottsdale and the one that fills first.
Free
Shaw Butte Trail
Shaw Butte Trail (#306) is a 4-mile loop that climbs about 650 feet to the 2,149-foot top of the western lump of the North Mountain Preserve, past the concrete foundation of Cloud Nine, a hilltop restaurant that burned in the early 1960s and was never rebuilt. It is rated difficult for the steep service-road grade on the north side, and it is the best moderate loop in the Phoenix Mountains that nobody from Scottsdale has heard of.
Free
Mormon Trail and Hidden Valley
A 1.1-mile, 720-foot climb from a small lot at the end of 24th Street to the National Trail, then a loop through Hidden Valley with its boulder squeeze (Fat Man's Pass), rock slide and Natural Tunnel, about 3.7 to 3.9 miles and 850 feet all told. It is the direct, steep version of the Pima Canyon route, with petroglyphs on the way up and no water or shade anywhere.
Free
South Mountain Park and Preserve
More than 16,000 acres of three small mountain ranges on the south edge of Phoenix, with over 100 miles of trails, a paved road to the 2,330-foot Dobbins Lookout, a visitor center and a ring of trailheads around the perimeter. It is one of the largest city parks in the country and it feels like it: you can hike all day on the National Trail and see nobody, or you can be at the lookout in a rental car twenty minutes after leaving the airport.
Free; no entry or parking fee
Apache Wash Trailhead
The main trailhead for the north half of the 9,600-acre Phoenix Sonoran Preserve, a paved lot with vault toilets and a shade structure on Sonoran Desert Drive where a dozen trails fan out: Apache Vista (0.5 miles, 153 feet) to a quick overlook, Ridgeback (1.5 miles, 224 feet) along the hills, and the 5.6-mile Apache Wash Loop around the valley. The trails are wide, well graded and signed, the saguaros are thick, and on a January morning the place is half empty. Desert Hills Trailhead on Carefree Highway is the other entry, with the longer Ocotillo and Sidewinder trails.
Free
Coon Bluff Recreation Site
A low bluff of mesquite and cottonwood on the Lower Salt River a mile east of Phon D Sutton, with picnic tables under the trees, vault toilets, a gravel bar for wading and a reputation as the single best spot to watch the Salt River horses. Google still calls it a campground; it is not. The Tonto National Forest lists it, under the name Raccoon Bluff Day Use Area, as day use only with no overnight camping, and the old weekend tent camping that locals remember is gone.
Tonto Daily Pass, $8 per vehicle bought ahead at a Forest Service office or vendor, or $12 at the on-site fee machine; $80 Tonto Discovery annual pass
Deem Hills Recreation Area
Almost 1,000 acres of black basalt hills wedged between I-17 and the Stetson Valley subdivisions, with a 5.7-mile Circumference Trail around the outside, a 1.5-mile Ridgeline Trail over the 2,050-foot top, and a few short connectors from two trailheads. It is a neighborhood preserve that happens to be big enough for a real workout, and the volcanic rock gives it a different look from the granite and schist ranges closer to Scottsdale.
Free
Phon D Sutton Recreation Area
A shaded day-use area where the Verde River meets the Salt, with 15 picnic tables under six ramadas, vault toilets, a sandy put-in and the Lower Salt River Nature Trail through the mesquite bosque next door. It is where the wild horses come down to drink most evenings and where tubers climb out most summer afternoons, which are two very different scenes. It is day use only, and always has been.
Tonto Daily Pass, $8 per vehicle bought ahead at a Forest Service office or retail vendor, or $12 at the on-site fee machine; $80 Tonto Discovery annual pass; America the Beautiful passes accepted
Thunderbird Conservation Park
Glendale's big desert park: 1,185 acres of the Hedgpeth Hills with about 15 miles of multi-use trail, numbered ramadas, grills, wildlife blinds along a sedimentation basin, and three entrances off 55th, 59th and 67th avenues. The 1.5-mile Arrowhead Point climb and the 3-mile Cholla Loop are the hikes; the 5-mile Coach Whip runs end to end. It is 35 minutes from Scottsdale and worth knowing about mainly if you are on that side of town, and in 2026 and 2027 the three trailhead lots are being rebuilt one at a time.
Free
Black Canyon Trail (Bob Bentley Trailhead)
The Black Canyon Trail is an 80-mile BLM National Recreation Trail that follows an old sheep-driveway corridor from Carefree Highway north past Black Canyon City to the Bradshaw foothills, and it is one of the best long mountain-bike rides in the Southwest. Its southern end is the Bob Bentley Trailhead on Carefree Highway, which the BLM has never developed: it is a gate in the fence. The real southern trailhead is Emery Henderson on New River Road, 10.6 trail miles north, with a paved lot and vault toilets. The first stretch is flat, fast and frankly dull; the country gets good north of New River.
Free; no permits, passes or fees
Cave Creek Regional Park
A 2,922-acre Maricopa County park in the hills between I-17 and the Town of Cave Creek, with about 14 miles of trail, a nature center with live desert animals and ranger programs, picnic ramadas, horse staging and a 55-site campground with hookups. The 5.8-mile Go John Trail circles the mountain and is one of the best moderate loops in the Valley; Overton (2.1 miles) and Slate (1.6 miles) are the shorter options. It costs $10 a car and is 40 minutes from Old Town, and from January to March the trailhead lots can fill.
$10 per vehicle (rising to $12 in 2028); $5 per person on foot, bike or horse; Maricopa County annual pass $120
Cave Creek Regional Park Campground
A clean, flat 55-site county campground in the saguaro foothills of Cave Creek Regional Park, every site with water and electric hookups, a fire pit and a table, with hot showers, flush toilets and a dump station. It is the nearest campground with hookups to north Scottsdale, the trails leave from the loop, and from January through March the snowbirds have it booked solid six months out. Tents are welcome but you will be camping among RVs.
$40 per night plus a $10 non-refundable reservation fee (rising to $50 per night in 2027 and $60 in 2028); day-use entry is included for the registered vehicle, extra vehicles $10
Pebble Beach Recreation Area
The widest, easiest beach on the Lower Salt and the put-in for most of the river's summer floats, with shade ramadas and tables, vault toilets and a cobble bar that gives it its name. It is also the loudest site on the river on a July Saturday. It is day use only; it always was. Come on a weekday or in October and it is a different, better place.
Tonto Daily Pass, $8 per vehicle bought ahead at a Forest Service office or vendor, or $12 at the on-site fee machine; $80 Tonto Discovery annual pass
Usery Mountain Regional Park
A 3,648-acre county park wrapped around Pass Mountain, the one with the white band of tuff across its face that East Valley locals call Scarface. It has 23 trails from a barrier-free loop to the 7.5-mile Pass Mountain circuit, the Valley's most popular cave hike, a 73-site campground, a nature center and an archery range with nearly 100 targets. It is the most complete day-use park in the East Valley and it knows it, so arrive early on winter weekends.
$10 per vehicle per day (rising to $12 in 2028); $5 per person walking or biking in; annual pass $120
Usery Mountain Regional Park Campground (Buckhorn)
Seventy-three developed sites on a wide, flat loop under Pass Mountain, every one with water and electric, hot showers in the restrooms and a dump station on the way out. It is the East Valley's version of McDowell Mountain: a comfortable county campground that happens to have 34 miles of trail and a cave hike starting a few hundred yards away, and the Superstitions 25 minutes down the road.
$40 per night (developed site with water and electric) plus a $10 reservation fee in 2026; $50 a night from January 2027
Base and Meridian Wildlife Area
About 198 acres of river, marsh and cottonwood-willow forest where the Salt River ends and the Gila carries on, managed by Arizona Game and Fish for waterfowl and the endangered Yuma Ridgway's rail. It is a working wildlife area, not a park: a gravel lot, a walking path along the river, a kayak launch and some fishing holes, with the city of Avondale's Tres Rios Nature Festival pitched on it one weekend each March. The name is literal. The initial point from which every township and range in Arizona is measured sits on the hill just across the river.
Free; no pass or permit required for the wildlife area itself
Butcher Jones Beach and Trail, Saguaro Lake
A gently sloping sand-and-gravel beach in a buoy-protected cove on Saguaro Lake's north shore, with mesquite-shaded picnic tables, vault toilets and the Butcher Jones Trail running east along the water for about two and a half miles to Burro Cove. The Forest Service calls it one of the most-visited sites on the Tonto, and on a June Saturday the lot is full and locked before ten. In February you share the trail with herons and a few anglers and wonder why you have never been.
Tonto Daily Pass, $8 per vehicle bought ahead at a Forest Service office or vendor, or $12 at the on-site fee machine; $80 Tonto Discovery annual pass; America the Beautiful passes accepted at this picnic site
Daisy Mountain Trail
The 3,180-foot peak above Anthem is State Trust Land, not a park. An informal trail climbs about 1.2 miles and 750 feet from the end of a residential street to a summit with the whole north Valley and the Bradshaws in view. It is a good little mountain with two real problems: you need a State Land recreation permit, and the only public access point has no parking at all. Unless you are staying in Anthem, there are better uses of a morning.
Arizona State Trust Land recreation permit, about $15 per person or $20 per family per year (confirm current price with the State Land Department)
McDowell Mountain Regional Park Campground
Ninety-two campsites on the lower slopes of the McDowells, 20 minutes past Fountain Hills, with hot showers, 50-amp hookups and the county's best mountain-bike trail system out the back of the loop. It is not wilderness, and you can see the Valley's glow from your tent, but for a Friday-night escape from Scottsdale nothing else comes close in distance or comfort.
$40 per night for a developed site with water and electric, $25 for a semi-developed Ironwood site, plus a $10 reservation fee; $10 per vehicle day use for visitors who are not camping
Wind Cave Trail
A mile and a half of steady switchbacks up the south face of Pass Mountain to a shallow, cool alcove hollowed out of the white tuff band, with ferns in the cracks and rock squirrels waiting for your sandwich. It gains about 800 feet, which is enough to earn the view, and it is the most popular trail in a very popular park, so the lot is full by mid-morning every winter weekend.
$10 per vehicle park entry (county annual pass accepted); no separate trail fee
Jewel of the Creek Preserve
A 26-acre land-trust preserve where Cave Creek runs all year, one of the last perennial streams in Maricopa County, through a corridor of cottonwoods, willows and a mesquite bosque with giant saguaros on the slopes. A figure-eight of short hiker-only trails, the Dragonfly and the Harry Dalton loops, covers about a mile and a half total with footbridges over the creek. The lot is free and tiny, it fills by mid-morning in winter, and the whole thing takes an hour. Desert Foothills Land Trust bought it from the state in 2001 to keep it from becoming houses.
Free
Estrella Mountain Regional Park
The county's second-largest park, 19,840 acres of bajada and rough volcanic foothills climbing toward the Sierra Estrella from the Gila River, with about 58 miles of trail, a 9.5-mile competitive track and the only grass picnic area in the county system, 65 acres of it under old eucalyptus. It is a long way from Scottsdale by Valley standards and that is why the trails are quiet. The park is mid-construction in 2026: a 50-site campground is being built where the rodeo arena stood, and the Rainbow Valley and Coldwater trailheads are closed through March 2027.
$10 per vehicle per day (rising to $12 in 2028); $5 per person walking or biking in; annual pass $120
Estrella Mountain Regional Park Campground
There is no campground to book at Estrella Mountain Regional Park in 2026. The county tore out the rodeo arena and is building a 50-site developed campground with two shower buildings, a dump station, an equestrian trailhead and a dog area in its place, a project it says will take until about March 2027. Until then the only overnight option is the occasional rental of a camp-host site by phone. Some listings still give 37 sites; the real number is zero now and 50 later.
No regular campsites to rent in 2026; the park occasionally rents its camp-host sites by phone. When the new campground opens, county developed sites are scheduled at $50 a night in 2027 plus a $10 reservation fee
Lost Creek Trail (Verrado and Skyline Regional Park)
Lost Creek Trail is an old ranch road turned trail that runs about two miles along the foot of the White Tanks from Skyline Regional Park's eastern trails to the edge of Verrado, the first mile inside the city park and the second on BLM land. For years the easy way in was Verrado's Lost Creek Trailhead at the end of Lost Creek Drive, with the Verrado petroglyphs a mile and a half up the wash. That lot closed in May 2024 for home construction and trail apps still list it as closed indefinitely; hikers reported a temporary lot and trailhead in early 2026, but the whole east end is in flux. The reliable way in is from Skyline, which adds about three miles round trip.
Free; Skyline Regional Park charges no entry fee
Single Track Trailhead (Daisy Mountain, New River side)
The unnamed pin south of New River is the Single Track Trailhead, a dirt clearing on State Trust Land at the north foot of Daisy Mountain, about 2,600 feet up and two rough miles off New River Road. From it a footpath climbs the north side of the mountain to the roughly 3,150-foot summit, and a 2.8-mile singletrack rolls downhill to Anthem. It is the back door to the same mountain the Anthem guide covers, with the opposite problems: there is room to park, but you need high clearance to get there and a State Land permit to be there.
Arizona State Trust Land recreation permit, about $15 per person or $20 per family per year (confirm current price with the State Land Department); no other fee
Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area
The quietest and most beautiful of the county's parks near Scottsdale: 2,154 acres of upper Sonoran Desert where Cave Creek flows through cottonwoods in winter and spring, bought by Maricopa County, the Town of Cave Creek and the state in 2000 to stop a golf resort. The Spur Cross Trail (5.2 miles) and the short Dragonfly, Metate and Towhee loops along the creek are the easy days; the Elephant Mountain Trail (2.0 miles, 638 feet, rated extremely difficult) is the hard one. It costs $5 a person at an honor box, the last 1.5 miles of road are dirt, and there is no water.
$5 per person; children under 15 free; Cave Creek residents free with a resident card; Maricopa County annual pass accepted; exact cash in the iron ranger envelope
Lake Pleasant Campgrounds (Desert Tortoise and Roadrunner)
Two campgrounds on the bluffs above the west shore: Desert Tortoise, 74 sites split between 25 developed, 39 semi-developed and 10 tent sites, and Roadrunner, 71 sites, all developed with water, electric and a covered ramada at each. Both have restrooms and showers, both look down on the lake, and both are a short walk from the Discovery Center and the ramps. Add boat-in camping at the 10-lane lot and a primitive Dirt Spillway area and Lake Pleasant has more ways to spend a night than any other county park, and more reasons to book early.
$40 per night developed (water and electric), $25 semi-developed, $20 primitive at the Dirt Spillway, plus a $10 reservation fee in 2026; $50, $35 and $25 from January 2027
Lake Pleasant Regional Park
A 23,362-acre county park wrapped around the Valley's largest and deepest reservoir, where the Agua Fria and the Central Arizona Project fill a canyon behind New Waddell Dam. There are ten-lane boat ramps, two marinas, swimming coves, 145 campsites, a Discovery Center about the dam and water, 18.8 miles of trail, a herd of feral burros that wanders the roads at dusk and the Pipeline Canyon Trail, the Valley's only hike along a shoreline. It is a boating lake first and a park second, and on a summer weekend it is loud. In winter it is quiet, blue and underused.
$10 per vehicle per day (rising to $12 in 2028), plus $5 per motorized or $3 per non-motorized watercraft; annual pass $120
Little Pan Staging Area, Table Mesa Recreation Area
Little Pan is a flat, gravelly BLM staging area with two accessible vault toilets, information kiosks, two OHV training areas and free primitive camping, 2.5 miles of dirt off I-17 at Table Mesa Road. It is the hub of the 14,000-acre Table Mesa Recreation Area, which means dust, engines and target shooting are the soundtrack on any weekend. The quiet attraction is next door: the Black Canyon Trail's Table Mesa trailhead, about three miles west of the freeway, starts a roughly 10-mile Little Pan Loop that drops to the Agua Fria and climbs the mesas, and the 12.5-mile segment north to Black Canyon City is the most technical riding on the whole 80-mile trail.
Free for camping and day use; off-highway vehicles need a current Arizona OHV decal; commercial, competitive and large group events need a BLM special recreation permit
San Tan Mountain Regional Park
More than 10,000 acres of low granite mountains and saguaro flats at the far southeast corner of the metro area, established in 1986 and run by Maricopa County even though it sits in Pinal. Nine trails totaling about 20 miles, with the 2.5-mile Goldmine climb and the 6.4-mile San Tan loop as the anchors, a small visitor center with a tortoise, and a gate that is never crowded. It is a long drive from Scottsdale and nobody from Scottsdale goes, which is exactly its appeal if you are already down here.
$10 per vehicle per day (rising to $12 in 2028); $5 per person walking or biking in; annual pass $120
Sears-Kay Ruin
The stone foundations of a fortified Hohokam village of about 40 rooms on a knob above Cave Creek, built around 1050 and lived in for roughly 150 years, with a signed one-mile interpretive loop climbing about 220 feet to the walls. The Forest Service built a paved eight-car lot, three ramadas and a vault toilet, charges nothing, and the site is on the National Register. It is the easiest place within an hour of Scottsdale to stand inside a thousand-year-old room.
Free; no pass or permit required
Skyline Regional Park
The City of Buckeye's own mountain park on the south end of the White Tanks: about 8,700 acres, more than 20 miles of hiking, biking and horse trail, ramadas, flush restrooms and a small loop of seven primitive campsites, all of it with no entry fee two miles off I-10. It is newer, emptier and simpler than the county parks, and the camping is the bargain of the Valley at about $20 a night, as long as you book three days ahead and bring your own water.
Free entry; campsites about $20 per night
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Trail (Jomax Road, Peoria)
A quarter mile of easy trail lined with plaques about the Vietnam War, its casualties and some of the Arizonans who died in it, ending at a flagpole, a bench and a guestbook on a knoll above the Vistancia rooftops. The trail then keeps going, with benches every couple hundred feet, to the top of an unnamed 1,730-foot hill, about 0.8 miles and 315 feet from the road. Residents of Trilogy at Vistancia built it and keep it up. There is no sign on Jomax Road, no parking lot and no agency behind it: the hill is State Trust Land, not the Peoria preserve the pin's label suggests.
Free to walk; the land is State Trust Land, where a State Land Department recreation permit (about $15 per person or $20 per family per year, confirm current price) is technically required
White Tank Mountain Regional Park
Nearly 30,000 acres of steep granite range rising to over 4,000 feet on the West Valley's edge, the largest park in the Maricopa County system, with a nature center and public library at the gate, about 30 miles of trail and the Waterfall Trail, a 0.9-mile walk past the densest cluster of petroglyphs in the Valley to a seasonal fall in a slot of white granite. Above the easy stuff, the Ford Canyon and Goat Camp trails climb 1,400 to 1,700 feet into the range and are two of the hardest day hikes in metro Phoenix. The main trailhead staging area is closed for construction through October 31, 2026.
$10 per vehicle per day (rising to $12 in 2028); $5 per person walking or biking in; annual pass $120
White Tank Mountain Regional Park Family Campground
Forty developed sites with water and electric, flush toilets and showers on the slope below the White Tanks, facing east across the entire Valley, plus a walk-in tent loop, a group campground that parks 50 rigs and a youth area. The sunrise is the thing: the sun comes up behind the Superstitions 60 miles away and lights the city grid below you. It is the county's best campground for a view and its most remote from Scottsdale.
$40 per night for a developed site with water and electric, $25 for a semi-developed Willow site, plus a $10 reservation fee in 2026; $50 and $35 from January 2027
Box Canyon and the Florence BLM dispersed camping
The owner's unnamed "BLM" pin east of SR 79 is the start of Cottonwood Canyon Road, the main entrance to the Florence OHV area and, in winter, a long line of RVs on the flats beside it. The first miles are actually State Trust land, which needs a cheap annual permit; BLM land and the free camping start a few miles in. Beyond that the road climbs to the Five Points trail hub and south through Box Canyon, a one-vehicle-wide slot that is spectacular dry and deadly in rain. Come for the trails, not for solitude.
Free on BLM land farther in; the camps near the highway are on Arizona State Trust land and need a State Land Department recreation permit, $15 per person or $20 per family per year
Buckeye Hills Regional Park
Buckeye Hills is the Maricopa County park nobody from Scottsdale has heard of: about 4,450 acres of dark volcanic hills on the south bank of the Gila River off SR 85, with a $10 gate, restrooms, a picnic ramada, no running water and no built trail system. The county's own word for the hiking is primitive. What fills the parking lot is the Joe Foss Shooting Complex at the south end, reopened under City of Buckeye management in August 2025, and on a Friday to Sunday the hills echo with it. Come midweek for the quiet, or come for the range and know what you are getting.
$10 per vehicle, rising to $12 on January 1, 2028; Maricopa County annual pass accepted; shooting range $7 per person
Casa Grande Mountain Park
Casa Grande Mountain is the rocky range you pass between I-10 and I-8 on the way to Tucson, and the city has turned it into a free park with more than 17 miles of marked trail built almost entirely by volunteers and AmeriCorps crews since 2010. Two dirt-lot trailheads serve it: the north one at the end of Hanna Road off Peart Road, where Google Maps puts the park, and the Arica Road trailhead on the south side. The Ridge Trail runs the crest, a service road climbs steeply to the radio towers near the 2,538-foot high point, and the butte trails below are mellow enough for a first ride. No water, no restrooms, no fee.
Free
Castle Hot Springs Road BLM dispersed camping
North of Lake Pleasant, Castle Hot Springs Road runs through a patchwork of BLM, State Trust and private land where you can pull onto an existing flat and camp for free. It is the closest real dispersed camping to the north Valley, which is both the appeal and the problem: the pullouts near the pavement are shot up and trashed, the good spots are farther in on gravel, and wild burros will walk through camp at dawn. Carry water, know whose land you are on, and go on a weeknight.
Free on BLM land; an Arizona State Land Department recreation permit ($15 a year per person, $20 per family) is required on the State Trust parcels mixed in along the road
Quartz Peak Trail, Sierra Estrella Wilderness
Three miles and about 2,500 feet from the floor of Rainbow Valley to a 4,052-foot quartz-capped summit on the crest of the Sierra Estrella, the dark range that walls off the southwest Valley. The BLM calls it extremely steep, difficult to follow in places and for experienced, well-conditioned hikers only, and for once the agency is understating it. Getting to the trailhead is half the trouble: 13 miles of sandy dirt road that needs high clearance. The view from the top, across the whole Valley to the Superstitions and south over the Gila River Indian Community to nothing at all, is the reward.
Free; no permit, pass or fee
Montezuma Peak, Sierra Estrella (Montezuma Peak Parking)
The Google Maps pin labelled Montezuma Peak Parking is a clearing at about 1,820 feet at the end of a deep-sand 4WD track in Rainbow Valley, and it sits inside the BLM's Sierra Estrella Wilderness, so parking there is legal. The peak it is named for, Montezuma Peak at about 4,340 feet, is not: the Gila River Indian Community boundary runs roughly a mile east of the clearing, well below the crest, and the summit, the ridge and the upper drainage are tribal land closed to the public without permission that the community does not give. Hikers who have gone anyway describe a trailless 1.8-mile, 2,550-foot grind and warn of impounded vehicles. This entry exists to say so plainly.
Free on the BLM side; the summit requires Gila River Indian Community permission, which hikers report is not granted
About an hour east · 22 places
The Superstitions and the Apache Trail
The closest real wilderness to Scottsdale. Low, exposed, spectacular and strictly a cool-season range; the Apache Trail strings lakes and campgrounds along its north side.
Broadway Cave
From a tiny lot at the end of Broadway Avenue, the flat Jacob's Crosscut Trail runs along the base of Superstition Mountain for about 1.4 miles to a big cairn, then an unofficial trail climbs 500 feet in a third of a mile of loose switchbacks to a cave about 20 feet high and 30 wide that faces west over Apache Junction. About 3.8 miles round trip and 800 to 950 feet of gain, free, no state park gate. The lot holds eight cars and the county tows.
Free; no fee and no Tonto Pass
Silly Mountain Park
A lone hill a few hundred feet above the US 60 at the east edge of Apache Junction, with five short volunteer-built trails that braid up to a summit at about 2,100 feet, a third-of-a-mile accessible botanical walk at the bottom, and a straight-on view of Superstition Mountain across the highway. The longest loop is about 2.5 miles with roughly 400 to 450 feet of gain. It is free, close and modest, and after a wet winter the brittlebush and poppies on its slopes are as good as anywhere in the East Valley.
Free
Lost Dutchman State Park
A 320-acre state park pressed against the west face of Superstition Mountain, where the easy Treasure Loop, the moderate Prospector's View and the brutal Siphon Draw to the Flatiron all leave from the same paved lots. It is the most civilized way into the range, which is exactly why the gate backs up on a cool Saturday. Pay the fee, start early, and pick the trail that matches the legs you brought.
Day use $10 per vehicle with one person, $20 per vehicle with two to four people, $5 per individual or bicycle; free for registered campers
Lost Dutchman State Park Campground
About 135 paved campsites, 68 of them with water and 50/30/20-amp electric, plus five air-conditioned cabins and three group areas, all with Superstition Mountain filling the eastern sky. Showers, flush toilets and a dump station make it the softest camping in the range, and the trails start where the loops end. It books up on winter weekends almost a year out, so plan like it.
Nightly rates vary by site and season and are shown at booking; second vehicle $15 per night; camping cabins $99 per night plus a $5 reservation fee; $3.60 reservation fee per campsite
Siphon Draw and the Flatiron
A maintained trail climbs about 2 miles into the Basin, a slickrock bowl under the cliffs of Superstition Mountain; above it an unmaintained route gains another roughly 1,800 feet in three-quarters of a mile to the Flatiron at about 4,860 feet. Round trip is 5.8 miles by the park's count, 6 to 6.6 by most GPS watches, with about 2,800 to 3,100 feet of gain and a 10-foot rock wall near the top. It is harder than Camelback by a wide margin, and the descent, not the climb, is where people get hurt.
Lost Dutchman State Park day use: $10 per vehicle with one person, $20 with two to four; free for registered campers
First Water Road dispersed camping (the "Camp 99" pin)
First Water Road is the 2.5-mile dirt road from the Apache Trail to the First Water Trailhead, and for decades its pullouts were the free place to sleep on the edge of the Superstition Wilderness. That ended. A Mesa Ranger District order has banned camping along the whole road, 300 feet either side, since January 2023, and the current version runs to January 2031. Hike from here; sleep at Lost Dutchman State Park a mile away.
Free to drive and to park at the trailhead; camping anywhere along the road is prohibited by Forest Order 03-12-03-26-00 through January 11, 2031
Hieroglyphic Trail
About a mile and a half of gentle climbing on a wide, rocky trail from the end of a Gold Canyon cul-de-sac to a canyon of smooth boulders covered in Hohokam petroglyphs, with seasonal pools below them. It is the Superstitions with the difficulty turned down and the payoff turned up, which is why the lot is full by eight on a winter Saturday.
Free; no pass required at this trailhead
Willow Springs Gate (Apache Trail)
The pin Google calls Willow Canyon Trailhead is the Willow Springs gate, one of five access points into the Tonto National Forest's 34,000-acre Bulldog Canyon OHV Permit Zone, on the north side of the Apache Trail between Lost Dutchman State Park and Canyon Lake. From the pullout, Forest Road 12 heads north up Willow Springs Canyon into the Goldfield Mountains, and a 4-mile loop around the rock formations to Willow Springs Basin Tank is the usual hike. It is free and unsigned for hikers, OHV-permit country for anyone with an engine, and empty on weekday mornings.
Free for hikers and horses; motorized vehicles entering the Bulldog Canyon zone need a Tonto National Forest OHV permit from recreation.gov ($10 for 3 days, $60 for 6 months, $80 annual)
First Water Trailhead
A free dirt lot with vault toilets at the end of a graded forest road, and the start of the Dutchman's Trail, the Second Water Trail and the Black Mesa Trail. The classic loop, Dutchman's to Black Mesa to Second Water and back, is about 9 miles across a saguaro flat called Garden Valley with views of Weavers Needle, with almost no climbing and almost no people compared with Peralta. The Forest Service calls the road unpaved and recommends high clearance; in practice most cars manage it dry.
Free; no fee and no Tonto Pass
The Wave Cave
A cave high on the south face of the Superstitions with a smooth lip of rock inside it curled exactly like a breaking wave, which is why it is on every Phoenix Instagram feed from December to March. From the Carney Springs area it is about 3 miles round trip with roughly 800 feet of gain, most of it in the last half mile; since parking at Carney Springs itself is no longer allowed, the legal start at the Lost Goldmine East trailhead makes it closer to 5 miles. The Shaka Cave and a 230-foot seasonal waterfall are off the same trail.
Free; no fee at the Lost Goldmine East trailhead
Whitlow Ranch Reservoir
Whitlow Ranch Dam is an earthen flood-control dam the Army Corps of Engineers finished in 1960 across Queen Creek, a mile east of Queen Valley. The reservoir behind it is empty almost all the time; what you get is a mesquite-and-cottonwood flat that fills with birds, a short climb to the dam crest with the Superstitions behind you, and Whitlow Canyon running north into the Tonto National Forest. It is a modest place and a good one for a low-key morning.
Free; no fee, pass or permit
Boulder Canyon Trail
Boulder Canyon Trail #103 starts across the highway from the Canyon Lake Marina and climbs a ridge where, in under two miles, you can see Canyon Lake behind you and Battleship Mountain, Weavers Needle and the La Barge Canyon country ahead. It then drops into La Barge Creek and continues up Boulder Canyon about 7 miles total to the Dutchman's Trail. Most people turn around at the creek crossing for a 5-to-7-mile day. In the 2026–27 season there is a complication: the whole Canyon Lake recreation area, marina lot included, is closed from September 8, 2026 for about 16 weeks while SRP lowers the lake for dam work.
Free; hikers park free in the marina lot when the lake is open. Note: the Canyon Lake recreation area, including the marina lot, is closed from September 8, 2026 for about 16 weeks of dam work, so confirm access before you go
Canyon Lake
A 950-acre reservoir behind the 1925 Mormon Flat Dam, squeezed into a canyon of red volcanic cliffs so narrow that the lake looks like a river from the Apache Trail. Acacia and Boulder day-use areas have swimming beaches and ramadas, the Dolly Steamboat runs 90-minute nature cruises, and the marina rents pontoons and runs a campground with hookups. The important fact for 2026–27: SRP and the Bureau of Reclamation are lowering the lake more than 50 feet for dam inspections, and the Forest Service closed every recreation site around it on September 8, 2026, for about 16 weeks.
Tonto Daily Pass $8 per vehicle (from a Forest Service office or vendor) or $12 at the on-site fee machine, plus $4 per motorized watercraft; Dolly Steamboat cruises from $35; marina camping and rentals priced by the concessionaire
Peralta Trail to Fremont Saddle
Peralta Trail #102 climbs a shaded canyon of hoodoos and oaks about 2.3 miles to Fremont Saddle, where Weavers Needle, the 1,000-foot volcanic spire at the center of every Lost Dutchman story, stands straight in front of you. It is the best view-per-mile in the range and the reason the dirt lot at the end of Peralta Road is full by 7:30 on a winter weekend. The eight miles of graded dirt to reach it are part of the deal.
Free; no fee and no Tonto Pass at this trailhead
Picketpost Mountain
Picketpost is the flat-topped volcanic mesa that stands alone south of US 60 as you drop toward Superior, and the route up it is one of the best short hard hikes in the state: about 2.3 miles one way and roughly 2,000 feet of gain, the second half a cairned and paint-marked class 2 and 3 scramble up chutes and slabs to a summit plateau at 4,378 feet with a mailbox full of logbooks. The trailhead is the Arizona Trail's Passage 17 and 18 junction, with vault toilets and a gate that closes at dark.
Free; no fee is posted at the trailhead
Tortilla Campground
A 76-site Forest Service campground at 1,800 feet on a bench above the Apache Trail, directly across the road from Tortilla Flat, population six, with potable water, flush toilets, a dump and sewer hookups and $20 sites. It runs only in the cool months and is the obvious base for Canyon Lake and the Superstition Wilderness. It is closed until further notice for extensive facility repairs, with no reservations for the 2026–27 winter, and the lake it serves is closed for dam work until early 2027, so this is a guide for when both come back.
$20 per night for a single site when open; 50 percent off for Interagency Senior and Access pass holders; the fee machine takes cards only
Boyce Thompson Arboretum
Founded in 1924 by copper magnate William Boyce Thompson, the arboretum is 135 acres of cultivated gardens inside a 372-acre desert property on Queen Creek, with nearly five miles of trails, a 1.5-mile main loop, a eucalyptus grove, a cactus garden, a cottonwood canyon, a small lake and Picketpost Mountain filling the sky to the south. It is the one place within 90 minutes of Scottsdale where the desert comes with labels and shade. Admission is $24.95 and worth it; the summer hours are short for a reason.
$24.95 adults and youth 13 and up, $10 children 5–12, under 5 free; $16 adult admission June through August; members free
Oak Flat Campground
Sixteen free campsites with tables and fire grills under big Emory oaks on a granite-boulder mesa at 3,900 feet, four miles east of Superior, with two vault toilets, no water, no trash service and some of the best bouldering in Arizona within walking distance. The place is Chi'chil Bildagoteel, a Western Apache sacred site on the National Register of Historic Places, and in March 2026 the federal government transferred it to Resolution Copper, a Rio Tinto and BHP company, for a block-cave copper mine that is expected over decades to collapse the ground here into a crater roughly two miles across. The campground is open and free for now, under the company's management.
Free; no camping fee, no pass
Five Pools (Devil's Canyon)
Five Pools is a series of waterfalls dropping into deep, sculpted bowls in Devil's Canyon, the big drainage east of Oak Flat and Apache Leap, about 210 feet of falls in all with the tallest around 50 to 60 feet. Reaching it means a rough forest road, a mile of slickrock and boulders down Hackberry Creek, bushwhacking through poison oak in Devil's Canyon, and then five rappels and swims with no trail out. It is one of the prettiest places in central Arizona and it is a technical canyon, full stop. Since March 2026 the usual approach from Oak Flat also crosses land that belongs to Resolution Copper.
Free; no fee or permit, but access across the former Oak Flat parcel is now at the discretion of a private landowner
Woodbury Trailhead, Superstition Wilderness
Woodbury is where the Superstitions stop being a day-trip range. Thirteen miles of dirt north of Queen Valley, the trailhead at about 3,520 feet opens the JF Trail north toward Tortilla Pass, the Woodbury and Coffee Flat trails west through Randolph and Fraser canyons, and, a few miles in, the Rogers Canyon Trail to the best-preserved cliff dwelling in the range. The 2019 Woodbury Fire started near here and burned 123,875 acres; the country is recovering, open and quiet, and the road is the price of admission.
Free; no fee and no Tonto Pass at this trailhead
Haunted Canyon Trailhead
Haunted Canyon Trail #203 is 8.5 miles end to end between Pinto Valley Mine Road (FR 287) and FR 287A, and the lower trailhead near Pinto Creek is the one most people use. The first stretch follows a mining road along the creek past pipes and pump stations, then the trail turns up Haunted Canyon proper, a shaded, sycamore-lined canyon that runs in spring, and reaches a side trail to Tony Ranch, a 1920s homestead, about 5 miles in. The approach through active mine country is strange, and the canyon is worth it.
Free; no fee or pass
Burnt Corral Campground, Apache Lake
Eighty-two sites on a green, cottonwood-shaded bench right at the water on Apache Lake, the longest and least visited of the Salt River reservoirs, with potable water, vault toilets, a boat launch and a paved loop road. It is the best lake campground in the Tonto's desert zone. The reason it is quiet is the drive: either 2.5 hours around through the Beeline and SR 188, or 38 miles up the Apache Trail, the last 20 unpaved and the Fish Creek Hill section limited to high-clearance four-wheel drive with no trailers.
$20 per night single site, $40 double; day use requires a Tonto Daily Pass, $8 per vehicle from an office or vendor or $12 at the on-site machine, plus $4 per motorized boat
One to two hours northeast · 17 places
The Verde River, Four Peaks and the Mazatzals
Where the Beeline Highway leaves the suburbs: river beaches, a CCC-era creekside campground, hot springs and the big mountains on Scottsdale’s eastern skyline.
Sycamore Creek Trailhead (SR 87)
The pin Google calls Sycamore Creek Trailhead is the entrance to the Tonto's Lower Sycamore OHV area, where Forest Road 403 leaves Bush Highway a quarter mile from the Beeline. The Bush OHV Staging Area is the first lot and the larger Sycamore OHV Staging Area is 1.25 miles farther in, both feeding about 112 miles of motorized routes through sandy washes and the seasonal creek. You can walk here, and after a storm the creek crossings are pretty, but this is a motor-sports area 35 minutes from Old Town, not a hiking trailhead, and it is honest to say so.
Free; no Tonto Pass and, as of this writing, no OHV permit, though the Forest Service says a Tonto OHV permit will be required in the future
Blue Wash Trailhead
From a gravel pullout on Cave Creek Road, the Blue Wash Trail drops into a wash walled with stacked slabs of stone and follows it about 1.4 miles down to Camp Creek, where a three-tier waterfall spills into a small grotto with a pool. It is sandy, unsigned and mostly downhill on the way in, which means the 400 feet of climbing comes on the way back, and the falls run reliably only in winter and spring. For the effort it is the best waterfall walk this close to Scottsdale, and on a wet February weekend everyone north of the 101 knows it.
Free; no fee or pass
Box Bar Recreation Area
Box Bar is the next river access downstream from Needle Rock and the one where you are allowed to stay the night: a rocky, pebbly stretch of the Verde with shade trees, one vault toilet and a parking area where tents and small trailers set up along the west edge. It costs a Tonto Pass and nothing more. The catch is a big one: the whole site is closed every year from December 1 to June 30 for nesting bald eagles, which removes exactly the months when you would most want to camp on a desert river.
Tonto Daily Pass: $8 per vehicle from a vendor or Tonto office, $12 at a fee machine (nearest machine is at Needle Rock); $80 annual
Needle Rock Recreation Site
Needle Rock is a gravel lot, vault toilets, picnic tables and a long pebble beach where the Verde River slides past a sandstone pinnacle, three miles of dirt road beyond the last house in Rio Verde. It is day use only, it takes a Tonto Pass, and on a warm Saturday it is wall to wall; on a weekday morning in April it is the nicest free-flowing river access in Maricopa County. The wild horses are the Salt River herd's Verde relatives, and they are habituated, not tame.
Tonto Daily Pass: $8 per vehicle from a vendor or Tonto office, $12 at the on-site fee machine; America the Beautiful passes accepted
Ballantine Trail
Ballantine is the trailhead you have driven past a hundred times on the Beeline, a dirt lot on the right just before the road climbs to Sunflower. From it the Pine Creek Loop and the Ballantine Trail #283 climb through granite boulders to Boulder Flat, a high basin about three miles up where the poppies come in March. The 2020 Bush Fire burned across all of it, so the shade is gone and the views are bigger; the wildflowers, if anything, got better. It is free, close and underrated.
Free; no pass required
Bartlett Lake
Bartlett is the Verde's lower reservoir and the only big lake you can drive to from Scottsdale without touching a dirt road: 13 miles of paved Bartlett Dam Road end at a marina, a motorized launch at Yellow Cliffs and Jojoba, a swimming and picnic cove at Rattlesnake with 41 ramadas, and two shoreline areas, SB Cove and Bartlett Flat, where you camp on the sand wherever the water line lets you. It all runs on the Tonto Pass. When the lake is full it is 2,800 acres of blue against bare mountains; when it is drawn down, the beaches get bigger and the launch ramps get longer.
Tonto Daily Pass $8 per vehicle from a vendor or office, $12 at a fee machine; motorized boats need a $4 Tonto Watercraft Sticker; annual Discovery Pass $80
Bronco Trailhead
Bronco is the big open lot with six horse pens on the right side of Seven Springs Road, three miles into the gravel. It is free, there is nothing there but parking, pens and a manure bin, and the Bronco Trail #245 that leaves it is a harder, emptier walk than the creekside trail at Seven Springs. The Maricopa Trail passes through, which is how you can walk from here to the edge of Scottsdale's Preserve if you have the legs.
Free; no Tonto Pass required
Riverside Campground, Verde River
Riverside is a small Forest Service campground on the Verde River just below Bartlett Dam, 12 sites under big mesquites and cottonwoods with the river at your feet and the dam face up the canyon. It was always the quiet alternative to the Bartlett Lake shoreline. In June 2024 a human-caused wildfire started in the campground, burned about 180 acres and killed the trees that made it, and the Forest Service has kept it closed ever since. The current order runs to March 31, 2027.
$16 per site per night when open (50% off with a Senior or Access pass), paid at a Tonto fee machine or by Scan and Pay. Closed through at least March 31, 2027
Seven Springs Recreation Area
Seven Springs is the closest place to Scottsdale where you can camp beside running water under sycamores, and the Civilian Conservation Corps built the whole thing in 1934. The campground is small, dry (no potable water) and first come, first served, the last nine miles are gravel, and the picnic area itself has been closed to vehicles by washouts. It is still the best overnight within an hour and a quarter of Old Town.
$16 per site per night at the CCC Campground (50% off with a Senior or Access pass); Cave Creek Group Campground $75 per night; the Cave Creek Trailhead is free
Mount Ord
Mount Ord is the 7,128-foot summit with the radio towers that you see on the left as the Beeline climbs out of Sunflower. A graded dirt road, Forest Road 626, leaves SR 87 near milepost 223 and climbs about six miles through grassland, oaks and finally ponderosa pine to a locked gate; from there it is a short walk to the towers and a view that takes in Four Peaks, the Mazatzal crest, the Mogollon Rim and Roosevelt Lake. It is free, it is cool, and a stock SUV handles the road in dry weather.
Free; no pass required
Barnhardt Trail, Mazatzal Wilderness
Barnhardt Trail #43 is the way into the Mazatzal Wilderness that everyone recommends and few people actually finish: about six miles and 1,800 feet up a deep red-rock canyon to the Mazatzal Divide Trail and the Arizona Trail, with a side canyon waterfall at the halfway point that runs after rain and snowmelt. The trailhead is five miles up a rutted forest road south of Payson. The 2004 Willow Fire took the big pines, but the canyon walls, the water and the quiet are intact.
Free; no pass or permit required
Horseshoe Campground
Horseshoe is a dozen developed sites with tables and fire pits on a mesquite flat beside the Verde, a few miles below Horseshoe Dam and at the end of ten miles of unmaintained dirt. It costs $16, there is no water or trash service, and sites 11 and 12 sit on the river. Bald eagles fish this stretch all winter. As of this writing the only road in, Horseshoe Dam Road, is under an emergency closure for flood repairs, so confirm it has reopened before you load the truck.
$16 per site per night; 50% off with an America the Beautiful Senior or Access pass
Mount Peeley Trailhead, Mazatzal Wilderness
The Mount Peeley Trailhead sits at about 5,600 feet at the end of a narrow, twisting nine-mile forest road above Sunflower, which makes it the highest drive-up start in the Mazatzals. From the lot the Cornucopia Trail #86 reaches the Mazatzal Divide Trail #23, the Arizona Trail, in half a mile; a cairned off-trail scramble climbs Mount Peeley, 7,030 feet, in about 2.4 miles with 1,450 feet of gain; and the divide runs 30 miles north to City Creek through country burned by the 2004 Willow and 2012 Sunflower fires and still recovering. The road is the test and the quiet is the reward.
Free; no fee, pass or permit
Four Peaks: Brown's Peak via Lone Pine Saddle
Brown's Peak is the northernmost and highest of the Four Peaks, 7,657 feet, and the most-climbed of the four because Brown's Trail #133 gets you most of the way: about two miles from the Lone Pine Saddle trailhead to Brown's Saddle, then a steep, loose, hands-on scramble up a chute to the summit. The hike is only five miles round trip. The drive is the hard part: roughly 19 miles of Forest Road 143, rocky and rutted, that the Forest Service says wants high clearance and four-wheel drive.
Free; no pass or permit required
Childs Dispersed Camping Area
Childs is a flat, bare patch of ground beside the Verde River where the Arizona Power Company built a hydroelectric plant in 1908 and ran it for nearly a century on water piped from Fossil Creek. The plant is gone, the river is restored, and the Forest Service lets you camp here for free with one vault toilet and nothing else. It is the base camp for Verde Hot Springs, a mile's walk and a river ford upstream. The road in is 21 miles of dirt, the last six of them bad.
Free
Verde Hot Springs
Verde Hot Springs is the concrete shell of a hotel resort that opened in the 1920s and burned in 1962, with its spring-fed pools still holding at about 104 degrees on the far bank of the Verde River. You get there by driving 21 miles of dirt to the old Childs power plant, walking about a mile upriver, and wading across. It is free, it is beautiful, it is clothing-optional by long custom, and the road, the ford and the crowd on a spring weekend are all exactly as rough as they sound.
Free; no fee or permit for the springs or for camping at Childs
Sheep Bridge, Verde River
Sheep Bridge is a narrow suspension footbridge over the Verde River at the bottom of Bloody Basin, a replica built by the Forest Service in 1989 of the bridge the Flagstaff Sheep Company strung across the river in 1943 and 1944 so its flocks could cross between winter and summer range without drowning. It is on the National Register, it is the trailhead for the west side of the Mazatzal Wilderness, and a hot spring seeps out of the west bank just upstream. Getting there is 45 miles of dirt from Carefree or 36 from I-17, the last 12 on a rarely maintained road the Forest Service calls rocky and technical, and that is why it stays quiet.
Free; no fee for the site, and no permit for day use or camping
Two hours east · 24 places
Roosevelt Lake, Globe and the Pinals
Arizona’s biggest lake in the state’s driest-looking country, with the cliff dwellings above it, and the forested Pinal Mountains rising straight out of Globe.
Arizona Trail Kelvin Trailhead
At the Kelvin-Riverside Bridge the Arizona Trail crosses the Gila River and starts Passage 16, the Gila River Canyons, 25 miles of singletrack that follows the river through a cottonwood-lined gorge before climbing north toward Picketpost Mountain. The day hike is 3 miles in to an old railroad bridge and back, past the golden spike that marks where the Arizona Trail was completed in December 2011. Parking is at the BLM lot at the end of Centurion Road by the bridge or the larger Florence-Kelvin Trailhead 1.5 miles west. It is free, open, warm in January and nearly deserted.
Free; no fee or permit for individual use
Rock Creek Trailhead (Tonto Basin)
The pin Google calls Rock Creek is the Rock Creek Trailhead for Chillicut Trail #132, the east-side route into the Four Peaks Wilderness. From about 2,850 feet beside a seasonal creek a few miles off SR 188, the trail follows an old jeep road, crosses a dozen small drainages, switchbacks steeply into Baldy Canyon with its sycamores and cottonwoods, and tops out 5.5 miles and roughly 3,700 feet later at the Four Peaks Trail and the Arizona Trail on Buckhorn Mountain, in ponderosa pines. It is one of the hardest and least-used day hikes on the Tonto, and the road to it needs clearance.
Free; no fee or Tonto Pass
Round Mountain Park (Globe)
Round Mountain Park is a 386-acre city park on the south side of Globe where a network of short, named loops climbs a volcanic hill to a flag at about 4,200 feet, with the Pinal Mountains filling the south and the open pit of the Old Dominion mine district spread below you to the north. The longest single loop is about 3 miles, you can string them all together for 6 or 7, and there are shallow caves, a rock formation called Bull's Eye Rock and a visitor center with restrooms at the trailhead. It is free, easy to find and the best short hike in the Globe-Miami area.
Free; no entry fee or parking fee
Cemetery Trailhead (Roosevelt)
Cemetery Trail #255 is a 1.3-mile hardened path from a little lot by Lakeview Park up to Roosevelt Cemetery, where settlers and workers who built Theodore Roosevelt Dam between 1905 and 1911 are buried, with a self-guided brochure from the ranger station across the road. Past the graves a spur connects to the Thompson Trail #121, part of the Arizona Trail, which runs along the ridges above the lake to the Roosevelt bridge and on to the 6-mile Vineyard Trail with Four Peaks in your face the whole way. It is the gentlest trailhead on the lake and the only one with a story.
Free; no fee or Tonto Pass at the trailhead
Indian Point Campground, Roosevelt Lake
Indian Point is the free, semi-developed camping area on the northwest shore of Roosevelt Lake, where Tonto Creek comes in. The Forest Service lists it as shoreline day use and dispersed camping with vault toilets, a paved boat launch and no water, and it charges nothing. The catch is the road: it is paved except where Forest Road 60 fords Tonto Creek, a crossing that is dangerous or impossible when the creek is flowing. When it is dry, this is the quietest lake camping within two hours of Scottsdale.
Free; no camping fee and no pass required
Cholla Campground, Roosevelt Lake
Cholla is the big, developed Forest Service campground on the north shore of Roosevelt Lake: 206 sites in four loops, every one with a shade ramada, plus flush toilets, showers, water, a paved boat ramp and a dump station, all run on solar. It is the easiest real camping trip from Scottsdale that ends at a lake, and the trade is that it feels more like a well-run park than a wilderness. Come between October and April, bring a boat or a kayak if you have one, and skip it in summer.
$25 per night single site, $50 double; extra vehicles $8; half price on single sites with a Senior or Access pass; no Tonto Pass needed for campers
Jones Water Campground
Jones Water is a small, free, primitive campground in a riparian pocket of oaks and junipers right off US 60 between Globe and the Salt River Canyon. It has had a vault toilet, tables and fire rings, no water and no fee, and it is close enough to the highway to hear trucks. In August 2025 the Tonto National Forest signed a decision to decommission it and remove its deteriorating infrastructure, with the work estimated for that fall; a year later the recreation page still lists it open. Call Globe before you count on it, and treat it as what it always was: a free bed two hours from Scottsdale on the way to somewhere else.
Free; no fee and no pass required
Kellner Canyon Campground
What Google calls Kellner Campground is the Kellner Group Site, a single reservable group camp under oaks and sycamores in the bottom of Kellner Canyon where a small stream usually runs. It takes up to 25 people and five vehicles for $75 a night, has a vault toilet, five picnic units with grills and a group fire ring, and nothing else. It is not a place to show up and pitch a tent; the road is gated and the code comes with your recreation.gov booking.
$75 per night for the whole site, 1 to 25 people; reservation required
Tonto National Monument
Tonto National Monument protects two Salado cliff dwellings built into caves above the Tonto Basin around 1300 to 1450, with Roosevelt Lake spread out below. The Lower Cliff Dwelling is a one-mile round trip on a steep paved trail you can do on your own in about an hour; the Upper Cliff Dwelling is a three-mile, 600-foot guided hike offered on winter weekends by phone reservation only. It costs $10 a head, it is two hours from Old Town, and in summer the trail shuts at noon. Pair it with a night at Windy Hill or Cholla and it is one of the best cultural stops in central Arizona.
$10 per person age 16 and up, cashless; America the Beautiful passes accepted; children under 16 free
Windy Hill Campground, Roosevelt Lake
Windy Hill is the largest campground on Roosevelt Lake and one of the largest in the Tonto National Forest, with 147 reservable and first-come sites spread over a peninsula of named loops on the south shore. It has shade ramadas on every site, water, showers, playgrounds and a boat ramp, and because it is so big it almost never fills. It is less scenic than Cholla and the name is honest about the afternoon wind, but when everything else on the lake is taken, Windy Hill has a site.
$25 per night single site, $50 double; extra vehicles $8; half price on single sites with a Senior or Access pass
Pioneer Pass Campground
Pioneer Pass is a loose cluster of four free camping areas, Granite, Toll Gate, Wagon Wheel and Cattle Trap, spread along Forest Road 112 at the 6,000-foot saddle on the east side of the Pinal Mountains. Each area has a vault toilet, a handful of tables and fire rings, and nothing else; there is no water and no fee. It is lower and warmer than the summit campgrounds, closer to Globe on a better road, and the trails to Pinal Peak start right here.
Free; no fee and no pass required
Timber Camp Recreation Area
Timber Camp is the Tonto National Forest's main developed campground on US 60 between Globe and the Salt River Canyon, in ponderosa pine and juniper at about 5,500 feet. It has 13 first-come individual sites in the Brundrett 1 loop, two reservable group areas that hold up to 150 people each (one of them equestrian, with corrals), accessible vault toilets, pavilions and fire rings, and no water. It is the best-equipped camp in this stretch of the forest and the only one you can book for a crowd.
Brundrett 1 individual sites: a nightly fee paid at the on-site machine (the Forest Service lists $16 for a single site); group sites $75 per night for up to 50 people, $150 for 51 to 150
Schoolhouse Campground, Roosevelt Lake
Schoolhouse is the Forest Service campground at the far southeast end of Roosevelt Lake, 40 sites in the Mesquite Loop with ramadas, pull-through parking and a paved boat ramp, and no potable water. It is also closed right now: the Forest Service has shut both the campground and the ramp because the lake has dropped below the level the launch needs. When it reopens it is the cheapest and quietest developed camp on the lake. Until then, Windy Hill is the fallback.
$20 per night single site, $40 double when open; half price on single sites with a Senior or Access pass
Sulphide del Rey Campground
Sulphide del Rey is a small free campground at about 6,000 feet on Forest Road 651, halfway between Globe and the Pinal Peak summit, on the site of an old mining-company camp where the miners lived to get out of the heat. It has a vault toilet, tables and fire rings under ponderosa pine, no water and no fee. It is less dramatic than Pinal Campground, five miles below it on the same road, and that is exactly why it is usually empty.
Free; no fee and no pass required
Gila River Recreation Area (Winkelman)
Two small BLM campgrounds, Shores and Christmas, sit in the Gila River canyon along SR 77 a few miles upstream of Winkelman, with gravel loops, fire rings, vault toilets and cottonwood shade for free. The river here is a dam-controlled Sonoran desert stream with catfish and bass, floatable in summer and a quiet green corridor in winter. It is two and a half hours from Scottsdale, the sites are not built for big RVs, and the town park downstream has the hookups if you need them.
Free; first come, first served. No permit for private, non-commercial use
Parker Creek Trailhead, Sierra Ancha
Parker Creek Trail #160 leaves a roadside pullout on the Young Highway at about 5,050 feet and climbs roughly 4 miles and 2,000 feet through ponderosa pine and mixed conifer to the Rim Trail #139 on the crest of the Sierra Ancha, at about 7,000 feet. The trailhead sits at the edge of the Sierra Ancha Experimental Forest, where the Forest Service has studied watersheds since 1932, and the trail is shaded, steady and almost empty. It is a long way from Scottsdale, and that is why.
Free; no fee or permit
Valentine Ridge Campground
Valentine Ridge is a small, free Forest Service camping area in the pines at 6,700 feet, 2 miles off the Young Road below the Mogollon Rim, a few minutes from the trout water of Canyon Creek. The Forest Service now lists it as a dispersed camping area rather than a campground, but there are about ten defined sites with tables, fire rings and a vault toilet, no water and no fee. A 9-mile mountain bike loop starts at camp. It is quieter than anything on the Rim Road on a summer weekend, and that is the point.
Free; no fee and no pass required
Pinal Campground, Pinal Mountains
Pinal Campground is four free sites under ponderosa pine and white fir near the top of the Pinal Mountains, the sky-island range that rises straight out of Globe. With the twelve-site Six Shooter camp beside it and the tiny Upper Pinal camp a few hundred feet higher, it is the closest high-elevation forest camping to the Valley that is not on the Mogollon Rim, and it is often twenty-five degrees cooler than Scottsdale. The price is ten miles of narrow mountain gravel on Forest Road 651, no water and no trailers to speak of.
Free; no fee and no pass required
Rose Creek Campground, Sierra Ancha
Rose Creek is a tiny Forest Service campground on SR 288, the mostly unpaved Globe-to-Young highway, where a small creek crosses the road at about 5,400 feet between the Salome and Sierra Ancha wilderness areas. There are about five sites with tables and fire rings, a vault toilet, no water and no fee. It is the first forest camp you reach climbing out of the Roosevelt Lake desert, and on a weeknight you will probably have it to yourself.
Free; no fee and no pass required
Alderwood Campground
Alderwood is less a campground than a single developed site: a table, a fire ring and a vault toilet beside Haigler Creek at the end of a rough spur off Forest Road 200. It is free, it is shaded by alders and sycamores, the creek holds trout, and the Hellsgate Wilderness is a short walk downstream. It has also dropped off the Forest Service's current website, so go with a plan B and a full water jug.
Free by every account; confirm with the Payson Ranger District, (928) 474-7900
Upper Pinal Campground
Upper Pinal is the small sibling of Pinal Campground, three sites in the firs a little farther up Forest Road 651 toward the Pinal Peak towers. It has a toilet, tables and fire rings, no water and no fee, and it is the coldest spot on the mountain. The Forest Service folds it into its Pinal Campground listing rather than giving it a page of its own, so treat the two as one destination: drive up, take whichever sites are open, and bring the warm bag.
Free; no fee and no pass required
Sawmill Flats Campground
Sawmill Flat is a handful of primitive sites in the ponderosa and oak along the Globe-Young Highway, high in the Sierra Ancha near Workman Creek. It has long been listed as free, with vault toilets, a few tables and fire rings and no water, and it fills with hunters in the fall. It has dropped off the Forest Service's current website, so treat the details as last-known rather than guaranteed and have a dispersed backup in mind.
Free by every account; confirm with the Payson Ranger District, (928) 474-7900
Workman Creek Falls
Workman Creek drops about 200 feet off a limestone ledge in the Sierra Ancha, and a Forest Service road runs right to the top of it. From SR 288 it is about 2.5 miles up FR 487 to the Falls Day Use Area, a short walk to the brink, and a view down a wooded canyon that is as good as any waterfall in the state when the snow is melting. Camping is not allowed at the falls themselves, but free dispersed sites line the road below and above them. The road is the price: gravel, narrow, steep past the falls, and impassable in mud or snow.
Free; no fee and no pass required
Reynolds Creek Campground
Reynolds Creek is not the small free campground the map pin suggests; it is a single reservable group site, $75 a night, gated, with two big ramadas, eight tables, a group grill, four steel fire rings and one vault toilet beside a creek that runs all year at 5,250 feet. Two Sierra Ancha trailheads are within a quarter mile and Workman Creek Falls is two miles south. If you can fill it, it is one of the best-sited group camps in the Tonto; if you are two people with a tent, camp at Rose Creek or along FR 487 instead.
$75 per night for the group site; $10 per night for each additional vehicle; reservation required
One and a half to two and a half hours north · 37 places
Payson and the Mogollon Rim
The Valley’s summer escape: 2,000 feet of cliff, ponderosa pines, trout lakes along the Rim Road and campgrounds that fill every weekend from May to September.
Houston Mesa Campground
Houston Mesa is the closest developed campground to Payson, a mile north of town where Houston Mesa Road leaves the Beeline. It is 102 sites of pinyon, juniper and pine at 5,200 feet, with flush toilets, potable water and a separate horse camp across the road. It is not wilderness and you will hear the highway, but it is open all year, it books on recreation.gov, and it is the sensible base for the East Verde swimming holes and the Shoofly ruin up the road.
$29 per night single site; $22 equestrian site; $170 group site; $8 per night for a second vehicle
Monument Peak Loop (Payson)
A roughly three-mile loop around a small granite-topped peak in the Granite Dells, the boulder country on Payson's southeast edge, starting from a pull-off on a graded dirt road a few minutes from SR 260. It is flat, shaded by juniper and pine for half its length, free, and shared with horses, mountain bikes and ATVs, which is the honest trade-off: it is a good walk, not a wilderness one. Monument Peak itself has no built trail to the top; the loop circles it.
Free; no pass or fee at the trailhead
Ponderosa Campground
Ponderosa is 47 single sites and two group sites in tall pines at 5,600 feet, right off SR 260 twelve miles east of Payson. There is no creek and no view, just big flat sites, potable water, vault toilets and a $22 price, which is why it is the one that still has openings when Christopher Creek and the Rim lakes are full. It is a base, not a destination: Horton Creek, Tonto Creek and Woods Canyon Lake are all within 20 minutes.
$22 per night single site; $100 per night group site; $8 per night for a second vehicle
Water Wheel Falls
Water Wheel is the most popular of the East Verde day-use sites above Payson: a flat walk up the river from the parking lot to a set of granite cascades and plunge pools where Ellison Creek comes in, about three quarters of a mile each way. It is pretty, cold and close, and on a summer Saturday it is a scene. It is also the place where ten people from one family died in a flash flood on July 15, 2017, when a storm over a burn scar sent water down Ellison Creek with no warning. Go, but go with the radar open.
$8 per vehicle per day with a Tonto Daily Pass bought in advance; $12 at the on-site fee machine; America the Beautiful passes accepted
Second Crossing, East Verde River
Second Crossing is one of four day-use sites where Houston Mesa Road meets the East Verde River above Payson: First Crossing at 7 miles, Water Wheel at 7.5, Second at 8 and Third at 8.5. Google and several apps call it a campground. It is not. The Forest Service lists all four as day use only, with vault toilets, picnic tables, no water and an $8 Tonto pass. What you get is a shallow, cold river under tall pines at 5,100 feet, which on a May afternoon is exactly enough.
$8 per vehicle per day with a Tonto Daily Pass bought in advance; $12 at the on-site fee machine; America the Beautiful passes accepted
Tonto Natural Bridge State Park
Pine Creek spent a few hundred thousand years cutting a 400-foot tunnel through a dam of travertine, and the result is a natural bridge 183 feet high and 150 feet wide that Arizona State Parks says is probably the largest of its kind in the world. Four trails, none over half a mile but all steep, drop from the rim to the creek bed and under the arch. It is a two-hour stop, not a day, and the access road is a 14 percent grade that trailers should not attempt.
$10 per adult (14 and up), $5 for ages 7 to 13, free under 7
Horton Creek Trail
Horton Creek Trail #285 climbs about four miles and roughly 1,200 feet from Tonto Creek to Horton Spring, where a creek's worth of water pours straight out of the base of the Mogollon Rim. The grade is kind, the shade is constant and the creek is beside you the entire way, which makes it the one Rim hike to do if you are doing one. Through at least October 31, 2026 the usual trailhead parking is closed for a bridge replacement on Forest Road 289; park at Derrick Trailhead instead and connect in on the Derrick Trail.
Free; no pass required at the Horton day-use site or trailhead
The Paleo Site (SR 260)
A paved pull-off on eastbound SR 260 about 15 miles east of Payson, a pedestrian gate, two interpretive signs and a slope of grey Naco Formation limestone and shale that is thick with Pennsylvanian marine fossils: brachiopods by the hundreds, crinoid stems, bryozoans, horn corals and bivalves, around 300 million years old. The Tonto National Forest allows limited personal collecting of invertebrate fossils, so you can take a few home. Google calls it a monument; it is a sign, a fence and a very good hillside.
Free; limited personal collection of invertebrate fossils is allowed under Tonto National Forest rules, no permit for surface collecting with hand tools
Christopher Creek Campground
Christopher Creek is the campground people mean when they talk about camping near Payson: 43 sites on both banks of a cold, spring-fed creek stocked with rainbow trout, under big ponderosas at 5,640 feet, a short walk from a hamlet with two restaurants. It is small, close-set and reservable, and summer weekends are gone months ahead. Book it early or use it as the model for what to look for elsewhere.
$24 per night single site; $80 per night group site; $8 per night for a second vehicle; day-use picnic area requires a Tonto pass
Stoneman Lake Overlook
Stoneman Lake fills an almost perfectly round basin about 80 acres across in the pines south of Mormon Lake, one of the handful of natural lakes in Arizona, and geologists still argue whether it is a collapsed sinkhole in the limestone or an old volcanic crater. It is also, in the Forest Service's own words, usually empty. A pullout on Stoneman Lake Road about 2.5 miles past the end of the pavement looks straight down into the basin, and a small day-use area on the north shore has shaded tables, vault toilets and a gravel ramp for the years when there is water to launch on. Free, quiet, and best understood as a scenic drive with a stop rather than a lake trip.
Free; no fee at the overlook or the day-use area
Sharp Creek Campground
Sharp Creek is the Payson district's most modern campground: 28 single sites in three loops with pull-through and back-in pads, and a separate loop of three group sites that hold 75 people each, at 6,000 feet in ponderosa pine just below the Rim. The creek it is named for is a trickle, so the water you came for is Christopher Creek a mile west or the Rim lakes ten minutes up the hill. For RVs and for groups it is the best-built campground on SR 260.
$29 per night single site; $150 per night group site (up to 75 people); $8 per night for a second vehicle
Geode Hill (Payson)
A stretch of limestone hillside under the Rim where round nodules, many of them hollow and lined with quartz crystals, litter the surface along an old forest road. It is on the Tonto National Forest off the Control Road, roughly three miles east of Whispering Pines, and the Forest Service allows limited personal collecting from the surface without a permit. Google puts the pin on a residential street in Whispering Pines; the geodes are a few miles east, down Forest Road 1600, and the last stretch wants high clearance or a walk.
Free; limited personal collection allowed under Tonto National Forest rockhounding rules, no permit for surface collecting
Rim Campground
Rim Campground is the first turn off Forest Road 300, a mile of pavement from SR 260 at the top of the Rim: 26 parallel-parking sites in two loops of 13 under ponderosa, $18 a night, with a host, accessible vault toilets and the Rim Top Trailhead for the Rim Lakes Vista Trail a few minutes away. It is the easiest Rim campground to reach and the one you can still find a first-come site at on a Friday evening. The Forest Service page contradicts itself on drinking water, so bring your own.
$18 per night single site (up to 8 people and one vehicle); $12 per night for each extra vehicle
The Dude Fire Firefighter Memorial
On June 26, 1990, six members of the Perryville inmate fire crew died in Walk Moore Canyon when the Dude Fire blew up around them below the Mogollon Rim. Six crosses mark where they fell, about two-thirds of a mile up the canyon from the Control Road on an old jeep trail, and residents of Bonita Creek Estates, the subdivision the crew was defending, built a second memorial a short drive east. The walk is flat and short. The place is not easy.
Free
Baker Butte Lookout
Baker Butte is the high point of the Mogollon Rim at about 8,074 feet, a wooded hump just east of SR 87 with a 30-foot steel fire tower on top built in 1937 and listed on the National Historic Lookout Register. A gated spur, FR 300B, leaves the Rim Road 1.2 miles in from the highway at the General Crook Trail parking area; it is closed to cars and open to feet, and the walk to the tower is about 0.4 miles and a few hundred feet up through oak and fir. When a lookout is on duty and willing, you can climb the tower, and the catwalk sees from the San Francisco Peaks to the Mazatzals. When nobody is home, the summit is trees and a sign.
Free
Sinkhole Campground
A tidy 26-site Forest Service campground in the pines at 7,560 feet, half a mile off SR 260 and a one-mile walk from Willow Springs Lake. The roads and spurs are chip-sealed, there is drinking water, a camp host and accessible vault toilets, and half the sites can be reserved. It is smaller and quieter than Canyon Point down the road and far less hectic than the Woods Canyon Lake campgrounds, which is exactly its appeal.
$25 per night for a single site (up to 8 people, 1 vehicle); $12 per night for each extra vehicle
Willow Springs Lake
A 150-acre trout lake at 7,600 feet that Arizona Game and Fish built in 1966 and still stocks from spring through fall. It sits half a mile off the pavement of SR 260, has a boat ramp, a vault toilet and nothing else, and it is the Rim lake you pick when you want fishing or a paddle without a dirt-road commitment. Sinkhole Campground is a one-mile walk away, and Woods Canyon Lake, with its store and rental boats, is ten minutes west.
Free; no day-use or launch fee. Arizona fishing license required to fish
Aspen Campground, Woods Canyon Lake
Aspen is the largest campground on the Rim and the one most Valley families mean when they say they are going to Woods Canyon Lake: 136 sites in four loops that alternate meadow and woods at about 7,500 feet, with potable water, nine vault toilets, paved roads, hosts, weekend ranger programs and the lake and its store a short walk away. It costs $35, it books six months ahead for every summer weekend, and 55 first-come sites mean a Thursday arrival still has a chance. There are no showers and no hookups, and there are bears.
$35 per night single site (up to 8 people and one vehicle); $12 per night for each extra vehicle
Canyon Point Campground
Just over a hundred sites in the pines at 7,500 feet right on SR 260, with showers, flush toilets, a dump station, 32 electric sites and two group areas for 25 and 55 people. It is the most developed campground on the Rim and the only one with hot water, so it is where the Valley sends its RVs and its nervous first-timers. It is not quiet and it is not wild, but it is comfortable, and Willow Springs Lake is five miles away.
$38 per night single site; $50 with electric; $92 double; group sites $222-$260; extra vehicle $12 per night
Clints Well Campground
A handful of plain sites in the pines at 6,868 feet, a few hundred yards up Lake Mary Road from the Clints Well junction, where SR 87 from Payson meets the road to Flagstaff. Eight dollars, first come, vault toilets, no water, and a gas station across the highway. It is a crossroads campground, useful precisely because it is on the way to everything else: the Rim Road is five minutes south, C.C. Cragin ten minutes east, and Flagstaff an hour north.
$8 per night for a single site (up to 8 people, 2 vehicles) in spring and summer; no fee the rest of the year
Rim Road (FR 300) Dispersed Camping
Forest Road 300 is a roughly 40-mile gravel road that runs along the very edge of the Mogollon Rim between SR 87 and SR 260, and for most of its length you can pull off onto an existing site and camp for free. The views from the rim-edge sites, straight down 2,000 feet to the Tonto Basin, are the best camping views in central Arizona. There is no water, no trash service and almost no toilets, fire restrictions shut the campfires down most summers, and on a holiday weekend the good spots are gone by Thursday night.
Free. Developed campgrounds along the road (Kehl Springs, Knoll Lake, Mogollon, Rim) charge their own fees
Woods Canyon Lake
Woods Canyon Lake is a 55-acre reservoir in a pine-lined canyon at 7,510 feet, the most developed of the Rim lakes and the easiest to use: paved road to the shore, a store and marina with boat and kayak rentals, fishing licenses and firewood, a boat ramp, a $10 day-use picnic area, and three campgrounds within a mile. It is stocked with rainbow trout all season and allows electric motors only, so it stays quiet. It is also the lake every family in the East Valley goes to in July, so plan around that.
Day use $10 per vehicle at the lake's fee areas; campgrounds $25 to $36 per night; boat and kayak rentals extra at the store
Colcord Ridge Campground
Colcord Ridge is a free primitive campground in ponderosa, white fir and Douglas fir at 7,600 feet, right where Young Road meets FR 33 three dirt miles south of SR 260. It has vault toilets and tables and nothing else, and the Forest Service does not even publish a site count. As of 2026 its page lists it as closed for a large-scale clean-up and restoration project, so check before you plan on it. When it is open it is the easiest free pine camping off the 260 corridor, with Canyon Creek a mile and a half down the hill.
Free; no fee or pass required
Kehl Springs Campground
A handful of sites in a stand of old ponderosa right at the brink of the Mogollon Rim, 7,441 feet up and six gravel miles east of SR 87, where the ground ends and the view drops 2,000 feet to the Mazatzals and Four Peaks. It is eight dollars a night, first come, with vault toilets and tables and no water. The General Crook Trail passes the gate, and the General Springs cabin and the Battle of Big Dry Wash marker are a few miles further along the Rim Road.
$8 per night for a single site in the fee season (roughly May to October); no fee the rest of the year
Mogollon Campground
Mogollon is the smaller, cheaper, less-visited sibling of Aspen and Spillway, five miles out Forest Road 300 just past the Woods Canyon Lake turn: 26 parallel-parking sites in two loops of 13 under ponderosa, with potable water, accessible vault toilets, a host and an $18 price. The Rim Lakes Vista Trail ends here, so the 2,000-foot drop-off is a short walk from camp. The sites are roadside pull-offs rather than spurs, which is the only thing to understand before you book.
$18 per night single site (up to 8 people and one vehicle); $12 per night for each extra vehicle
Blue Ridge Campground
A small, plain Forest Service campground in the pines at 6,929 feet, a mile of gravel off SR 87 on the north side of the Rim. It has potable water, vault toilets, tables and fire rings, costs $20 a night, takes no reservations and is the closest campground to the Blue Ridge Ranger Station. It is the backup to Rock Crossing for C.C. Cragin Reservoir, which is about 10 miles away by road, and it is the one you can still get into on a Friday night.
$20 per night for a single site (up to 8 people, 2 vehicles)
Moqui Group Campground
Moqui is the Coconino's purpose-built group campground on the Rim country plateau: three gravel pods named Simmons, Spooner and Ernst, each holding up to 50 people with tables, grills, fire rings, vault toilets, trash service and piped drinking water, plus horseshoe courts and an amphitheater shared by all. It books on recreation.gov for $85 a night per pod and is the easiest way to put a big group under ponderosas with the Rim Lakes, Cabin Loop trails and the Arizona Trail nearby. It is closed from October to early May.
$85 per night per pod for groups of 10 to 50 people; two pods for up to 100
Rock Crossing Campground
Thirty-one single sites and two doubles in ponderosa pine and oak at 7,316 feet, two miles up the gravel from the C.C. Cragin boat ramp. It has drinking water, vault toilets, tent pads, bear food lockers, trash service and camp hosts, part of it reserves on recreation.gov and part is first come, and the maximum rig is about 32 feet. It is the campground to book if the point of the trip is the reservoir.
$20 per night single site (up to 8 people, 2 vehicles); $40 double site (16 people, 4 vehicles). Senior and Access passes half off single sites
Upper Canyon Creek Campground
Upper Canyon Creek is ten designated dispersed sites on a cold, spring-fed creek at 6,600 feet, in old ponderosa with white fir and Douglas fir, about five miles of unpaved forest road south of SR 260 near Forest Lakes. It is free, first come, and has vault toilets and tables but no water or trash service. Canyon Creek is one of Arizona's few artificial-fly-and-lure trout streams, and the state hatchery that stocks it is just up the road. It is the quietest creek camp in Rim Country that a passenger car can still reach in dry weather.
Free; no fee or pass required
Black Canyon Rim Campground
Twenty sites on flat, sandy ground under ponderosa pines at 7,600 feet, three miles of gravel south of SR 260 on the quieter eastern end of the Rim. It has drinking water, accessible vault toilets, trash service and a camp host, and Black Canyon Lake is 2.5 miles up the road for trout and small-motor boating. Wild horses wander through most mornings. It is the Rim campground that still feels like 1985, in a good way.
$20 per night for a single site (up to 8 people, 1 vehicle); $12 per night for each extra vehicle
Airplane Flats Campground
Airplane Flat is a small, free Forest Service campground in an open stand of big ponderosa on Canyon Creek, one of the Rim's best wild-trout streams, at 6,600 feet below the Mogollon Rim. It has vault toilets serviced once a week, picnic tables, no water, a 16-foot trailer limit and a lot of bears. The last seven and a half miles are unpaved forest road that wants four-wheel drive after rain. It is the quieter, rougher cousin of Upper Canyon Creek Campground a few miles upstream.
Free; no fee or pass required. Groups over 75 need a permit from the district
C.C. Cragin (Blue Ridge) Reservoir
A long, skinny reservoir in the bottom of East Clear Creek canyon, 6,695 feet up and about 15,000 acre-feet when full, that looks more like a slow river between cliffs than a lake. Boats are limited to electric or 10-horsepower motors, there is no shore to speak of and almost nowhere to swim, and that is why it is the best canyon paddle in Arizona. Phelps Dodge built the dam in 1965; SRP has owned it since 2005 and pipes the water to Payson. One vault toilet, no water, no fee, six miles of gravel.
Free; no day-use or launch fee. Arizona fishing license required
Fossil Creek
A spring-fed creek that pours out of the base of the Mogollon Rim at 20,000 gallons a minute and a constant 72 degrees, so loaded with dissolved limestone that it builds travertine dams and turquoise pools for miles. It was dammed and diverted for a century, freed in 2008, and named one of Arizona's two Wild and Scenic rivers in 2009. It then nearly drowned in its own popularity, so from April 1 to October 1 every vehicle needs a $6 recreation.gov permit for a specific parking lot, there is no camping, no fires and no glass, and the only way to the creek by car is 14 miles of rough dirt from the Camp Verde side. It is worth all of it.
$6 per vehicle, non-refundable reservation fee, April 1 to October 1; free October 2 to March 31. Arizona fishing license to fish
Jacks Canyon Campground
Jacks Canyon is the sport-climbing crag of northern Arizona: a water-carved limestone and sandstone canyon on the Winslow side of the Rim country with well over 200 bolted routes from 5.5 to 5.14, mostly steep and pocketed. The Forest Service maintains a gravel lot, a vault toilet and free, unimproved camping on the rim, with a ten-minute trail down to the walls. There is no water, no trash service and no reason to be here in the summer heat or after rain, when the road becomes a famous vehicle trap.
Free
Bear Canyon Lake
A narrow, deep, 60-acre trout lake in a steep canyon at 7,560 feet that you reach by a foot trail from the parking area, which is why it stays quiet while Woods Canyon and Willow Springs fill up. Around the rim of the canyon is a free, rustic camping area with vault toilets and no water, 14 miles of gravel from SR 260. Electric motors only, no fee for anything, and you pack out every scrap.
Free; no fee to fish, launch or camp. Arizona fishing license required
Myrtle Lake and Lost Lake
Two small, shallow natural lakes on the Dane Canyon topographic quad near the Rim Road's turnoff to Myrtle Point: Myrtle Lake, right beside the road where the Google pin sits, and Lost Lake, about 0.8 miles to its southeast and half a mile off the road toward the Rim edge, at roughly 7,860 feet. They are meadow ponds in the Rim's limestone, filled by snowmelt and monsoon rain, ringed by ponderosa and grazed by elk at dusk, and often low or dry by midsummer. No facilities, no stocking we could verify, no reason to drive three hours for them alone; every reason to camp near them if you are on the Rim Road anyway.
Free; dispersed camping along the Rim Road is free with a 14-day limit
Knoll Lake Campground
A first-come, cash-only Forest Service campground beside Knoll Lake, a 75-acre, 50-foot-deep trout lake with a small boat ramp at about 7,300 feet, reached by roughly 20 miles of gravel from either highway. It has drinking water, vault toilets and tables, the lake takes electric motors only, and the drive is the filter: this is the least-visited developed campground on the Rim. The season is short, mid-May to early September, and the roads close in winter.
$20 per night single site (up to 8 people, 2 vehicles); $40 double site. Cash only; Senior and Access passes half off single sites
Two hours north · 20 places
Sedona, Jerome and the Verde Valley
Red rock, Oak Creek and the ruins along the Verde. The trailheads are famous for a reason and the campgrounds in the canyon book out months ahead.
Copper Canyon Trailhead (Camp Verde)
A developed Forest Service trailhead a mile down a dirt road from SR 260 at Camp Verde, with ramadas, grills, a vault toilet and room to turn a horse trailer, and three trails leaving it. The one for hikers is Copper Falls Trail #504, a loop of about 3.75 to 4 miles with 300 to 400 feet of climbing that crosses a creek, tops out on the rim of Copper Canyon with the Verde Valley spread below, and drops to an intermittent waterfall at the far end. The other two are OHV routes. It is free, open year-round and shared with cows, which tells you the kind of place it is.
Free; no fee or pass
Montezuma Castle National Monument
A 20-room, five-story Sinagua apartment house tucked into a limestone alcove 90 feet up a cliff above Beaver Creek, so well preserved it looks occupied. You see it from below on a paved, shaded, third-of-a-mile loop; nobody has climbed inside since 1951. It is ten minutes off I-17, costs $10, takes an hour, and has been a national monument since 1906. There is no reason not to stop.
$10 per adult (16 and older), good for 7 days at both Montezuma Castle and Tuzigoot; children 15 and under free; $35 annual pass for both monuments; America the Beautiful passes accepted
Bell Rock and Courthouse Butte Loop
A 3.8-mile loop on wide, mostly gentle trail around the two formations you see first when you drive into Sedona on SR 179, with about 300 feet of total climbing, two paved trailheads with toilets and pass machines, and no shuttle rules. Bell Rock itself invites scrambling as high as you like. It is not wild and it is not quiet, but it is the easiest place in red rock country to understand why everyone comes, and it needs nothing but shoes and a $5 pass.
Red Rock Pass ($5 per day, $15 per week, $20 per year) or America the Beautiful pass to park; machines at both trailheads
Clear Creek Campground
A flat, grassy, cottonwood-shaded campground on the banks of West Clear Creek, a few minutes off I-17 at Camp Verde. It is the closest reservable creekside camping to Scottsdale that stays open all year, and at 3,200 feet it is a winter and shoulder-season place, not a summer escape. The creek is the whole point: wading, a few swimming holes, smallmouth bass, and the sound of water at night.
$27 per night for a single site (one vehicle); $10 per extra vehicle; group site $108 to $182 per night
Montezuma Well
A limestone sinkhole 368 feet across in the middle of the desert, full of warm, carbonated, arsenic-laced water that no fish can live in and five species live nowhere else. Springs refill it with about 1.5 million gallons a day, and the Sinagua and the Hohokam before them built a canal off the outlet that still carries water a thousand years later. It is free, it is 20 minutes off I-17, and the paved half-mile trail takes you from the rim down to a shaded creek-side ditch that feels like a different climate.
Free; no entrance fee at the Well (Montezuma Castle, 11 miles away, charges $10 per adult)
Beaver Creek Day Use Area and Crane Petroglyph Site
Google still calls this a campground, and it was one. The Forest Service converted Beaver Creek to a fee day-use picnic site, so the camping is gone, but the reasons to come are intact: a shaded stretch of Wet Beaver Creek with wading pools and a stocked trout stream, the Bell Trail into the Wet Beaver Wilderness, and half a mile up the road the Crane Petroglyph Heritage Site, formerly V Bar V, which is the biggest and best-kept rock art site in the Verde Valley and is only open Friday through Monday.
Beaver Creek Day Use: $14 per vehicle (up to 5 people), $4 per walk-in; Coconino Pass $25 weekly or $50 annual. Crane Petroglyph Site: Red Rock Pass, $5 per day. Bell Trailhead: Red Rock Pass.
Cathedral Rock Trail
The shortest serious hike in Sedona: about 1.2 to 1.5 miles round trip and 669 feet straight up the slickrock saddle between Cathedral Rock's spires, with toeholds notched in the sandstone and a crack you climb like a ladder. The Forest Service calls it strenuous and 'more of a rock climb than a hike,' which is about right. Eighty thousand people a year do it, so the Forest Service and the city closed the trailhead lot to cars Thursday through Sunday and made you ride a free shuttle from SR 179. Ride it, climb it, and be on the saddle an hour before sunset.
Free by Sedona Shuttle (Thursday to Sunday and holiday periods); Red Rock Pass ($5 per day) or America the Beautiful pass to park at the trailhead on days the shuttle is not running
Lo Lo Mai Springs Outdoor Resort
A private, membership-style campground on three-quarters of a mile of lower Oak Creek in Cornville, 20 minutes below Sedona, with shaded RV sites (water and 30-amp at all, 50-amp and sewer at some), creekside tent sites, a range of cabins, a heated pool and spa, showers, laundry, a store and a playground. It is the comfortable, reservable alternative to the Oak Creek Canyon campgrounds, with warmer water and no red rock. Cell service is nearly nonexistent and the facilities show their age, both of which are part of the deal.
Varies by site and season; third-party listings in 2024 and 2025 put tent and RV sites at roughly $60 to $110 a night and cabins from about $100, with per-person, pet and extra-vehicle charges. Call 928-634-4700 for current rates.
Dead Horse Ranch State Park
The most civilized campground in the Verde Valley: 123 sites in four loops with 30/50-amp power and water at most of them, free hot showers, a dump station, eight log cabins, three stocked lagoons, and the Verde River along the south edge. It is in the town of Cottonwood, which sounds like a drawback until you want ice, a restaurant or a tasting room ten minutes from your tent. Sedona is 20 miles, Jerome is 15 minutes up the hill, and Tuzigoot is a short walk across the marsh.
Camping $50 per night with electric, $25 without, $15 per extra vehicle; cabins $70 per night plus a $50 refundable cleaning deposit; day use $10 per vehicle (1 person), $20 per vehicle (2 to 4 people), $5 per individual or bicycle
Tuzigoot National Monument
Where Montezuma Castle is a cliff you look up at, Tuzigoot is a hilltop village you walk through: 110 rooms of stone pueblo on a limestone ridge above a bend of the Verde River, built up over about 300 years starting around 1000 and empty by the early 1400s. The paved loop goes right into the rooms and up to a rebuilt rooftop with a view of the whole valley, Jerome hanging on the mountain behind you. The museum, in a 1930s stone building, has the best artifact collection of any Verde Valley site.
$10 per adult (16 and older), good for 7 days at both Tuzigoot and Montezuma Castle; children 15 and under free; $35 annual pass for both; America the Beautiful passes accepted
Devil's Bridge Trail
The largest natural sandstone arch in the Sedona area, about 50 feet high, with a flat top you can walk out on while someone below takes the picture that is on every Sedona postcard made since 2015. The trail itself is short: 1.6 miles round trip and 371 feet of climbing from the official trailhead. The problem is that the trailhead sits 1.3 miles up a rutted jeep road that needs high clearance, so almost everyone walks in from Mescal (4 miles round trip) or Dry Creek Vista (5.8 miles), or rides the free city shuttle Thursday through Sunday. Expect a line for the photo.
Red Rock Pass ($5 per day, $15 per week, $20 per year) or America the Beautiful pass to park at Dry Creek Vista or Mescal; free if you ride the Sedona Shuttle
Manzanita Campground
Fourteen tent sites on a bend of Oak Creek, close together under ash and box elder, with gravel beaches, trout, swimming holes and red cliffs overhead, and a highway on the other side of the fence. It is the only year-round campground in the canyon, the only one this close to Sedona, and at $30 the best deal in the red rocks, which is why the six-month reservation window is a contest. Tents and sleep-in vans only; no trailers, no RVs, one car per site.
$30 per night per site (one vehicle, tents only); firewood $10 a bag
Red Rock State Park
A 286-acre state park on a bend of Oak Creek southwest of Sedona, run as a nature preserve: about 5 miles of interconnecting loops along the creek and up to low ridges, a good visitor center, ranger-led bird walks and full-moon hikes, and a straight-on view of Cathedral Rock from the Eagle's Nest overlook. It costs $10 a head, it is never full, and the two rules that keep it quiet are no pets and no swimming. If the Red Rock Pass trailheads feel like a theme park, this is the antidote.
$10 per adult (14 and older); $5 youth 7 to 13; children 6 and under free; $5 per individual walk-in or bicycle; Red Rock Pass not valid
Boynton Canyon Trail
Six miles out and back with 931 feet of gain, from a lot beside the Enchantment Resort gate to the head of a box canyon where red walls give way to white sandstone and a forest of ponderosa, oak and fir. The first mile skirts the resort's fence and the last mile climbs a cool, shaded drainage to a dead end that feels like northern Arizona rather than Sedona. The Subway Cave, an unofficial scramble to a tunnel-like alcove with Sinagua ruins about two miles in, has turned a quiet trail into a busy one; the lot fills early and there is no shuttle.
Red Rock Pass ($5 per day, $15 per week, $20 per year) or America the Beautiful pass to park
Slide Rock State Park
An 80-foot chute of slick red sandstone where Oak Creek narrows, polished by the creek into a natural slide that has been dumping people into cold water since the Pendleys farmed apples here a century ago. It is a genuinely great swim and a genuinely bad crowd: $30 a car in summer, no reservations, and the lot closes when it fills, which on a July Saturday is before 10. Go on a weekday at 8 and you will understand why it is famous; go at noon on a weekend and you will be turned around on the highway.
$30 per vehicle (1 to 4 adults) May 1 to August 21, 2026; $20 per vehicle August 22, 2026 to April 2027; $5 per additional adult; children under 6 free; card strongly preferred, exact cash otherwise
Mingus Mountain Campground
A ponderosa-and-oak campground on the flat summit of Mingus Mountain, the 7,810-foot range that walls off the Verde Valley from Prescott, with 27 sites, a group site, vault toilets, water, and a cliff-edge hang-gliding launch a short walk away where the Verde Valley and Sedona's red rocks fill the view. It is 20 minutes above Jerome and open May through October. The electric hookups that made it popular with RVers were knocked out by lightning in 2024 and have not come back; every site is now listed as non-electric.
About $18 per night per site, $5 per extra vehicle, per the Forest Service's posted rates (its page also lists older $10 tent and $14 electric rates); Senior and Access passes 50 percent off; confirm on recreation.gov
Potato Patch Campground
The bigger and more practical of the two Mingus Mountain campgrounds: 41 sites in ponderosa pine at 7,200 feet, right at the summit of SR 89A with no dirt road, including a 12-site loop with 30-amp electric hookups, which on a national forest in Arizona is close to unique. Composting toilets, water, a host, paved parking pads, and Mingus Lake across the highway. It lacks the cliff-edge view and the hang gliders of its neighbor and makes up for it by being the one you can actually plug in at.
$14 per night for a non-electric site, $18 with electric hookup, $5 per extra vehicle; group site $28; Senior and Access passes 50 percent off
West Fork of Oak Creek Trail
A nearly flat 3-mile walk up a side canyon of Oak Creek, crossing and recrossing a clear, cold stream a dozen or so times on stepping stones, under sandstone walls that rise close to a thousand feet, through maples that go red in late October. The maintained trail ends at mile three where the canyon narrows to a wade; the full 14-mile canyon is a different, serious trip. It is the best day hike in the Sedona area and everyone knows it, so the lot fills by 9:30 in every busy season and the fee is $15 cash, card or Coconino Pass, with no Red Rock Pass accepted.
$15 per vehicle (up to 5 people) at the Call of the Canyon gate, or $4 per walk-in or cyclist; Coconino Pass $25 weekly or $50 annual; Red Rock Pass and America the Beautiful pass are NOT accepted
Cave Springs Campground
The largest campground in Oak Creek Canyon and the only one with showers: 84 sites in a stand of ponderosa pines where the canyon narrows, many of them on the bank of the creek, with trout, swimming holes and the West Fork trailhead a few miles south. At 5,400 feet it is ten degrees cooler than Sedona and open roughly April to October. RVs to 36 feet fit; nothing has hookups. It books out for summer weekends six months ahead, but it is a far easier get than Manzanita.
$30 per night per site (up to 8 people and one vehicle); $10 per extra vehicle; firewood $10, ice $5; showers are coin or token operated
Pine Flat Campground
The top campground in Oak Creek Canyon, a mile above Cave Springs at 5,545 feet, with 59 sites split by the highway in a stand of ponderosa, Douglas fir and oak along a young Oak Creek. It is the coolest of the canyon's campgrounds in summer, the first to feel like fall, and a little less frantic than Cave Springs because it has no showers. Chavez Crossing, the Forest Service's reservable group campground on the edge of Sedona, is the place to send a group of ten to fifty.
$30 per night per site (up to 8 people and one vehicle); $10 per extra vehicle; firewood $10, ice $5
One to two hours northwest · 13 places
Prescott, the Bradshaws and the Agua Fria
Granite dells, pine-ringed lakes and mile-high air, with the Agua Fria’s petroglyphs and the Bradshaws’ mining camps on the way up.
High Desert Trail and Black Canyon City Trailhead (High Desert Park)
High Desert Park is Black Canyon City's community park: 89.71 acres of county-leased BLM land with ramadas, restrooms, a drinking fountain, a playground, ball fields and about 2.7 miles of color-coded desert trail, the longest of them the blue High Desert Trail that loops the park's rim above the Agua Fria. In the same lease, at the end of Warner Road, sits the BLM's Black Canyon City Trailhead, with a toilet and a dirt lot, where the 80-mile Black Canyon Trail runs north toward Bumble Bee and south across the river toward Table Mesa. It is the rare trailhead with a place to wash your hands, an hour from Old Town.
Free
Badger Springs Trail, Agua Fria National Monument
From a gravel lot less than a mile off I-17, Badger Springs Wash leads about eight-tenths of a mile down a sandy, boulder-strewn canyon to the Agua Fria River and a panel of petroglyphs on the dark rock at the confluence. It is the easiest way into the 70,900-acre Agua Fria National Monument, which protects hundreds of archaeological sites on the mesas above, including the 80-room Pueblo La Plata. Free, no gate, a vault toilet, and no water.
Free
Hassayampa River Preserve
About 770 acres where the Hassayampa River, underground for most of its length, is forced to the surface by bedrock and runs year-round through a cottonwood-willow forest, a mesquite bosque and a spring-fed pond lined with century-old palms. The Nature Conservancy bought it in 1986; Maricopa County has run it since 2017. Seven short trails total about five miles, 280 bird species have been recorded, and it is closed Mondays, Tuesdays and every afternoon in summer. No dogs.
$5 per person, children 12 and under free; Maricopa County annual pass accepted
Powell Springs Campground
Eleven free sites built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in a pocket of ponderosa pine along Hackberry Wash, a few miles up a dirt road from the almost-ghost town of Cherry. There is no water, no trash service and no host, which is exactly why it stays quiet while Lynx Lake and the Rim fill up. It is the easiest free pine campground to reach from the Valley that does not involve a forest road full of ATVs.
Free
Lynx Lake Recreation Area
A 55-acre trout lake in the ponderosas ten minutes outside Prescott, with two Forest Service campgrounds (Lynx with 35 sites, Hilltop with 38), a marina that rents boats, a cafe, and a short trail to a hilltop pueblo ruin. More than 90,000 people a year come here, so it is not quiet, but it is the most complete and least intimidating campground setup within two hours of Scottsdale. Reserve early; it fills every summer weekend.
Camping $18 per night single site, $36 double, $5 per extra vehicle; day use $5 per vehicle, free on Wednesdays
Peavine Trail and Watson Lake
The Peavine is an old Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix Railway grade turned into a wide, flat gravel trail that runs north from Sundog Ranch Road along the east shore of Watson Lake and straight through the Granite Dells, a billion-plus years of weathered granite stacked into domes and towers. Add Watson Lake Park across the water, with kayak rentals and a small summer campground, and you have the gentlest full day in the Prescott area. Parking is $5, free on Wednesdays.
$5 per vehicle daily parking at the Peavine Trailhead and Watson Lake Park, free on Wednesdays; camping at Watson Lake Park $25 per site per night
Prescott Basin dispersed camping
Around Prescott the national forest is too close to town and too loved to allow camping anywhere, so the Forest Service designated 112 numbered sites on eleven roads and banned camping everywhere else in the 59,000-acre Prescott Basin. Each site is a steel post with a decal, a parking spot, a fire ring and room for a tent, and all of them are free. The limit is 7 days instead of the usual 14, fires are allowed only in the ring and never during restrictions, and on holiday weekends every one is taken by Thursday night.
Free
Thumb Butte Trail
Thumb Butte is the 6,515-foot volcanic plug that sticks up west of Prescott on every postcard, and Trail #33 is the roughly two-mile loop around it: steep and partly paved on the east side, gentler on the west, with about 600 feet of climbing to a saddle where you look back over the whole town to Granite Mountain and the Bradshaws. It is the Prescott equivalent of a Camelback-lite, done in an hour and a half, with a proper picnic area and flush toilets at the bottom. Five dollars to park, free on Wednesdays.
$5 per vehicle day-use fee, free on Wednesdays; Prescott National Forest and America the Beautiful passes accepted
Bradshaw Mountain Campground (Kirkland)
The owner's "Bradshaw Mt. Campground" pin lands on GoldBar Ranch, a small private campground on Wagoner Road in the hills between Kirkland and the Bradshaws. It has 11 sites around a stocked pond, flush toilets, showers, a dock and a rope swing, and it books through Hipcamp for about $35 a night. No pets, no potable water, no hookups, and campfires only when Yavapai County allows them. It is a pleasant, quiet, slightly rough-edged place that is not a public campground.
From about $35 per night per site, booked and paid on Hipcamp; prices vary by site and season
Yavapai Campground, Granite Basin
Twenty-one compact sites tucked into granite outcrops and ponderosa pine in the Granite Basin Recreation Area, with drinking water, composting toilets and the Granite Mountain Wilderness trails a short walk away. It is smaller, quieter and better designed than Lynx Lake, with a five-acre pond instead of a marina. Reservable, $18 a night, April through October.
$18 per night single site, $36 double, $5 per extra vehicle
Granite Mountain Trail (Prescott)
Granite Mountain Trail #261 climbs from the Metate Trailhead through pinyon and ponderosa to Blair Pass, then switchbacks up the mountain's granite shoulder to a vista point about 7,100 feet up, with the whole Prescott basin, the Bradshaws and, on a clear day, the San Francisco Peaks laid out below. Figure about four miles one way and roughly 1,500 feet of gain. It is the signature hike of the Prescott area, and it is not a Scottsdale-style hour-long out-and-back.
$5 per vehicle day-use fee at the Metate Trailhead, free on Wednesdays; Prescott National Forest and America the Beautiful passes accepted
Lower Wolf Creek Campground
A Civilian Conservation Corps campground from the late 1930s on the banks of Wolf Creek, where Arizona walnut and live oak grow between granite boulders under the pines. Twenty sites, vault toilets, no water, ten dollars a night, first come, first served, and a short summer-only season. It is the budget alternative to Lynx Lake, twenty minutes farther into the Bradshaws and a very different mood.
$10 per night, $5 per extra vehicle, cash at a self-service station
Hazlett Hollow Campground and Crown King
Fifteen sites in a ponderosa hollow in the southern Bradshaws, each with a three-sided wooden shelter on a concrete floor and stonework the Civilian Conservation Corps laid in the 1930s, next to a small lake and six miles beyond the old mining town of Crown King. Getting there means about 26 miles of dirt road, the last stretch of it rough, which keeps it quiet. It is the closest real mountain campground to Scottsdale by air and one of the slowest by road.
Free according to the Forest Service page, which also lists a $10 single-site rate; bring $10 in cash and expect either
Two to two and a half hours north · 17 places
Flagstaff, Williams and the Peaks
Seven thousand feet and up: the lakes along Lake Mary Road, the cinder cones, the state’s highest trail and the campgrounds people from Phoenix book for July.
Fort Tuthill County Park Campground
Fort Tuthill is the old Arizona National Guard camp turned county park at the south edge of Flagstaff, and its campground is the closest place to the city you can legally sleep in a tent: about 100 sites in the pines a minute off I-17, with water spigots, portable toilets, eight RV sites with water and sewer, no electricity and no showers. What it lacks in Forest Service polish it makes up for in location and in the things around it: the county bike park, the Flagstaff Extreme treetop course, the fairgrounds amphitheater and the Flagstaff Urban Trail into town.
About $30 per night for a standard site in recent seasons, more for the eight water-and-sewer RV sites and the group areas; firewood and ice sold on site; confirm current rates when you book
Canyon Vista Campground
Canyon Vista is the closest Forest Service campground to Flagstaff, a single small loop of 14 sites at the head of Walnut Canyon six miles down Lake Mary Road. It has water, vault toilets and no lake, and it sells out because the Arizona Trail and the Sandys Canyon Trail into Walnut Canyon are a few minutes' walk away and downtown is ten minutes by car. It is a trailhead with campsites, which for the right person is exactly the point.
$30 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people; $8 for a second vehicle; day use $12 per vehicle
Lakeview Campground, Upper Lake Mary
Thirty sites on a ponderosa hillside across Lake Mary Road from Upper Lake Mary, the long reservoir that doubles as Flagstaff's water supply and its only no-horsepower-limit lake. It is paved all the way in, has water and clean vault toilets, and the lake is a short walk or a two-minute drive. The trade-off is road noise and sites that are closer together than the Mormon Lake campgrounds farther south.
$30 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people; $10 per night for a second vehicle; day use $12 per vehicle
Marshall Lake
Marshall Lake is a shallow marsh on Anderson Mesa that is a lake in wet years and a wet meadow in dry ones, ringed by ponderosa and fenced off from vehicles to protect nesting waterfowl. The draw is the free dispersed camping in the pines on the east side, the elk that walk through at dusk, and the Arizona Trail, which passes right by. There is nothing here: no toilet, no water, no tables. That is the appeal and the warning.
Free
Walnut Canyon National Monument
Walnut Canyon is a 400-foot-deep limestone gorge east of Flagstaff whose ledges the Sinagua people walled into homes around the year 1100. The Island Trail drops 185 feet down 240 stone steps to a loop past 25 of those rooms, close enough to see the soot on the ceilings, and the Rim Trail gives you the overview without the stairs. It is a one-to-two-hour stop, $25 a car, and one of the best small national monuments in the Southwest.
$25 per vehicle, good for seven days; $20 per motorcycle; $15 per person on foot or bike; the $45 Flagstaff-area annual pass covers Walnut Canyon, Sunset Crater and Wupatki; America the Beautiful passes accepted; cashless
Pine Grove Campground
Pine Grove is the nicest of the Lake Mary Road campgrounds: 46 roomy sites under tall ponderosas, coin showers, a dump station, paved main road and 16 fully accessible sites. It is not on a lake, which is why it is quieter than Lakeview and Ashurst, and why it costs a few dollars more than the campgrounds that are.
$34 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people; $10 per night for a second vehicle; showers $7; dump station free for registered campers, $14 for others; day use $12 per vehicle
Ashurst Lake Campgrounds
Ashurst and its sister loop Forked Pine are two small, basic campgrounds, about 25 sites each, on opposite shores of a shallow, round lake in open ponderosa at 7,100 feet. The lake holds water through drought years when others go dry, the trout fishing is reliable, and the 10-horsepower limit keeps it calm. The wind does not. Ashurst is one of the windiest spots on the plateau, which is why the windsurfers love it and your tent will not.
$27 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people at either campground; $10 for a second vehicle; day use $12 per vehicle
Dairy Springs Campground, Mormon Lake
Dairy Springs is the larger of the two old Forest Service campgrounds on the west side of Mormon Lake: 30 sites and a group site in dense ponderosa at 7,170 feet, with potable water, vault toilets, a campfire amphitheater and three short trails to overlooks of the lake basin. Mormon Lake itself is a marsh more often than a lake, so this is forest camping with a view, not water camping. Mormon Lake Lodge, a mile down the road, supplies steak, ice and a store.
$30 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people; $10 for a second vehicle; group site $135 per night for up to 40 people
Bonito Campground, Sunset Crater
Bonito sits in the ponderosa right at the entrance station of Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, with the black Bonito Lava Flow a few hundred yards from the tents. Its 44 sites have water, vault toilets and paved spurs, and from here the Lava Flow Trail, Lenox Crater and the 35-mile loop road through Wupatki's pueblos are all before-lunch outings. In 2026 it closed six weeks early for road work on Forest Road 545; the road reopens October 22 and the campground returns in May.
$34 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people; $10 for a second vehicle; day use $12 per vehicle; the monument next door charges a separate $25 per vehicle, good for seven days at Sunset Crater and Wupatki
Double Springs Campground, Mormon Lake
Double Springs is a small Depression-era campground, 15 sites in the pines a mile past Dairy Springs on the west side of Mormon Lake, built around a pair of springs that still run in wet years. Every site is reservable, which means no Friday-night gamble, and the Lake View Trail starts beside the campground and climbs two miles to overlooks of the lake basin and the old volcanoes beyond. It is the quietest night's sleep on this side of Flagstaff.
$27 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people; $10 for a second vehicle; day use $12 per vehicle
Cinder Hills OHV Area dispersed camping
Cinder Hills is 13,500 acres of black volcanic cinder cones and craters between Flagstaff and Sunset Crater where the Coconino lets off-highway vehicles ride cross-country, and it lets you camp anywhere inside the designated area for free. The hardened roads FR 776 and FR 777 carry trailers and motorhomes to big flats where the OHV crowd sets up for the weekend; overlanders climb farther in for quiet. There is no water, no toilet, no trash service, no glass allowed, and no peace on a summer Saturday. On a Tuesday in September it is a spectacular place to wake up.
Free
Humphreys Peak Trail
Humphreys Trail No. 151 climbs from the Snowbowl's lower lot at 9,340 feet through spruce and bristlecone to the saddle, then along a bare, rocky ridge to Arizona's highest point at 12,633 feet: about 5 miles and 3,400 feet each way, three to four hours up for most people. The views reach the Grand Canyon. The ridge is also the most exposed place in the state when a monsoon cell builds, which it does most afternoons in July and August, and people have died up there in the lightning. Start at dawn, turn around at the first thunder, and it is a very good day.
Free; no Forest Service fee or permit; Snowbowl sets its own parking rules, so check its site for any lot charges on event days
Lava River Cave
Lava River Cave is the longest lava tube in Arizona, about a mile of rock pipe formed 700,000 years ago when the outside of a lava flow cooled and the inside drained out. You climb down a jumble of boulders at the entrance, and then you walk, in total darkness, on a floor that ranges from smooth to ankle-breaking, through a tunnel 30 feet high in places and a crawl in one. It is 35 to 45 degrees inside every day of the year. There are no lights, no rails, no staff; it is a hole in the forest and you are responsible for yourself.
$5 per vehicle per day or $15 per vehicle per week, paid at the automated machine on site; America the Beautiful and Red Rock passes accepted
Kaibab Lake Campground
Kaibab Lake is a small, pretty reservoir in the ponderosa a mile north of I-40 at Williams, with a campground of about 70 sites and three group areas wrapped around its shore. It is the most convenient camping on the way to the Grand Canyon that is not inside the park, an hour from the South Rim and ten minutes from the Grand Canyon Railway depot, and it has water, a fishing pier and a boat ramp. You can hear the interstate from the near loops and the train from all of them.
$32 per night for a single site, $55 for a double; group sites $80 to $225; plus a one-time $8 reservation fee; day use $8 per vehicle
Lockett Meadow Campground
Lockett Meadow is a grassy bowl ringed with aspen on the inside of the San Francisco Peaks' old caldera, and the 17-site campground on its edge is the highest and most beautiful on the Coconino. There is no water, one vault toilet, no reservations and a steep single-lane dirt road to get in. In 2026 that road, Forest Road 552, is closed to everything including feet and bikes from July 14 to November 30 for heavy maintenance, so the aspen season is a 2027 plan.
$27 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people; $10 for a second vehicle; day use $12 to $14 per vehicle depending on which line of the Forest Service page you read
Dogtown Lake Campground
Dogtown is the Williams-area campground locals pick: 54 level sites and a big group site in ponderosa on a small, electric-motors-only lake at 7,050 feet, seven miles of paved and gravel road south of town. No interstate, no train, no wake. There is water, vault toilets, a boat ramp, a nature trail along the shore and the Davenport Hill Trail up to an overlook from the back of the loop. The Grand Canyon is still only an hour and a quarter away.
$30 per night for a single site, $50 for a double; group site $300 for up to 80 people; plus a one-time $8 reservation fee; day use $8 per vehicle
White Horse Lake Campground
White Horse Lake is the farthest-flung of the three Williams lakes, a reservoir at 6,600 feet at the end of 19 miles of forest road, and its campground is also the largest: about 90 sites in several loops around the shore, a group site for 60, a paved boat ramp and electric-motor-only water. Sycamore Canyon's rim, with views into a 20-mile wilderness gorge, is a short drive or hike south. In 2026 the water system was off and the Forest Service asked campers to bring their own; confirm before you go.
$30 per night for a single site, $50 for a double; group site $198 for up to 60 people; plus a one-time $8 reservation fee; day use $8 per vehicle
Three to four hours east · 23 places
The White Mountains
Show Low, Pinetop and Greer, where the Valley goes to fish and breathe in July. Farther than the Rim, cooler, greener and quieter.
Second Campground (White Mountain Apache)
Second Campground is a primitive camp on the reservation side of the Salt River, about six miles of dirt road downstream from the US 60 bridge in Salt River Canyon. It belongs to the White Mountain Apache Tribe, it has a toilet and not much else, and you camp here on the tribe's Black and Salt River Special Use permit, bought in advance at the Carrizo Store or another tribal vendor. The river, the canyon walls and the quiet are the point.
Black and Salt River Special Use permit, posted at $25 per adult per day (children under 10 free with a permitted adult); permits are per calendar day and non-refundable
Blue Lake Campground (Cibecue)
Google Maps calls this a campground. The pin is West Blue Lake, a small lake at 7,255 feet on the reservation's northwest plateau south of the Rim, and it sits inside the White Mountain Apache Tribe's closed area, where no tribal recreation permit allows non-members to camp, fish or even drive. There is nothing here for a visitor, and trying to reach it is trespass. The tribe's open lakes with real campgrounds are 60 miles east around McNary and Hawley Lake.
Not available to non-members; no permit opens this area
Fool Hollow Lake Recreation Area
Fool Hollow is the most civilized campground in the White Mountains: about 100 sites in the ponderosas on a 150-acre lake at 6,300 feet, inside the Show Low city limits, with water and 30-amp electric at the RV sites, free hot showers, a dump station, a visitor center and a reservation system that actually works. It costs twice what the Forest Service campgrounds nearby charge and it books out on summer weekends months ahead. The lake is low enough right now that only hand-launched boats are going in.
Camping $25 per night non-electric, $50 with hookups, $75 oversized, plus a $3.60 reservation fee; day use $10 per vehicle for one person, $20 for two to four
Show Low Lake Campground
Show Low Lake is a Navajo County park with a concession-run campground of 75 sites on a 100-acre reservoir at 6,500 feet, ten minutes south of downtown Show Low. It is plainer than Fool Hollow and cheaper, with standard sites at $24 plus tax and 30-amp electric at $34, a dump station, restrooms, seasonal showers and a small seasonal store that rents boats. The lake has produced Arizona's last five state-record walleye. It stays open all winter, with fewer services.
Standard sites $24 per night plus tax, pull-throughs $26, lakeside $30, 30-amp electric $34; $10 reservation fee per site; day-use picnicking $8 per vehicle
Scott Reservoir
Scott Reservoir is a small, pretty lake in the pines a mile and a half up Porter Mountain Road from Lakeside, with picnic tables, portable toilets and an accessible boat ramp, and it is free. It used to be a casual camping spot; it is not anymore. In February 2026 the Forest Service prohibited all camping here for three years because people were camping with no bathrooms and leaving the results. Come to fish, launch a kayak or eat lunch, then sleep somewhere with a toilet.
Free
Diamond Creek Junction Campground
Diamond Creek Junction is an informal tribal camp where Diamond Creek Road leaves the paved valley and turns to rock, a few miles up from SR 73 north of Whiteriver. There are no numbered sites, no toilet you can count on and no sign; there is a trout creek running through meadows and pines, and a $15 tribal camping permit that makes it legal. Visitors have driven up Route R25 looking for it and turned around, so go for the creek and treat the campground name as a suggestion.
White Mountain Apache daily camping permit, $15 per vehicle per day (up to 8 people) on the tribe's current price list; fishing permit $10 per adult per day extra
Lower Log Road Campground
Lower Log is one of the White Mountain Apache Tribe's designated campgrounds, a string of riverside sites along the North Fork of the White River off SR 73 north of Whiteriver, at about 6,000 feet. The tribe stocks the Lower Log and Upper Log stretches with trout, the sites have tables and fire rings, there are vault toilets and trash roll-offs, and the whole thing runs on a $15-per-vehicle daily camping permit with no reservations. It is simple, shady and usually not full.
White Mountain Apache daily camping permit, $15 per vehicle per day (up to 8 people), $350 for 30 days; fishing permit $10 per adult per day extra
Diamond Creek Number Two Campground
Number Two is the second of the informal camping spots along Diamond Creek, a mile or so up Route R25 from the junction, at the same creek, with the same trout and the same absence of facilities. It exists on maps and in tribal fishing lore, not as a signed campground; a visitor in 2025 drove the route and could not find it. You come for the creek, with a tribal camping permit in the window, and you camp where the ground is already used.
White Mountain Apache daily camping permit, $15 per vehicle per day (up to 8 people); fishing permit $10 per adult per day extra
Upper Log Campground
Upper Log is the upstream of the White Mountain Apache Tribe's two designated campgrounds on the North Fork of the White River, a few miles down Slide Creek Road from SR 260 near McNary at about 6,400 feet. The sites are shaded and close to the stocked stream, there are tables, fire rings, portable toilets and a dumpster, and the only paperwork is a $15-per-vehicle tribal camping permit from the Hon-Dah store 10 minutes away. A June visitor found hardly anyone there.
White Mountain Apache daily camping permit, $15 per vehicle per day (up to 8 people), $350 for 30 days; fishing permit $10 per adult per day extra
Granville Campground
Granville is the first Forest Service campground you reach heading north from Clifton on US 191, 16 miles out and 3,000 feet up, in a shady side canyon of Arizona cypress, Gambel oak and quaking aspen at 6,604 feet. It is free, has about a dozen tent sites with tables, grills, a vault toilet and horse corrals at the north end, and no drinking water. A few private summer cabins share the canyon under Forest Service permit. For a free campground, it is unusually pleasant.
Free
Hoyer Campground, Greer
Rolfe C. Hoyer is the big campground above Greer: close to 100 sites on pine needles and grass at 8,300 feet, with a shower house, a dump station, a camp host selling firewood and ice, and the three Greer Lakes across the highway. There are no hookups at any site, whatever older listings say. It costs $24, it books on recreation.gov, and it is one of the most popular campgrounds in the White Mountains for good reason.
$24 per night for a single site, $12 with an Interagency Senior or Access pass; $24 for an additional camp unit, paid at the campground
Big Lake Recreation Area
Big Lake is the high point of Arizona car camping, literally: 450 acres of cold, stocked trout water at about 9,000 feet on the plateau south of Greer, ringed by five Forest Service campgrounds that together hold more than 300 sites, a store with gas, food, firewood and boat rentals, flush toilets, showers, a dump station and a visitor center. Apache Trout has the only hookups; Rainbow is the big family campground; Grayling is small and quiet; Cutthroat and Brookchar are tent-only on the water. It is a four-hour drive and worth the week.
From $20 to $30 per night for a standard site depending on campground, $46 with full hookups at Apache Trout, $50 to $90 for double sites, $200 to $375 for group sites; Interagency Senior and Access passes take half off standard sites
Thompson Trail #629 (Greer)
A gentle trail that follows the West Fork of the Black River downstream for about 2.5 miles from a small lot on Forest Road 116 to a junction with the West Fork Trail #628, never crossing the water and never climbing more than a few dozen feet at a time. At nearly 8,800 feet it runs through wet meadows, spruce and fir and the regrowing aspen of the 2011 Wallow Fire, past an Apache trout fish barrier ten minutes in. It is free, foot-only, and one of the most reliably beautiful short hikes in Arizona.
Free; no fee or pass
Alpine Divide Campground
Alpine Divide is the Forest Service's small fee campground just north of Alpine, about a dozen sites in a grove of ponderosa at 8,500 feet at the foot of Escudilla Mountain, with two vault toilets, tables, fire rings and dumpsters in season. It costs $10, cannot be reserved, and sits close enough to US 191 that you will hear the trucks. Recent visitors report some sites closed for maintenance; the Alpine Ranger District will know which.
$10 per vehicle per night; $5 with an Interagency Senior or Access pass; additional camp unit $10, paid at the campground
Horse Springs Campground, Black River
Horse Springs is the main campground of the East Fork Recreation Area, 27 sites in two loops at 7,610 feet above the East Fork of the Black River, with seasonal water spigots, three new vault toilets, a group ramada and a picnic area, run by a concessionaire for $16 a night with no reservations. It is where the hosts are, where the firewood is, and where the other East Fork campgrounds send you for water. Most of it is accessible.
$16 per vehicle per night; $8 with an Interagency Senior or Access pass; additional camp unit $16, paid at the campground
West Fork Campground, Black River
West Fork is the Forest Service's free, barely developed campground on the West Fork of the Black River, in a narrow pine canyon at 7,740 feet reached by 12 miles of forest road from Big Lake. There is one vault toilet, some tables and rock fire rings, a few old wooden shelters, and no water, trash service, hosts or site numbers. Camping is wherever the ground is flat, the river is at your feet, and the Wallow Fire burned the ridges above. Trailers do not belong.
Free
Buffalo Crossing Campground, Black River
Buffalo Crossing is the oldest and prettiest of the East Fork Black River campgrounds, 16 single sites built by the Civilian Conservation Corps on a bend of the river at 7,540 feet, 11 miles of gravel west of Alpine. Rock fire rings, tables, three vault toilets, no water, no hookups, $14 a night and no reservations. The East Fork is stocked with rainbows and holds wild browns and Apache trout, and the sites are a few steps from it.
$14 per vehicle per night; $7 with an Interagency Senior or Access pass; additional camp unit $14, paid at the campground
Diamond Rock Campground, Black River
Diamond Rock is the highest of the East Fork Black River campgrounds, 12 sites at 7,890 feet, three of them under three-sided Adirondack log shelters the Civilian Conservation Corps built in the 1930s. Tables, rock fire rings, a vault toilet, a seasonal spigot in the first cluster, no hookups, $14 a night, no reservations. The river is right there, the turnarounds are tight, and the shelters are the best rain insurance in the White Mountains.
$14 per camp unit per night; $7 with an Interagency Senior or Access pass; additional camp unit $14, paid at the campground
Hannagan Meadow Campground
Hannagan is a tiny Forest Service campground at 9,120 feet on US 191, the Coronado Trail: eight single sites under spruce and fir, a vault toilet, no water and no fee, a quarter mile from Hannagan Meadow Lodge and its restaurant. It is one of the highest campgrounds in Arizona and one of the oldest stops on the road, and the forest around it is what the 2011 Wallow Fire left. Trailers over 16 feet do not fit.
Free; donations accepted
Honeymoon Campground
Honeymoon is the Forest Service's small primitive campground at the top of the Eagle Creek road, 22 miles of dirt and creek crossings from US 191 north of Morenci, at 5,440 feet where the desert canyon turns to sycamore and cottonwood. Four tables, two grills, a vault toilet, no water, no fee and no cell service. It is quiet, remote and pack in, pack out, and the road is the price of admission.
Free
KP Cienega Campground
KP Cienega is a five-site Forest Service campground at about 9,000 feet, a mile and a half of dirt off US 191 south of Hannagan Meadow, at the edge of a wet meadow where the KP Trail drops into the Blue Range Primitive Area. It is free, it has a vault toilet and tables and nothing else, and it is as far from anything as a car campground in Arizona gets. The Forest Service calls it one of the highest campgrounds in the state.
Free
Pacheta Lake Campground
Pacheta is a 68-acre lake at about 8,200 feet in the spruce and meadow country south of Reservation Lake, with a small designated tribal campground on its shore. The tribe manages it as catch and release, artificial lures and flies only, which is why the fish are large. Getting there means an hour of dirt beyond Big Lake on roads the tribe's own map decorates with 4x4 warnings, and a $15-per-vehicle camping permit you must already have. Nearly nobody is there.
White Mountain Apache daily camping permit, $15 per vehicle per day (up to 8 people), $350 for 30 days; fishing permit $10 per adult per day extra
Stray Horse Campground
Strayhorse is a small, free Forest Service campground on US 191 a few miles south of the Hannagan Meadow summit, at 7,780 feet in ponderosa and Gambel oak, with picnic tables, grills, a vault toilet and horse corrals. It is the trailhead for the Highline Trail and the Raspberry Trail into the Blue Range, which is why the corrals are there. The water is shut off and trash service has ended, so it is pack in, pack out. Nobody counts the sites because there are only a handful.
Free
Two to two and a half hours south · 16 places
Tucson and the Sky Islands
A winter trip. Saguaro forests, Sabino Canyon and the road up Mount Lemmon from cactus to pine, with campgrounds at every elevation.
Picacho Peak State Park
Picacho is the volcanic fin you have driven past a hundred times on the way to Tucson, and the Hunter Trail up it is the most un-Arizona hike in Arizona: 1.6 miles one way, half of it on steel cables bolted to bare rock, to a summit of about 3,370 feet with a 360-degree view of the Santa Cruz flats. The park below it is a tidy state park with a 78-site electric campground, hot showers and, in a wet year, the best roadside poppy bloom in the state.
$10 per vehicle with one person, $20 per vehicle with two to four people, $5 per walk-in or bicycle; camping $50 per night
Catalina State Park
Catalina is the state park that happens to own the front door to the Pusch Ridge Wilderness. Eight trails leave one trailhead, from a flat shaded bridle path to the Romero Canyon Trail, which climbs 1,000 feet in 2.8 miles to a string of granite pools that run after rain. The 120-site campground has water and electric at every site, flush restrooms and showers, and it is the easiest base in southern Arizona for a hiker who wants the Catalinas without the Catalina Highway.
$10 per vehicle with one person, $20 per vehicle with two to four people, $5 per walk-in or bicycle; camping $50 per night with water and electric
Gilbert Ray Campground
Gilbert Ray is a county campground in a saguaro forest that is, honestly, as good as the national park's next door, which has no campground at all. There are 138 sites, almost all with 20/30/50-amp electric, flush restrooms, a dump station and water, and the Desert Museum and Saguaro West are five minutes away. It closes for the summer, it books a year out, and it is one of the best deals in Arizona camping at $35.
$35 per night for RV sites with electric, $10 per night for the eight tent-only sites; no discounts and no state or federal passes accepted
Saguaro National Park
Saguaro is two separate parks with one name and one fee, split by the city of Tucson. The west district is the dense, photogenic one: a 6-mile dirt loop drive through a saguaro stand thicker than anything near Scottsdale, with the Signal Hill petroglyphs and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum down the road. The east district is bigger and quieter, with an 8-mile paved loop and the Rincon Mountains behind it. There is no car camping in either; Gilbert Ray Campground next door to the west district fills that job.
$25 per vehicle, $20 per motorcycle, $15 per person on foot or bike, good for seven days in both districts; children 15 and under free; cashless
Peppersauce Campground
Peppersauce is the Mount Lemmon campground that is nowhere near the Catalina Highway. It sits in a grove of giant Arizona sycamores and walnuts in a dry creek bed at 4,700 feet on the mountain's north side, eight miles of dirt road out of Oracle, with vault toilets, no water, no cell signal and roughly 17 small sites at $15 a night. Peppersauce Cave, an undeveloped limestone cave people explore on their own, is a short walk away. It is a different mountain from the one Tucson knows.
$15 per night single site, $30 double; group site $50 per night plus $10 per vehicle; pay on site with cash or check
Soldier Trail (Mount Lemmon)
Soldier Trail #706 climbs about 2.6 miles and roughly 1,600 to 1,800 feet from a pull-out near the bottom of the Catalina Highway to the site of the old Catalina Federal Honor Camp, now the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site. It follows an old road and power-line route over desert ridges and drops through Soldier Canyon, where boulder cascades run as waterfalls after rain. It is free, dry and sunny, and far quieter than Sabino Canyon a few miles west.
Free at the lower pull-out; parking at the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site needs the $8 per day or $10 per week Catalina Highway pass, or an America the Beautiful pass
Molino Basin Campground
Molino Basin is the lowest campground on the Catalina Highway and the only one that opens in winter: a few dozen first-come sites in high-desert oak scrub at 4,500 feet, with vault toilets, no water and the Arizona Trail running through the middle. It is simple and a little scruffy, and in January, when everything above it is snowed shut and everything below it is booked, it is exactly what you want.
$20 per night single site; group area $100 per night plus $10 per vehicle; day use $8 per vehicle
Sabino Canyon Recreation Area
Sabino is Tucson's front yard: a paved road up a canyon full of saguaros, cottonwoods and a creek that actually runs, closed to cars and served by an electric shuttle, with the Santa Catalinas rising 5,000 feet above it. Ride the tram and walk back, or skip it and hike Bear Canyon to Seven Falls, about eight miles round trip with seven creek crossings. It is more developed than anything in the Superstitions and that is the point. Leave the dog at home; they are banned here.
$8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week; Coronado annual pass $40; America the Beautiful passes accepted. Shuttle fares are separate: Sabino Canyon $15 adult / $8 child, Bear Canyon $8 adult / $5 child
Douglas Spring Campground, Saguaro National Park
Saguaro National Park has no drive-in camping at all; its six campgrounds are in the Rincon Mountain wilderness and you walk to every one. Douglas Spring is the lowest and closest: three sites at 4,800 feet, 6.3 miles and about 1,800 feet above the trailhead at the dead end of Speedway, with a vault toilet, bear boxes, seasonal water in a nearby drainage and a strict no-campfire rule. The permit is $8 a night on recreation.gov. It is a long, exposed climb through saguaros into oak and juniper grassland, and the sunrise over Tucson is the reward.
$8 per campsite per night wilderness permit on recreation.gov, plus the park entrance fee of $25 per vehicle or $15 per person for 7 days
General Hitchcock Campground
General Hitchcock is the smallest and most old-fashioned of the Mount Lemmon campgrounds: roughly a dozen tent sites tucked into the oaks and pines of Bear Canyon at about 6,000 feet, right off the highway. No water, no trailers, no reservations, and the Green Mountain Trail starts across the road. It is the one to pick when Rose Canyon is full and you did not want the crowd anyway.
$20 per night single site, $40 double; pay on site with cash or check
Gabe Zimmerman Davidson Canyon Trailhead
A Pima County trailhead on Marsh Station Road where the Arizona Trail drops from the grassland into Davidson Canyon and meets Cienega Creek, one of the few perennial streams left in the Tucson basin. The lot holds 22 cars and 8 horse trailers, it is free, and a memorial arch with a tile portrait honors Gabe Zimmerman, the Giffords aide killed in the 2011 Tucson shooting who had helped make the Arizona Trail a National Scenic Trail. Walking the Arizona Trail needs no permit; stepping off it into the preserve needs a free one from the county.
Free; a free Pima County permit is required to leave the Arizona Trail and enter Cienega Creek Natural Preserve
Rose Canyon Campground and Lake
Rose Canyon is the Mount Lemmon campground everybody means when they say they are going camping on Mount Lemmon: 73 sites in big ponderosas and Gambel oak at 7,000 feet, a six-acre stocked trout lake at the bottom of the loop, drinking water, bear boxes and a small camp store. Half the sites book on recreation.gov and go months ahead for summer weekends. It is the most comfortable campground in the Catalinas and priced like it, at $31 a night.
$31 per night single site (up to six people), $51 double, $11 per extra vehicle; day use $11 per vehicle; firewood $10 a bundle
Tanque Verde Falls
Tanque Verde Creek drops about 80 feet over banded granite in Redington Pass, and for 50 years people have scrambled down to its pools, jumped off its cliffs and, with grim regularity, died there in flash floods and falls. The Forest Service rebuilt the area in 2024 with three trailheads, a half-mile Overlook Trail to a view of the falls, a two-mile rim loop and a short trail to the upper pools. Go after rain, stay on the trails, and treat the creek bed as the hazard it has proven to be.
Free; no fee or pass required
Spencer Canyon Campground
Spencer Canyon is the highest and biggest campground on the Catalina Highway: 66 sites in mixed conifer and aspen at 8,180 feet, with drinking water and clean vault toilets while it is open. There is no lake and no reservation system, which keeps it a notch quieter than Rose Canyon, and the Mount Lemmon trail network, Marshall Gulch and the village of Summerhaven are a few minutes above it. In August it is 30 degrees cooler than Tucson and 45 cooler than Scottsdale.
$31 per night single site (up to six people), $49 double, $11 per extra vehicle; firewood $10 a bundle; the Coronado day-use pass is not valid here
Bog Springs Campground, Madera Canyon
Madera Canyon is the most famous birding canyon in the United States, a sycamore-and-oak cut in the Santa Ritas where more than 250 species have been recorded, and Bog Springs is its only campground: 13 first-come sites at about 5,100 feet with water, vault toilets and bear boxes, a short walk from the lodge feeders and the Mount Wrightson trailhead. It is small and it fills, and it is the right place to sleep before a dawn start up Old Baldy to the 9,453-foot summit.
$20 per night single site, $40 double; day use elsewhere in Madera Canyon $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week; pay on site with cash or check
Soldier Falls Trailhead (Vail)
Soldier Falls is a seasonal waterfall in a side drainage off Mescal Road, the long dirt road that climbs from I-10 at Mescal toward Happy Valley and the east side of the Rincons. There is no sign and no built trail, just a pull-out on Coronado National Forest land and a worn path of a quarter to half a mile that follows a fence line to the fall. After a wet week it is a real cascade with a pool; in a dry winter it is a rock face and a puddle. Google calls the pull-out a trailhead because birders and hikers do.
Free; no fee or pass
Three to four and a half hours · 23 places
Southeastern Arizona
The Chiricahuas, Cochise Stronghold and the Huachucas: far enough to need a weekend, strange and beautiful enough to deserve one.
Cieneguita Campground, Las Cienegas
Las Cienegas is 45,000 acres of BLM grassland and the year-round Cienega Creek, with a working cattle ranch in the middle and the 1870s Empire Ranch headquarters you can walk through for free. Cieneguita is its main designated camping area: half a dozen or so very large, signed sites with rock fire rings on a mesquite-and-grass flat at about 4,600 feet, with no water, toilets or trash service at the camp and a vault toilet and spigot at the ranch headquarters a mile and a quarter away. It is free, 14 days, and the stars and the quiet are the point.
Free; no permit or fee for individual camping in the conservation area
Gardner Canyon Road dispersed camping
Gardner Canyon Road runs 8.7 dirt miles west from SR 83 into the Santa Ritas, and its first few miles are lined with free, numbered dispersed campsites in oak and mesquite grassland at about 5,000 feet, with Mount Wrightson filling the view. There are no toilets, no water and no fee; the rules are the Coronado's standard ones. Up the road are the Arizona Trail's Gardner Canyon trailhead and, by a side road, the restored 1904 adobe buildings of Kentucky Camp. It is the Santa Ritas without Madera Canyon's crowds or fees.
Free
Apache Springs Trailhead (Arizona Trail)
A big gravel lot with a trailer turnaround on a dirt road in the Santa Rita foothills, marking the line between Arizona Trail Passages 4 and 5. The obvious day hike is north on the trail about 3.7 miles through rolling oak grassland to Kentucky Camp, a restored 1904 mining company headquarters with potable water and a toilet, then back. It is free, there is nothing at the trailhead but parking, and the views of Mount Wrightson's granite peak are the best thing about the Sonoita side of the range.
Free; no fee or pass
La Siesta Campgrounds (Arivaca)
La Siesta is a small, family-run campground on a dirt road at the edge of Arivaca, a border-country village of about 700 people west of I-19. There is an upper terrace of pull-through sites with water and 30-amp electric, a large dry-camping field below, tent spots, showers, laundry and a dump station, with some long-term trailers mixed in. Pima County nearly shut it down over zoning in 2018 and then let it stay. It is the only campground in Arivaca and the closest bed to the refuge, and reviewers like the owner more than the amenities.
Reported rates range from about $15 a night for dry camping to roughly $40 to $45 for a hookup site; the dump station is $5; call 520-398-3132 for current prices
White Rock Campground, Peña Blanca Lake
Peña Blanca Lake is a 50-acre Game and Fish reservoir in a canyon of white volcanic cliffs at 4,000 feet, nine paved miles west of I-19, with a boat ramp, fishing piers, a shoreline trail and four picnic areas. White Rock is its campground: 13 oak-shaded sites a quarter mile up Peña Blanca Canyon with tables, fire rings and a vault toilet, no water, vehicles under 22 feet, for $15. It is popular with Nogales families on weekends and empty midweek, and the Forest Service posts both a mercury advisory for the fish and a border-activity advisory for the area.
$15 per night single site, $30 double, cash or check on site; Senior and Access passes pay half. Lake day use is $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week
Riverview Campground, Gila Box
Riverview is the developed campground of the Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area, a 23,000-acre BLM unit where the Gila River and Bonita Creek cut canyons through the desert northeast of Safford. Thirteen sites on a bench above the river, each with a shade ramada, table, fire ring and grill, plus potable water and a toilet, for $5. The campsites were enlarged for trailers, three of them pull-throughs. It is a three-hour-plus drive for most people, which is why it is never full.
$5 per night for a site with up to two vehicles, $2 per additional vehicle; a 2024 BLM plan proposed $15, so confirm
Arcadia Campground, Mount Graham
Arcadia is where the Swift Trail first reaches the pines, 11.6 paved miles up from US 191 at 6,770 feet, and it is the easiest campground on Mount Graham: 19 sites in ponderosa and oak along Wet Canyon's creek bed, drinking water in season, accessible vault toilets, and the Arcadia National Recreation Trail climbing from the loop toward the high country. It is open year-round when the road is, takes RVs to 22 feet, and spares you the 13 dirt miles that Riggs Flat demands.
$20 per night single site, $40 double; day use $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week; pay on site with cash or check
Cochise Stronghold
The Dragoons are a short, sharp range of granite domes between Benson and Willcox, and the canyons in their middle were where Cochise and his Chiricahua Apache band lived and hid through the 1860s and early 1870s; he is buried somewhere in these rocks. The Forest Service campground in East Stronghold Canyon has 11 shaded sites and two group sites, vault toilets and no water, and the Cochise Trail climbs from it to the divide. It is small, old, cheap and closed all summer.
$20 per night single site, $40 double; day use $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week; pay on site with cash or check
Lakeview Campground, Parker Canyon Lake
Parker Canyon Lake is a reservoir of about 130 acres tucked into the oak-and-juniper Canelo Hills at 5,400 feet, with a marina store that rents boats, a 10-horsepower limit, stocked trout in winter and bass the rest of the year, and a 5-mile trail around the shore. Lakeview Campground sits on the hill above it with roughly 65 first-come sites, drinking water and vault toilets, for $20 a night. It is remote, quiet and entirely paved to the door, which is rare for a Coronado campground.
$20 per night single site, $40 double; day use at the lake $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week; pay on site with cash or check
Miller Peak Wilderness backcountry camping
The Huachucas rise 5,000 feet out of the San Pedro Valley a few miles from Mexico, and the 20,190-acre Miller Peak Wilderness is their southern half. There is no campground up there; you backpack in on the Miller Canyon Trail, about 3.4 miles and 2,800 feet, and camp on the dispersed flats near the Crest Trail junction at Bathtub Spring, then walk the last mile and a half to the 9,466-foot summit. It is free, permitless, hard, and on a border where the Forest Service tells you to stay aware.
Free; no permit is required for wilderness camping on the Coronado National Forest and no fee at the Miller Canyon trailhead
Fourmile Canyon Campground (Klondyke)
Ten concrete-table sites under big mesquites at 3,500 feet, a toilet, trash cans and nothing else, three quarters of a mile from the one-store settlement of Klondyke and a few miles from the east trailhead of Aravaipa Canyon. It costs $5 and is run by the BLM out of Safford, with a volunteer host some of the year. The road in is long and partly dirt, there is no water, and the whole point is Aravaipa.
$5 per night for a site with up to two vehicles, $2 per additional vehicle; a 2024 BLM business plan proposed raising it to $15, so carry extra cash
Reef Townsite and Ramsey Vista Campgrounds, Carr Canyon
Carr Canyon Road switchbacks 2,500 feet up the face of the Huachuca Mountains to a pair of small Forest Service campgrounds in the pines. Reef Townsite's 16 sites sit on the foundations of a mining camp that worked from the 1890s to the 1950s; Ramsey Vista, a mile on at the end of the road, has a handful of sites, a horse corral and the Carr Peak trailhead. No water at either, trailers over 12 feet cannot make the switchbacks, and the road closes for winter. In June, when Sierra Vista is 95, it is 75 up here.
Ramsey Vista $15 per night single, $30 double; Reef Townsite's individual-site rate is not posted online, so bring cash or check for a similar amount; the Reef group site is $45 per night
Desert Oasis Campground (McNeal)
Desert Oasis is a private campground on a 120-acre ranch in the Sulphur Springs Valley, about a dozen miles east of Bisbee, run as a quiet winter base for RVers and birders. It has long full-hookup pull-throughs with 30 and 50 amp, tent sites behind a privacy fence, two small camping cabins and a couple of rental trailers, a clubhouse with laundry and showers, and three miles of walking trails on the property. Campfires are not allowed. It is clean, friendly and unexciting, which is what people driving a 40-foot motorhome through Cochise County want.
Rates are not posted online; recent campers report about $35 to $42 a night for a full-hookup site, with tent sites and dry camping less; call 520-979-6650 or book online
Bonita Canyon Campground, Chiricahua National Monument
Chiricahua is a national monument of rhyolite pinnacles, balanced rocks and stone columns left by a volcanic eruption 27 million years ago, in a sky-island range near the New Mexico line, and it is free to enter. Bonita Canyon is its only campground: 23 small sites in pine and oak along a usually dry creek, with flush toilets, water, food lockers and a 29-foot vehicle limit, booked on recreation.gov for $25. It is a four-hour drive from Scottsdale and worth two nights, not one.
$25 per night per site; group tent site $50; no entrance fee for the monument
Hot Well Dunes Recreation Area
In 1928 oil drillers hit 106-degree artesian water under a patch of ancient lakeshore sand southeast of Safford, and the BLM eventually built two concrete soaking tubs over the well and fenced 2,000 acres of dunes for off-highway vehicles. You can camp anywhere outside the parking lots for $3 a vehicle, with ten developed table-and-fire-ring sites and vault toilets, no water and no electricity. It is a 35-mile dirt-road drive from Safford and a very specific kind of good time.
$3 per vehicle per day, day or overnight; $30 annual pass from the Safford Field Office; a 2024 BLM plan proposed $15 per vehicle
Owl Creek Campground
Owl Creek is a seven-site BLM campground on a bluff at the mouth of the Gila Box, 7 miles south of Clifton and 4 miles of gravel in from US 191, with shade ramadas, tables, grills, a pit toilet and a $5 fee. It is the east end of the Black Hills Back Country Byway and a quarter mile above the Gila River boat put-in and the old Safford bridge picnic area. Google's pin and address put it near Alpine; it is not. This is a desert river camp at 3,400 feet, and winter is its season.
$5 per night for up to two vehicles, $2 for each additional vehicle; half price with an Interagency Senior or Access pass
Sycamore Campground, Turkey Creek
West Turkey Creek is the Chiricahuas' other canyon: a perennial stream on the west side of the range that nobody from out of state has heard of. Sycamore is its one developed campground, eight sites straddling the creek at 6,200 feet where it drops through a rocky cleft in a series of small cascades, with a waterfall a short walk upstream, waterless toilets, bear boxes and no water, for $15 first come. The last nine or ten miles are dirt, and six trails climb from Forest Road 41 into the Chiricahua Wilderness.
$15 per night single site, $30 double, cash or check on site
Camp Rucker Campground (Rucker Canyon)
Rucker Canyon is the remote southern basin of the Chiricahuas, reached by 20-odd miles of dirt road with creek crossings, and the Forest Service rebuilt its one developed campground in 2024: the old Camp Rucker group site is now Walnut Grove Campground, 10 individual sites with tables, fire rings and vault toilets under walnut, oak and juniper at about 5,500 feet, $15 a night, no water. A short walk away is the Camp Rucker Historic Site, an army post from the Apache wars named for a lieutenant who drowned in a flash flood here in 1878. The older camps farther up the canyon no longer appear on the forest's guide; dispersed camping along the roads is free.
$15 per night per site at Walnut Grove Campground, cash or check on site; dispersed camping along FR 74 and 74E is free
Pinery Canyon Campground
Pinery Canyon is a handful of old Forest Service sites in the pines at about 7,000 feet, a mile or so below Onion Saddle on the rough dirt road that crosses the Chiricahuas from the national monument to Portal. Guidebooks list four or five sites, tables, fire rings, a toilet, no water and no fee; the Forest Service does not currently list the campground on its website at all, so treat every detail as something to confirm. The road is the real story: washboard and ruts for the first miles on private land, then a slow climb into real mountain forest, with free dispersed pullouts the whole way.
No fee is posted; confirm with the Douglas Ranger District at 520-388-8436
Riggs Flat Campground, Mount Graham
Mount Graham is the tallest of Arizona's sky islands at 10,720 feet, and the Swift Trail climbs 7,000 feet up its side in 35 miles, the last 13 of them dirt, to end at Riggs Flat: an 11-acre trout lake in spruce, fir and aspen meadow at 8,600 feet with about 30 first-come campsites, drinking water and vault toilets. It is as alpine as Arizona gets south of Flagstaff and it takes more than four hours to reach from Scottsdale. Shannon and Cunningham, two smaller no-water campgrounds on the way up, are the fallback.
$20 per night single site, $40 double; day use at the lake $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week; pay on site with cash or check
Stewart Campground, Cave Creek Canyon
Stewart is the shadiest of the four Cave Creek Canyon campgrounds, a cluster of pull-in sites under tall Arizona cypress and sycamores right on the creek, a mile below Sunny Flat and a short walk from the South Fork road where the trogons are. Fewer than a dozen sites, vault toilets, water from about May to October, trailers to 16 feet, $20 a night first come. It is cooler and darker than Sunny Flat and has no view of the cliffs; which one you want depends on whether you came for shade or scenery.
$20 per night single site, $40 double, cash or check on site; day use $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week
Sunny Flat Campground, Cave Creek Canyon
Cave Creek Canyon is the sheer-walled, sycamore-floored canyon on the New Mexico side of the Chiricahuas where elegant trogons nest and birders from six continents gather every spring. Sunny Flat is the canyon's main campground: a dozen or so sites around a grassy meadow at about 5,200 feet with the rhyolite cliffs straight overhead, the only year-round drinking water of the four Cave Creek camps, vault toilets and room for 28-foot trailers, for $20 a night first come, first served. It is a five-hour drive from Scottsdale and the Forest Service closes it when a big storm is forecast.
$20 per night single site, $40 double, cash or check on site; day use $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week
Herb Martyr Campground
Herb Martyr is the last and smallest of the Cave Creek Canyon campgrounds, a handful of tent-only sites in two clusters under the oaks at 5,800 feet, where the road ends at a little 1935 dam long since filled with flood debris. It has a vault toilet, tables and fire rings, no water, and the Herb Martyr and Ash Spring trails start in the parking lot. On the drive in you can see 365-foot Winn Falls coming off Sanders Peak when it runs. It costs $15, takes no reservations and asks for high clearance on the last two dirt miles.
$15 per night single site, $30 double, cash or check on site; day use $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week
Three and a half to five hours north · 10 places
The Grand Canyon
Never a day trip. The rim campgrounds, the corridor campgrounds below the rim and Havasupai, all of which are reserved months to a year ahead.
Comanche Point
Comanche Point is a 7,073-foot promontory on the eastern South Rim, east of Desert View, looking straight down on the Colorado River where it bends around the Unkar Delta and the Palisades of the Desert. No trail goes there. The usual route walks a rough dirt road from Desert View toward Cedar Mountain, follows a long-closed jeep track toward Cape Solitude, and finishes cross-country up a steep slope, about 12 to 13 miles round trip. There is no water, no sign and no permit needed for a day; it is the kind of place the park leaves to people who can navigate.
Free to hike; $35 per-vehicle park entrance fee; overnight camping requires a backcountry permit ($10 plus $4 per person per night above the rim)
Desert View Campground
Fifty sites under pinyon and juniper less than half a mile from the rim at the east end of Desert View Drive, where the canyon opens up and you can see the Colorado River and the Painted Desert at once. It is a fraction the size of Mather, has flush toilets and a couple of water taps, and is a two-minute walk from Mary Colter's 1932 Watchtower. Reservations are required, and the season is April to October only.
$30 per night; plus the $35 per-vehicle park entrance fee
Mather Campground
Mather is the largest campground in the National Park system, 327 sites under ponderosa, pinyon and juniper about a mile back from the rim in Grand Canyon Village. It is not wilderness: you will hear your neighbors and the shuttle bus. But it puts you a free bus ride from the Bright Angel Trailhead and the Rim Trail, it has flush toilets, water and showers, and it is open every day of the year, which no other campground on the South Rim can say.
$30 per night for a standard site; $50 for a group site; $6 per person in the hiker/biker area; plus the $35 per-vehicle park entrance fee
Bright Angel Campground
Thirty small-group sites and two large group sites under the cottonwoods where Bright Angel Creek meets the Colorado River, 2,480 feet above sea level and 4,400 feet below the South Rim, a short walk from the Phantom Ranch canteen. It is the most requested backcountry campground in the park and the goal of nearly every first-time Grand Canyon backpacker. On August 29, 2026 a flash flood down Bright Angel Canyon killed people, wrecked the campground, both river bridges and the park's water pipeline, and the Park Service has closed it indefinitely with no permits being issued.
Backcountry permit: $10 per permit plus $15 per person per night; plus the $35 park entrance fee
Bright Angel Trail
A graded, switchbacking mule trail that drops 4,400 feet in 9.5 miles from Grand Canyon Village to the Colorado River, with covered resthouses, toilets and emergency phones along the way. Day hikers go down as far as they can climb back up, which for most people is the 1.5-Mile or 3-Mile Resthouse and for fit people in cool weather is Havasupai Gardens. The lower trail and the river bridges are closed after the August 2026 flash flood, and the drinking-water taps along the trail are shut off, so right now you carry everything.
Free to hike; $35 per-vehicle park entrance fee; overnight camping below the rim requires a backcountry permit ($10 plus $15 per person per night)
Havasupai Gardens Campground
Fifteen small-group sites and one large group site in the cottonwoods along Garden Creek, 4.5 miles and 3,060 feet below the Bright Angel Trailhead, with composting toilets, picnic tables, food lockers, a ranger station and, in normal years, year-round drinking water. It was Indian Garden until November 2022, when the park renamed it for the Havasupai people who farmed it until they were forced out. Right now it is the lowest overnight stop on the South Rim corridor, because the campground at the river is closed after the August 2026 flood.
Backcountry permit: $10 per permit plus $15 per person per night; plus the $35 park entrance fee
Havasupai Campground (Havasu Falls)
The campground is a mile of first-come tent sites along Havasu Creek between Havasu Falls and Mooney Falls, on the Havasupai Reservation, which is tribal land outside Grand Canyon National Park and run by the tribe under its own rules. Getting there is a 10-mile hike from Hualapai Hilltop with 2,000 feet of descent, a $455-per-person permit for a required three nights, and a reservation you buy on the tribe's website the morning the season goes on sale. The water really is that color. The rules are strict, the trail is hot, and the canyon floods.
$455 per person for a mandatory 3-night, 4-day campground permit, taxes and fees included; lodge rooms $2,277 for 3 nights (up to 4 people); pack mule $400 round trip; helicopter $300 per person one way
North Rim Campground
About 87 sites in ponderosa and aspen at 8,200 feet on the Kaibab Plateau, a short walk from the canyon edge and a half mile from the North Kaibab Trailhead, at the end of a 44-mile dead-end highway that sees a tenth of the South Rim's visitors. The Dragon Bravo Fire burned the Grand Canyon Lodge, the visitor center and the water plant in July 2025. The campground reopened June 1, 2026 with portable toilets, no drinking water, no showers, no campfires and no lodge, and that is the deal for the foreseeable future.
$30 per night for a standard site, with tent-only, rim-side and group sites priced from about $12 to $65; plus the $35 park entrance fee
Cottonwood Campground, North Kaibab Trail
A small backcountry campground beside Bright Angel Creek at 4,080 feet, 6.8 miles and 4,160 feet below the North Kaibab Trailhead and 7.2 miles above Bright Angel Campground at the river, with toilets, picnic tables, food lockers, an emergency phone and seasonal water. It exists to break the 14-mile, 5,800-foot North Kaibab descent in half and to put Ribbon Falls within a short walk. It is closed now: the August 29, 2026 flash flood shut the whole North Kaibab Trail, a waterline project was already going to close the stretch above it from October 15 into 2027, and the North Rim closes for winter December 1.
Backcountry permit: $10 per permit plus $15 per person per night; plus the $35 park entrance fee
Tuweep Campground
Tuweep is the Grand Canyon without the Grand Canyon crowd: nine small campsites and one group site on the Esplanade of the remote western North Rim, a short drive or walk from Toroweap Overlook, where the rim drops 3,000 feet straight to the Colorado River. Getting there takes a backcountry permit booked at least five days ahead, a park pass, a high-clearance vehicle and three or more hours on 60 miles of dirt from the Arizona Strip, and there is no water, fuel, cell service or anyone to help. The payoff is one of the great campsites in the country.
Backcountry permit: $10 per permit plus $4 per person per night (above-rim rate), plus the $35 Grand Canyon vehicle entrance fee or an America the Beautiful pass. Day visitors without a camping permit need a $2 Tuweep day-use vehicle permit
Four to five hours north · 9 places
Page, Lees Ferry and the Kaibab Plateau
The far north: Lake Powell’s beaches, the put-in for every Grand Canyon river trip, and the 8,000-foot plateau of aspens and meadows on the road to the North Rim.
Lees Ferry Campground
Lees Ferry is a bench of red rock above the Colorado River where the Paria comes in, the launch ramp every Grand Canyon river trip pushes off from, and a 54-site Park Service campground on the hill above it with flush toilets, water and a dump station but no hookups and no shade to speak of. It is first come, first served at $26 a night, open all year, and in 2026 the upper loop is closed for renovation, so plan on roughly half the sites. Come between October and April; the canyon floor is a furnace in summer.
$26 per night per site (raised from $20 in January 2025); plus the $30 per-vehicle Glen Canyon entrance fee, good for seven days; the park is cashless
Page Lake Powell Campground
This is the private, full-service campground in Page itself: about 160 sites by the owners' count, most of them full-hookup 30/50-amp RV pads in close gravel rows, plus dry tent pads, tiny homes, cabins and canvas-sided glamping wagons, an indoor pool, a playground, fiber Wi-Fi and a store. It is a parking lot with amenities, not a wilderness camp, and the highway noise from US 89 is the most common complaint. But it puts you ten minutes from Horseshoe Bend and Antelope Canyon with a hot shower and a grocery store, and that is exactly what most people visiting Page want.
Rates vary by site type and date and are not published as a flat list; recent guest reports range from about $28 for a dry tent pad to $125 or more for cabins and glamping wagons, with full-hookup RV sites commonly reported in the $60s in 2026. Check the live rate on the campground's booking page
Lone Rock Beach Campground
Lone Rock Beach is the only place at Lake Powell where you can drive your truck or RV onto the sand and camp wherever you stop, with the monolith of Lone Rock standing in the bay in front of you. It is primitive: vault toilets year-round, a flush toilet and outdoor shower station on the pavement in summer, no reliable water and no hookups, for $14 a night plus the park entrance fee. Lake Powell hit a record low of about 3,517 feet in September 2026, so the water has pulled far back from where the beach used to end, and the drive gets softer and longer every season. Spring and fall are lovely; summer weekends are loud.
$14 per vehicle per night, first come, first served, plus the $30 per-vehicle Glen Canyon entrance fee (seven days); card only at the booth and fee machine
Jacob Lake Campground
Jacob Lake is the crossroads where US 89A meets SR 67, the 44-mile dead-end road to the Grand Canyon North Rim, and the campground is 51 sites in ponderosa and aspen at 7,920 feet across the highway from the Jacob Lake Inn and its famous cookies. It has water, vault toilets and fire rings, no hookups, and costs $30 a night on recreation.gov. The Dragon Bravo Fire of 2025 burned the North Rim's lodge and most of the plateau to the south but spared Jacob Lake, and in 2026, with the park campground dry and fireless, this is the sensible place to sleep and the last gas, food and cell signal before the rim.
$30 per night for a single site plus a one-time $8 reservation fee; group sites $125, $175 or $225 per night by size; America the Beautiful passes do not discount camping here
DeMotte Campground
DeMotte is 38 sites in spruce, fir and aspen at about 8,800 feet on the edge of DeMotte Park, the long meadow beside SR 67, seven miles north of the Grand Canyon North Rim entrance. It is small, cold at night even in July, has water and vault toilets and fire rings, and costs $30 a night with half the sites reservable on recreation.gov. In 2026, with the park campground dry and fireless after the Dragon Bravo Fire, it is the best place to sleep within an hour of the rim, and it books out accordingly.
$30 per night for a single site plus a one-time $8 reservation fee on reserved sites; America the Beautiful passes are accepted for camping here
Kaibab Paiute RV Park and Campground
A clean, flat, tribally run RV park on the Kaibab Paiute reservation, about 58 full-hookup pull-through and back-in sites plus 16 tent sites, with 24-hour hot showers, a laundry, an off-leash dog park and Wi-Fi, for $30 a night ($15 for a tent). It is on the Arizona Strip, the empty country north of the Grand Canyon, a short walk from Pipe Spring National Monument and its shared Park Service and tribal museum. Nobody comes here for the campground itself; they come because it is the best-value hookups within an hour of the North Rim, Zion's east entrance and Kanab, and leave surprised by how pleasant it was.
$30 per night for a full-hookup RV site; $15 per night for a tent site (tribe's posted rates); Passport America, Good Sam and veteran discounts offered
White Pocket, Vermilion Cliffs
White Pocket is a few hundred acres of swirled, folded Navajo sandstone on the Paria Plateau, white domes laced with orange and red and cracked into brain-like polygons, with pools after rain that mirror the whole thing. It is as strange as the Wave and needs no permit, which is the point; the price is the drive, about 15 miles of deep sand and sharp rock beyond House Rock Valley Road that stranded groups every year. Four-wheel drive and high clearance are required, not suggested. Camp at the trailhead and shoot it at dawn.
Free; no permit and no fee as of October 2026 (a 2024 BLM draft business plan proposed a $10 per person daily fee that has not been adopted)
Ponderosa Grove Campground
A rebuilt BLM campground in a stand of ponderosa pines on the sandy bench above Coral Pink Sand Dunes, with 34 individual sites (26 for cars and tents, 6 for RVs, 2 walk-ins) at $12 a night, a 40-person group site at $50, vault toilets and no water. It is first come, first served, open all year, and quiet enough that the loudest thing most nights is the wind in the pines. The old nine-site version in guidebooks is gone; this is bigger and better.
$12 per night per individual site (first come, first served, pay at the fee tube or scan-and-pay); $50 per night for the group site, reserved on recreation.gov; all fees non-refundable
Indian Hollow Campground
Three campsites, a vault toilet and a view into the Grand Canyon from a lonely lip of the Kaibab Plateau's west side, reached by about 36 miles of graded and then rough forest road from Jacob Lake. It is free, it is first come, first served, there is no water, and from the end of the road the Thunder River Trail drops 6.3 miles across the Esplanade to the Bill Hall junction and onward to Thunder River, one of the great springs of the canyon. If the North Rim is the quiet rim, this is the quiet corner of it.
Free
Three to five hours northeast · 9 places
The Navajo Nation, Winslow and the Four Corners
Canyon de Chelly, the Chuskas and Monument Valley, where the campgrounds are tribal and the rules are different. Winslow’s canyon park is the stop on the way.
Grand Falls Campground
Grand Falls, the 185-foot cascade of brown Little Colorado River water that the internet calls Chocolate Falls, sits on Navajo Nation land in the Leupp Chapter, and residents closed it to non-Navajo visitors in March 2023 after years of trash, off-roading, drones and disrespect at a place that is sacred to them. The Leupp Chapter's website still says, in full, 'Grand Falls is closed,' and Navajo Nation Parks lists it as closed too. The ramada, pit toilet and picnic tables that passed for a campground were built in 2016 and are off-limits with the rest of the site. Do not go.
Closed to the public since March 2023; there was never a fee when it was open
McHood Park Campground (Winslow)
McHood Park is Winslow's city park on Clear Creek Reservoir, where a 1920s dam backed water into a sandstone canyon just south of town. Twenty-two unmarked dry-camping sites sit on the rim above the lake with tables, grills and a restroom building, for $15 a night on the honor kiosk. The reservoir is the draw: a flat-water paddle up the narrowing canyon past petroglyphs and cliff-jumping ledges, with canoe and kayak rentals in summer. The upkeep is thin, the showers have been broken for years and the water has been off, so arrive self-sufficient.
$15 per night for dry camping, paid at the entrance kiosk; a $7 per-vehicle day pass is reported in the city's 2026 fee schedule; confirm with the Winslow Visitor Center at 928-289-2434
Cottonwood Campground, Canyon de Chelly
A big, flat, old-fashioned campground in a grove of cottonwoods beside the Canyon de Chelly Welcome Center, run by Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation rather than the Park Service. You pay $30 cash in an envelope, pick any open site, and you are five minutes from the South Rim Drive and ten from the White House trailhead. It is plain and a little tired, the water is turned off in winter, and loose dogs wander through, but it is the only campground inside the monument and the one you should use.
$30 per night for up to 7 people, cash; group sites $60 per night for 14 to 30 people; $5 for day use, water fill or the dump station
Sleeping Bear Campground (Monument Valley)
A Navajo family has run a plain, 14-site campground on their land a mile off US 163 for years: dirt pads, a covered picnic table and stone fire ring at most sites, an outhouse, no water, no trash cans, and the buttes of Monument Valley standing on the southern horizon. It costs $25 cash, which a family member collects after dark. The owner's Google listing has two pins, one correctly on Douglas Mesa Road in Utah and one 8 miles south near Oljato on the Arizona side, where there is nothing; this is the Utah one, and the only one.
$25 per night per site, cash, collected by the family in the evening
Spider Rock Campground
Howard Smith's campground is 30-odd sites scattered through pinyon and juniper on the rim plateau toward the end of the South Rim Drive, plus a handful of forked-stick hogans with wood stoves that he built himself. It is $20 a night, cash, with fire pits, a solar shower, water fill and a dump station, and it is quieter and higher than the Navajo Parks campground in Chinle. Howard also guides canyon tours, which is the real reason people come back.
$20 per night per tent or RV site; groups of 7 to 14 people $36; hogans priced by size and season, ask when you call; solar showers $4 per person; firewood $7 a bundle; cash or check only
Antelope Lake Campground (Chambers)
Antelope Lake is a three-acre pond on the forested Defiance Plateau south of SR 264, stocked with rainbow trout by Navajo Fish & Wildlife in years when the water level allows, with a few informal tent spots on its banks and no facilities at all. Google files it under Chambers because that is the nearest post office; it is really 16 miles of dirt road southwest of Window Rock. You need a Navajo Nation camping permit and fishing permit, and you should call about water and road conditions first. It is a destination only for people who like this sort of thing.
Navajo Nation camping permit, listed at $15 per person per night by Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation; Navajo fishing permit $15 a day, $25 for three days or $40 a season for non-Navajos as posted (confirm, the price sheet is old)
Tsaile Lake Campground
Tsaile Lake is a 260-acre reservoir at 7,000 feet behind Diné College, where Canyon del Muerto begins, and the camping around its shore is a few informal dirt pullouts with stone fire rings that locals call Tsaile Lake, Black Pinnacle and South Shore campgrounds. There are no toilets, no tables and no water, and you need a Navajo Nation camping permit and a Navajo fishing permit to be there legally. It is beautiful and empty. It is not a campground in the Forest Service sense, and you should not expect one.
Navajo Nation camping permit, listed at $15 per person per night by Navajo Parks & Recreation; Navajo Nation fishing permit $15 a day, $25 for three days or $40 a season for non-Navajos (prices posted by Fish & Wildlife, confirm before you go)
Wagon Wheel Campground (Lukachukai)
Wagon Wheel is a picnic and camping area on Lukachukai Creek at about 7,500 feet, where the paved Buffalo Pass road leaves the Lukachukai valley and starts its 14-percent climb into the ponderosas. It is a few table-and-fire-ring spots in the pines beside a small perennial creek, used mostly by local families, with no toilets, water or caretaker. Google calls it a campground; the Navajo Nation EPA calls it a picnic area, and the truth is in between. You need a Navajo Nation camping permit to stay the night.
Navajo Nation camping permit, listed at $15 per person per night by Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation; no fee is collected on site
Buffalo Pass Campground, Chuska Mountains
Buffalo Pass is the paved saddle where Navajo Route 13 crosses the Lukachukai Mountains at about 8,450 feet. On the pass is a Navajo Nation picnic area, and around it are the walk-in camping spots the apps call Buffalo Pass Campground: pines, aspens, fire rings, a table or two, and a view off the east side that drops 2,500 feet to Red Valley with Shiprock standing beyond. There are no toilets, no water and no caretaker; litter is a recurring complaint. It is high, cool and quiet, and the Navajo Nation requires a camping permit.
Navajo Nation camping permit, listed at $15 per person per night by Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation; nothing is collected at the pass
One and a half to three hours · 10 places
Organ Pipe, the Gila and the far west
The emptiest country within reach of Scottsdale: petroglyphs on the Gila, the organ pipe cactus along the border and a few desert campgrounds that are perfect in January.
Margie's Cove Trail, Sonoran Desert National Monument
A near-level route of about nine miles through the heart of the 63,200-acre North Maricopa Mountains Wilderness, following old vehicle tracks and wide, sandy washes between ridges of broken granite and some of the densest saguaro stands near Phoenix. There are no signs, no markers and no water, so the BLM recommends it only for people who can navigate. The west trailhead has a vault toilet, parking for ten cars and three free campsites at the end of five miles of high-clearance dirt.
Free; no permit or pass
Saddle Mountain BLM dispersed camping
Saddle Mountain is a jagged volcanic ridge that rises 1,700 feet off the flats southwest of Tonopah, and the BLM land around its base is one of the Valley's best-known free camps. Paved Courthouse Road gets you to the edge of it, dirt spurs fan out to flats that fit anything from a tent to a 40-foot motorhome, and from December to February the place fills with snowbirds. No water, no toilets, no fee, 14 days, and the rougher the spur, the fewer the neighbors.
Free
Belmont Mountains (395th Avenue staging area)
The Google Maps pin is a gravel clearing just past the Central Arizona Project canal on 395th Avenue, the recommended staging spot for the 16-mile Belmont Mountain OHV route and the southern way into a range that has no trails at all. The Belmont Mountains' high point, Peak 3137, where surveyors set the Belmont benchmark in 1948, stands about four miles north of the clearing and 1,740 feet above it; the smaller bump officially named Belmont Mountain, about 2,500 feet, is a separate hill the same distance north. Reaching either from here means miles of jeep road to an abandoned mine, then a loose, cairned class 2 ridge. Most hikers who have done it came in from the Vulture Mine Road side instead, about 8 miles round trip and 1,360 feet of gain.
Free; no permit on the BLM portion. A State Land Department recreation permit is required where the OHV route crosses State Trust Land farther north
Painted Rock Petroglyph Site and Campground
A low hill of dark basalt boulders in the flat desert west of Gila Bend, covered in hundreds of petroglyphs pecked over centuries by the Hohokam and the people before and after them, with a plain BLM campground of 59 sites next door. There is no water, no shade and nothing within 25 miles, which is why the stars are extraordinary. It was a state park until 1989; the BLM runs it now for $8 a night.
$8 per night per campsite; check the entrance sign for any day-use charge at the petroglyph site
Hummingbird Springs Wilderness
A 31,200-acre federal wilderness 55 miles west of Phoenix with no trails, no trailhead and no facilities, taking in the northwest end of the Belmont Mountains and their highest point, Sugarloaf Mountain, 3,418 feet, whose banded cliffs you can see from I-10. The BLM says it is easy to backpack and that primitive campsites abound, both true in the sense that the washes are walkable and nothing is built. The Google Maps pin sits inside the wilderness near Hummingbird Springs itself, reached by a cherry-stem vehicle corridor off the canal and powerline roads north of I-10. Getting there is half the day; the mountain is a class 2 to 3 route-finding problem.
Free; no permits, passes or fees for individuals. Nearby State Trust Land requires a State Land Department recreation permit
Burro Creek Campground
A tidy BLM campground of 23 sites and one group site on a bench above Burro Creek, where the creek pools deep and blue beneath saguaro cliffs and the tall US 93 bridge. For a desert campground it is unusually civilized: drinking water, flush toilets, a dump station, shaded tables, a desert garden and a wildlife exhibit. Fourteen dollars a night, half the sites reservable, and 1.25 miles of pavement off the highway to Kingman.
$14 per night per site, $50 per night for the group site; day use is free at the two day-use sites
Gunsight Wash BLM dispersed camping
Gunsight Wash is a flat stretch of BLM desert a mile south of the crossroads town of Why, and it exists in most people's minds as the place you camp when Organ Pipe's campground is full. It is free, has a 14-day limit and has nothing else: no toilets, no water, no shade. In winter it is a loose village of RVs with the Ajo Range in the window; in summer it is empty and dangerous. Border Patrol traffic is constant and part of the scenery.
Free
Twin Peaks Campground, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument
The National Park Service's main campground at Organ Pipe, a mile and a half from the visitor center and a few miles from Mexico, with 208 sites in a saguaro and organ pipe forest, flush toilets, free solar-heated showers and a dump station, but no hookups. Twenty dollars a night plus the $25 park entrance, booked on recreation.gov. Alamo Canyon, 13 miles north, is the four-site tent-only alternative. It is the farthest drive in this guide's southwest set and the one most worth two nights.
$20 per night ($10 with a Senior or Access pass), group sites $50; plus the $25 per vehicle entrance fee, good for 7 days. The park is cashless
Alamo Lake State Park
A big Army Corps flood-control reservoir on the Bill Williams River in the empty country between Wickenburg and the Colorado, run as a state park since 1969. It is known nationally for largemouth bass and crappie, for wild burros wandering the campgrounds, and for a night sky with the nearest city lights 40 miles off. Seven campgrounds offer everything from dry sites to full hookups, plus four cabins, two ramps and a store. It is nearly three hours from Scottsdale, and the last 37 miles are a paved road to nowhere else.
Entrance $10 per vehicle with one person, $20 with 2 to 4 people, $5 per bicycle or walk-in; camping $25 dry or non-electric, $40 water and electric, $50 full hookup; cabins $85 per night
Hualapai Mountain Park
A 2,226-acre Mohave County park on the high shoulder of the Hualapai Mountains, where the road climbs 3,100 feet out of Kingman's desert into ponderosa, fir and aspen. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the stone cabins, roads and ten miles of trail in the 1930s, and the county still rents the cabins for $55 to $215 a night alongside dry camping, full-hookup RV loops and group areas. Trails climb to overlooks near 8,000 feet, elk graze the meadows, and it is three and a half hours from Scottsdale, which keeps it a Mohave County secret.
Day use $12 per vehicle (up to 4 people, $5 per extra person); dry camping $20 per night per tent or RV plus $10 per pet; full-hookup RV sites $45 per night; cabins $55 to $215 per night
Three to four and a half hours west · 13 places
Route 66, Lake Mead and the Colorado River
The river as a lake: Havasu, Mohave and Mead, the Cerbat Mountains above Kingman, the Mojave across the line. Winter and spring country, and a long way for a weekend.
Crossroads Campground, Parker Strip
A small BLM campground on the California bank of the Parker Strip, the 16-mile stretch of the Colorado between Parker Dam and the town of Parker: 26 dry sites with a table and grill each, one accessible vault toilet, a dumpster, a host, river frontage and a beach, for $5 a night. The free Rock House boat launch is a mile away. It is first come, dirt-padded, loud with boats on summer weekends and nearly perfect in January.
$5 per night per site
Three Dunes Campground, Lake Havasu
Three Dunes is one of Cattail Cove State Park's 32 boat-in campsites, a sandy pocket with a picnic table, a stand-up grill, a ramada and a pit toilet nearby on the Arizona shore of Lake Havasu, about a mile north of the park's ramp. You park in the lot, pay for parking and the campsite at the Iron Ranger, launch, and paddle or motor to whichever site is empty. No fires, no water, no reservations. On a weekday in March it is the best cheap beach night in western Arizona.
Posted nightly boat-in camping fee paid at the Iron Ranger (confirm the current rate with the park), plus Cattail Cove day use of $10 per vehicle for one person or $20 for 2 to 4, and $5 per night to leave a vehicle and trailer in the lot
Craggy Wash BLM dispersed camping
A broad desert wash east of SR 95 north of Lake Havasu City that the BLM has let become the free campground for the whole lake: a mile of hard-packed pullouts and rock fire rings packed with snowbird rigs from November to March, thinning to real solitude two or three miles up the wash. There is nothing here but ground, a 15 mph speed limit and a 14-day rule. Cell signal is strong, the trash situation is a running argument, and the London Bridge is 15 minutes away.
Free
Grand Canyon Caverns Campground
A private, slightly worn roadside complex on Route 66 where a motel, a restaurant, an RV park and a hillside of tent sites sit on top of a cavern you reach by a 200-foot elevator ride. The campground is a means to an end: it is level, cheap for what it is, and the only place to sleep for 25 miles in either direction. The cavern tour is the reason to stop, and it is a genuinely strange one, complete with Cold War fallout-shelter rations still stacked underground.
RV sites with water and electric $46.95 per night; tent and dry sites $22 per night per tent; cavern tours extra ($25.95 to $35.95 for adults on the two walking tours)
Katherine Landing Campground
The biggest and best-equipped campground on Lake Mohave: 173 landscaped, shaded sites with concrete tables and fire rings, flush restrooms, hot showers, laundry nearby, a dump station, and a full marina with an eight-lane ramp, rentals, a store, a bar and grill and a 51-room lodge a short walk away. It is run by a concessioner, costs $30 a night on top of the park entrance fee, and is first come, first served. In January it is sweaters and bass boats; in July it is 110 degrees and jet skis.
$30 per night ($15 with a Senior or Access pass, or a military pass); RV park with full hookups $55 per night; plus the Lake Mead entrance fee of $25 per vehicle for 1 to 7 days
Packsaddle Campground, Cerbat Mountains
The free, walk-in sibling of Windy Point: a BLM recreation site at about 6,000 feet on the crest of the Cerbat Mountains, with a vault toilet, a few picnic areas and dispersed campsites tucked among big granite boulders in pinyon and juniper. It is nine dirt miles up Big Wash Road from US 93, high clearance recommended, no water, no fee, and almost never full.
Free
Windy Point Campground, Cerbat Mountains
A small BLM campground on the spine of the Cerbat Mountains at about 6,100 feet, in pinyon pine and juniper, with a vault toilet, tables, grills, rock fire rings and views west to the Black Mountains and east toward the Hualapais. It costs $8 and nobody reserves it. The price of admission is Big Wash Road: 11 miles of graded dirt that the BLM says wants high clearance and no travel trailers.
$8 per night per site
Temple Bar Campground
The Park Service's one campground on the Arizona side of Lake Mead, at the end of a 26-mile paved road from US 93: 71 paved sites with tables, fire rings, water spigots and flush restrooms under palms, oleanders and cottonwoods, next to a concession marina with rentals, fuel, a store and a seasonal cafe. The low-water years closed launch ramps all over the lake; Temple Bar's is open on a concession-run mat with the lowest minimum elevation of any ramp on Lake Mead. It is remote, dark at night and $20.
$20 per night ($10 with a Senior or Access pass), plus the Lake Mead entrance fee of $25 per vehicle for 1 to 7 days
Boulder Beach Campground
The Park Service's main Lake Mead campground and the one closest to the Hoover Dam: 135 paved sites in a grove of palms, oleanders and mature cottonwoods that make it feel more like an oasis than a desert parking lot, with lake views from many sites, flush restrooms, water spigots and a dump station, but no showers or hookups. The 30-plus-mile paved River Mountains Loop Trail runs past the gate. It is $20 a night on recreation.gov, and in 2026 two of its loops are closed for the summer.
$20 per night ($10 with a Senior or Access pass); group sites $80; plus the Lake Mead entrance fee of $25 per vehicle for 1 to 7 days
Cottonwood Cove Campground
The Nevada side's answer to Katherine Landing, smaller and sandier: a paved, shaded Park Service campground of roughly 45 no-hookup sites next to a 75-site full-hookup RV park, a motel on the beach, a cafe, a store, a six-lane launch ramp and a marina that rents everything up to houseboats, at the end of 14 miles of empty highway from Searchlight. Since 2024 the concessioner runs the campground too, so it is not on recreation.gov. The lower loop, the owner's second pin, sits closest to the water.
Camping fee set by the concessioner (call 702-297-1464 or 877-262-8212 for current rates), plus the Lake Mead entrance fee of $25 per vehicle for 1 to 7 days
Mid Hills Campground, Mojave National Preserve
The high camp of Mojave National Preserve: 25 sites at 5,600 feet in a saddle between the New York and Providence mountains, half of them still shaded by pinyon pine and juniper and half in the ghost forest the 2005 Hackberry Complex Fire left behind. Vault toilets, tables, fire rings, no water, $20 on recreation.gov. The unpaved, steep access road keeps big RVs out and keeps the campground quiet, and the Mid Hills to Hole-in-the-Wall Trail leaves from the campground for eight miles of washes and cactus.
$20 per night; no entrance fee for Mojave National Preserve
Echo Bay Campground
The northernmost campground on Lake Mead, five miles off Northshore Road on the Overton Arm: paved sites with tables and fire rings under palms and cottonwoods, flush restrooms, spigots and a dump station, run by the Park Service at $20 on recreation.gov. The developed area around it has shrunk with the lake. The marina moved away years ago, one campground loop is fenced off, only about 34 sites are bookable, and the launch ramp has been under construction through 2026 to chase the water down. What is left is quiet, dark and ten minutes from Valley of Fire.
$20 per night ($10 with a Senior or Access pass), plus the Lake Mead entrance fee of $25 per vehicle for 1 to 7 days
BLM dispersed camping near Nipton
The pin Google Maps labels only 'BLM campground' north of Nipton is Clark Mountain Camp, a primitive BLM site at about 6,100 feet on the southern slope of the Clark Mountain Range, five rough miles north of I-15 between the Nipton Road exit and Mountain Pass. It is a parking area, several picnic tables and a two-sided pit grill in pinyon and juniper, inside the Clark Mountain Area of Critical Environmental Concern, with a 14-day limit and no fee, no water and no toilet. Above it rises 7,929-foot Clark Mountain, the high point of Mojave National Preserve.
Free
Three to three and a half hours southwest · 3 places
Yuma and the dunes
Free camping on the lower Colorado and the Imperial Sand Dunes just over the California line: the snowbird circuit, best from November to March.
Ogilby Road BLM camping
Ogilby Road runs north from I-8 between the Imperial Sand Dunes and the Cargo Muchacho Mountains, and the BLM desert on its east side is one of the big free winter camps of the Southwest: hundreds of acres of hard gravel flats reached by a few dirt tracks, with 14 days free in any 28, no facilities whatsoever, and a dozen to a hundred rigs spread out depending on the month. The west side of the road is in the dunes recreation area and needs a paid permit in season. Bring water, expect wind and the Union Pacific all night, and visit the Tumco ghost town up the road.
Free on the east side of Ogilby Road; the west side is inside the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, where a dunes permit ($55 a week in advance, $70 on site, $185 a season) is required October 1 to April 15
Mittry Lake Wildlife Area free camping
Mittry Lake is 600 acres of shallow, cattail-fringed water in the Colorado River floodplain between Laguna and Imperial dams, surrounded by 2,400 acres of marsh and desert that the BLM, Arizona Game and Fish and Reclamation manage together as a wildlife area. You may camp free in the dirt pullouts and lots along the lake road, now for 14 days in any 28, with a vault toilet and a three-lane boat ramp as the only facilities. The bass fishing is good, the birding is better, the road is washboard, and the weekends belong to Yuma.
Free; no permit, no fee
Gecko Campground, Imperial Sand Dunes
Gecko is the biggest of the BLM's campgrounds at the Imperial Sand Dunes, two paved loops of pads along the western edge of the Algodones Dunes where the sand rises 300 feet above the creosote. It has vault toilets, trash collection and nothing else: no water, no hookups, no dump, no shade. A dunes permit is required from October through mid-April, and on the big holiday weekends the campground and the flats around it become a temporary city of RVs, trailers and engines that never stop. In summer it is empty and lethal. This is a motorsport destination that happens to allow tents.
Imperial Sand Dunes permit required October 1 to April 15: $55 per week bought in advance at isdpermits.net, $70 per week on site, $185 for the season; free the rest of the year
Five to six hours northeast · 5 places
Southeastern Utah
Bears Ears and the Abajo Mountains above Monticello and Blanding. Not a Scottsdale weekend, but the camps people pass through on the way to the canyon country.
Devils Canyon Campground
Devils Canyon is the Manti-La Sal National Forest's workhorse campground: 42 single sites in pinyon, juniper and ponderosa at about 7,400 feet, a quarter mile off US 191 halfway between Blanding and Monticello, with paved spurs, vault toilets, seasonal water and a $20 fee on recreation.gov. It is not spectacular and not quiet (the highway hums), but it is the one Abajo-area campground you can reach with any vehicle in any weather, and the one with sites built for wheelchairs. Do not confuse it with Devils Garden in Arches, which the Forest Service has to say on its own page.
$20 per night for a single site; interagency Senior and Access passes take half off
Comb Wash dispersed camping (Arch Canyon)
Comb Wash is the broad sandy valley on the west side of Comb Ridge, the 80-mile sandstone fin that walls off Cedar Mesa, and the flat at the mouth of Arch Canyon, 2.5 miles up a graded dirt road from UT 95, is the area's established free camping spot: a scatter of used sites in the cottonwoods with a BLM vault toilet, a trail register and nothing else. Arch Canyon runs 12 miles north from here, with cliff dwellings, arches and running water. On July 13, 2026 the White House cut Bears Ears from 1.36 million acres to 121,096; the Arch Canyon and Comb Ridge area stayed inside the shrunken Shash Jáa Unit, so the rules here have not changed yet, but the fight over this country is far from over.
Free; no fee, pass or permit to camp at the canyon mouth as of October 2026. The BLM has said it plans a free permit system for Arch Canyon; confirm with the Monticello Field Office
Dalton Springs Campground, Abajo Mountains
Dalton Springs is the first campground on the paved road up the Abajos from Monticello: 16 first-come, first-served sites in a grove of aspen and Gambel oak at 8,200 feet, with seasonal water, vault toilets, tables and fire rings, for $20 a night. It is the simplest of the four Manti-La Sal campgrounds on the mountain, with no reservations, no group sites and no fuss, and because it is five minutes from town it is where you end up when Buckboard's groups have taken the top of the hill. Mule deer walk through most evenings; black bears come through some nights.
$20 per night for a single site
Nizhoni Campground, Abajo Mountains
Nizhoni is the Forest Service campground on the Blanding side of the Abajo Mountains, 21 single sites and two 50-person group areas in Gambel oak and ponderosa at 7,800 feet, with seasonal water, vault toilets and gravel spurs, for $20 a night on recreation.gov. It sits on the Abajo Loop scenic backway about 10 miles of mostly gravel road above town, which is far enough to keep it half-empty most of the summer while Cedar Mesa and Natural Bridges bake below. The name is Navajo for 'beautiful,' and the view south over Comb Ridge toward Monument Valley earns it.
$20 per night for a single site; $50 per night for either of two group sites (up to 50 people)
Buckboard Campground, Abajo Mountains
Buckboard is the highest of the Abajo campgrounds, 10 single sites and two 50-person group sites in aspen and Gambel oak at 8,900 feet, six paved miles up the Blue Mountain road from Monticello. It has seasonal water, two vault toilets, fire rings and a $20 fee on recreation.gov, and the group sites are why most people know it. Summer days are 75 to 85, nights 50 to 60, and the Robertson Pasture and Spring Creek trails leave from nearby. The season is short, the mountain is quiet, and the stars are absurd.
$20 per night for a single site; $50 per night for a group site (up to 50 people)
Nothing matches — the desert is quiet. Clear a filter or try a different word.
No drive at all
The trails inside the city line
Scottsdale has more than 200 miles of trail of its own, most of it in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. Those trailheads have their own guides on the parks page; the ranked list is the place to start.
- Brown's Ranch Rock Formations (Cathedral Rock, the Amphitheater, Balanced Rock, Brown's Mountain)
- Brown's Ranch Trailhead
- Camelback Mountain: Cholla Trail
- Camelback Mountain: Echo Canyon Trail
- Drinkwater Peak
- East End (McDowell Mountains high point)
- Fraesfield Trailhead
- Gateway Trailhead & Gateway Loop
- Granite Mountain Trailhead
- Lost Dog Wash Trailhead
- Marcus Landslide Trail
- McDowell Mountain Regional Park
- McDowell Sonoran Preserve
- Papago Park & Hole-in-the-Rock
- Pima & Dynamite Trailhead
- Pinnacle Peak Park
- Quartz Trailhead & Quartz Trail
- Reach 11 Recreation Area
- Sunrise Trailhead & Sunrise Peak
- Thompson Peak (summit via Bell Pass)
- Tom's Thumb Trailhead & Trail
- Windgate Pass–Bell Pass Loop
Fees, seasons and site counts change with the agency’s budget and the fire year. Each guide shows the date its facts were last checked; confirm with the Forest Service, the park or recreation.gov before you drive two hours on one of them.