What is Airplane Flat Campground?
Canyon Creek is born at a spring under the Mogollon Rim and runs south through a long, narrow valley of ponderosa and meadow toward the Fort Apache Reservation, and for most of its length it is a wild-trout stream that Arizona anglers talk about quietly. Airplane Flat is the Forest Service campground on its lower reach, a loop of sites in an open stand of mature pines at 6,600 feet with picnic tables, fire rings and vault toilets that get pumped once a week. There is no water, no host, no fee, and no trailer over 16 feet.
It is quieter and rougher than Upper Canyon Creek a few miles upstream near the hatchery, and it attracts a particular crowd: fly fishers working the pocket water below the OW Ranch, where the regulations are flies and lures only, and hunters in the fall. Elk and turkey feed in the meadows at dusk, Abert’s squirrels work the pines, and black bears know what a cooler is. In winter the temperature falls into the teens and the roads are left to the snow; the season is April through October.
What you get is a free, shaded site on one of the Rim’s best small trout streams, with a dozen or so neighbors at most and elk in the meadow. What you do not get is water, trash service, a road you can trust after rain, a trailer longer than a pickup bed, or a night when the cooler can stay on the table.
How to camp at Airplane Flat right
Pay nothing, follow the rules. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit, trailers under 16 feet, no horses or pack animals, quiet hours 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. with generators off. Groups over 75 need a permit from the district office, (928) 474-7900.
Get there. SR 87, the Beeline, to Payson, then SR 260 east about 33 miles, past Christopher Creek and up onto the plateau, to the Young Road (FR 512) on the right. Go south 3 miles to Forest Road 33, turn left, and follow it 4.5 miles east to the campground. About 2 hours 40 minutes from Old Town. Both forest roads are unpaved; FR 512 is graded, FR 33 is narrower and rockier, and the Forest Service advises four-wheel drive or chains after heavy rain or snow. From Young it is 23 miles north on SR 288/FR 512 to the FR 33 turnoff. The loop has room for a dozen or so vehicles and fills on summer weekends. Carry a saw and a shovel in the vehicle; a single storm can put a tree across the road.
Pick the season. Arrive on a weekday in late May or June before the monsoon muddies FR 33, or in late September when the elk are bugling and the campground is nearly empty. Monsoon afternoons flood the road dips and bring lightning to the ridges; late spring and early fall are the dry windows.
Water and trash. None of either. Carry a gallon a day and take every scrap home; toilets are serviced weekly at best. Canyon Creek can be filtered in a pinch.
Pick a site. The sites at the far end of the loop are flattest and farthest from the road dust.
Bears. Food, coolers and trash in a hard-sided vehicle every night, not the tent and not the cooler on the table. This is the Forest Service’s first warning on its own page, and it is earned.
Fire. The Tonto is usually under restrictions by June. Bring a stove and check before you count on a campfire.
Fish it properly. Come for the fishing or do not come; Canyon Creek is a small, brushy, technical stream that rewards a short rod and patience. Arizona license required; flies and lures only south of the OW Ranch; check Game and Fish for current limits.
Dogs. Allowed; keep them close at dusk when the elk and the bears move.
Skip it if you need water or a longer trailer, or the loop is full. Upper Canyon Creek a few miles up FR 33 toward the fish hatchery has more sites, Valentine Ridge and Colcord Ridge are the other small Young Road campgrounds, and the dispersed pullouts along FR 33 and the Rim Road are legal under the usual rules.
A trout stream between a feud and a fire
Canyon Creek runs about 31 miles from its spring under the Rim south to the Salt, and the lower two thirds are on the Fort Apache Reservation, which is the first thing to understand about this valley: it stayed Apache longer than most of the Rim country and still is, a few miles downstream of the campground. The White Mountain Apache hold the river below; the Tonto Apache held the country west toward Payson until the Army removed them in 1875.
The settlers who came in behind them fought each other. In Pleasant Valley, 20 miles south around what is now Young, the Pleasant Valley War ran from 1882 to 1892 between the Tewksbury family, who turned from cattle to sheep, and the Graham family and the cattlemen who sided with them, with hired guns and lawmen drawn in on both sides. Its worst years were 1886 and 1887; in September 1887 a sheriff’s posse killed John Graham and Charles Blevins in a shootout at the Perkins Store, which still stands in Young as a museum. Between 35 and 50 people died, the highest toll of any range feud in American history, and Tom Horn, the scout who later hanged in Wyoming, was in it somewhere, though nobody has settled for whom. The last killing was Tom Graham’s, shot in Tempe on August 2, 1892. Zane Grey turned the feud into To the Last Man in 1921, and the Rim country under Canyon Creek became the setting of a national myth about Arizona.
The campground’s own story is thinner. Its name, by the only account I found, comes from a plane that came down on the flat; the Forest Service’s pages do not say when, and I could not find the date. The Forest Service laid out the campground as a small no-fee site under the big pines, with the trout stream as the draw and the OW Ranch, the old cattle outfit downstream, as the dividing line for the flies-and-lures rule; the year it opened is not recorded on the agency’s pages either. The Young Road, FR 512 and SR 288, is still mostly unpaved, which is why the valley stayed quiet while the SR 260 corridor filled.
The fire nearly ended it. The Rodeo Fire was set near the rodeo grounds at Cibecue on the reservation on June 18, 2002, by a seasonal firefighter hoping for work; the Chediski Fire started two days later near Chediski Peak and the two merged into 468,000 acres, the largest wildfire in Arizona’s history until the Wallow Fire of 2011, burning toward Show Low, Heber-Overgaard and the Rim communities before it was controlled on July 7. Canyon Creek’s watershed sits between the two ignition points, and the valley has lived with the fire’s aftermath, in flood-scoured channels and standing dead timber on the ridges, ever since. The arsonist got ten years.
What has not changed is the creek. Game and Fish manages it as a wild-trout stream, the pocket water below the OW Ranch is still flies and lures, and the bears still know what a cooler is.
Why it matters
Airplane Flat is the Rim country without the highway: a free campground on an Apache river where the settlers’ bloodiest feud was fought and the state’s biggest fire began, reached by dirt roads the county never paved. It explains why the Young Road valleys feel a century behind SR 260 and why that is the point of them. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is specific. If you fish, have a truck and can bring your own water and bear discipline, this is a free night on one of the best small trout streams in the state, two hours and forty minutes from Old Town; if you want a creek to play in and a road you can trust, Christopher Creek and the SR 260 campgrounds are the right answer and this one is not.