What is Alamo Lake State Park?
Alamo Lake is what happens when the Army Corps of Engineers dams a desert river for flood control and then has to do something with the water. The Flood Control Act of 1944 authorized the dam on the Bill Williams River to protect the lower Colorado; the Corps finished it in 1968 along with a campground, a ramp and a paved road from Wenden, and Arizona State Parks took over the shore in November 1969 while Game and Fish took the water. The lake’s size swings with runoff, which is part of why the fishing is so good: flooded brush, shallow structure, and bass and crappie that draw anglers from across the country.
The park sits at about 1,200 feet in bare, rocky Sonoran Desert, 4,900 acres of shore 37 miles from the nearest pavement that goes anywhere else. That isolation is the other attraction. The nearest city lights are 40 miles away, the sky is as dark as any developed campground in Arizona, and the park runs star parties through the winter. Wild burros, descendants of prospectors’ animals, graze through the campgrounds at night. Bald and golden eagles winter here. The camping is extensive: Campground A with basic sites, B with 42 mixed sites, C with 40 water-and-electric sites, F with 15 full hookups, the main campground with 19 full-hookup sites and no RV length limit, Cholla with 41 electric sites and its own ramp, and D and E for dry camping. Restrooms are in every loop, showers in A, C and the main campground, dump stations at Cholla and the main campground. Four air-conditioned cabins with bunks and porches overlook the lake.
What you get is hookups, hot showers and a store in a place with no town, no traffic and no light. What you do not get is groceries, reliable cell service, a beach, or a boat ramp you can count on in a dry year.
How to camp Alamo Lake right
Book, and pick the loop for your rig. Entrance $10 per vehicle with one person, $20 with two to four, $5 per bicycle. Camping $25 dry or non-electric, $40 water and electric, $50 full hookup, plus a $3.60 reservation fee; cabins $85 plus $5, up to 365 days ahead. Second vehicles pay $15 a night. Check-in is 2 p.m. for sites and 3 p.m. for cabins. C or the main campground for showers and power; D and E for tents and the OHV crowd, where the park asks riders to camp.
Get there, and fuel up in Salome. About 2 hours 50 minutes from Old Town. Take Loop 101 west to US 60 (Grand Avenue) and follow it northwest through Wickenburg, then west through Aguila and Salome to Wenden. Turn north on Alamo Road and drive 37 miles of paved two-lane across open desert to the park entrance. Salome has the last fuel and propane. The road is fine for any vehicle and trailer; watch for cattle and burros. The Hassayampa River Preserve at Wickenburg is the stop on the way.
Pick the season. Year-round, but October through April is the camping season and February through July the fishing season. Summer highs exceed 110 degrees, and only the cabins and hookup sites make sense. The Low Water ramp closes when the lake drops; check the park page before you tow.
Water and supplies. Potable water, flush restrooms and showers in the park. The store sells ice, bait, firewood and snacks, not groceries. Bring everything else, including more ice than you think.
Fish the brush. Largemouth, crappie, redear, catfish, bluegill and tilapia; Arizona license at 10 and older; the store sells minnows October through May. The flooded brush along the shore is where the fish are, which is why the lake’s level matters more than the weather.
Stay up. The Alamo Lake Star Party in November and the monthly dark-sky nights are the easiest way to look through a serious telescope in Arizona; see the stargazing note for the moon calendar. Even without a scope, the horizon here has no glow.
Burros, OHVs, dogs. Burros wander through camp at night; keep food in the vehicle and do not feed them. The surrounding BLM roads are an off-highway playground, so expect engine noise in C, D and E on winter weekends. Dogs on leash; two per cabin, declared at booking.
Skip it if three hours and no town is too much. Lake Pleasant has hookups an hour from Scottsdale; Burro Creek on US 93 is the BLM alternative with a creek and no lake.
A town at the bottom of a flood-control lake
The Bill Williams is a desert river, mostly dry and occasionally enormous, draining the Big Sandy and Santa Maria rivers out of the Yavapai uplands and running west through a gap in the mountains to the Colorado. Its valley is the old seam between the Yavapai to the east and the Mohave and other river peoples along the Colorado, and its name comes from Bill Williams, the mountain man who trapped it in the 1830s. For most of the nineteenth century the only reason to be here was ore. In the late 1890s Tom Rodgers founded Alamo Crossing at the best ford on the river as a base for prospectors working the Artillery Mountains. It never amounted to much: a five-stamp mill, a few stores, a post office that opened in 1899 and closed for good in 1918, and residents who mostly camped rather than lived. A manganese boom in the early 1950s brought it back for a few years, with the Mesa Manganese and neighbouring mines working until about 1954; the 1960 census counted 18 people at the crossing.
The river’s floods were the problem, and not for the people at the crossing. When the Bill Williams ran big it dumped into the Colorado just above Parker Dam, and the federal government had just spent two decades building dams and canals along that river. Congress authorized the Alamo Dam in the Flood Control Act of 1944, on the Chief of Engineers’ recommendation, to keep Bill Williams floods off the lower Colorado and, secondarily, to store water and provide recreation. The Army Corps of Engineers built it through the 1960s and finished it in 1968: an earthfill dam rising 283 feet from the streambed, with a reservoir that in a wet year reaches back 15 miles. The water covered Alamo Crossing, in places 80 feet deep, and the old town road still runs down into the lake. The Corps built a campground, picnic area, beach, restrooms, a boat ramp and a paved road 38 miles north from Wenden, and then looked for someone to run them.
Arizona State Parks had been looking at Corps reservoirs since its ten-year plan of 1958. Talks began in early 1963, with a joint inspection in October, and in April 1969 the Parks Board signed a management agreement with the Game and Fish Commission and a 25-year lease with the Corps: the state would run the shoreline facilities and Game and Fish the lake surface, a split that still holds. Alamo Lake State Park was dedicated in November 1969 with Wayne Perault as its first manager. It was, and is, the most remote unit in the system.
The fishing was an accident of hydrology. Unusually high flows in the 1970s and 1980s filled the lake far beyond what the Corps had expected, flooding the mesquite and palo verde along the old valley floor and giving largemouth bass and crappie the brushy structure they thrive in; the lake has been known to rise 11 feet in a night. Game and Fish stocked and managed it, the bass tournaments came, and the park grew from the Corps’ single campground into seven loops, hookups, two ramps, a store and four cabins. The state signed a new 25-year lease on September 1, 1997. The burros, descended from the prospectors’ animals, were here before any of it and have never left. The lake’s level still swings with the runoff, which is why the Low Water ramp has a name, and why the brush that makes the fishing is sometimes a hundred yards from the water.
Why it matters
Alamo explains a kind of Arizona lake that Scottsdale visitors rarely see: not a Salt River Project reservoir built for irrigation, but an Army Corps flood-control dam whose water is a by-product, run by a state park on a federal lease with a town at the bottom. It also explains why the bass are so good, which is runoff, not management. For a visitor the verdict is clear: it is too far for a night and exactly right for three, with hookups and hot showers in the darkest, quietest campground the state operates. Fill the tank in Salome, book C or the main loop, bring your own ice, and stay up late.