What is Alderwood Campground?
Haigler Creek comes off the Mogollon Rim south of Colcord Mountain and drops through a canyon of alder, sycamore and ponderosa into the Hellsgate Wilderness. Along the way Forest Road 200 follows it, and the Forest Service built two small camps on the creek: Haigler Canyon, the one with several sites and a day-use area, and, half a mile down a spur called FR 202A, Alderwood, which by every description is a single site: one picnic table, one fire ring, one vault toilet, and the creek a few steps away at about 5,200 feet. It is free, there is no water, and the trailer limit is 16 feet, which is a polite way of saying tents and truck campers.
The honest caveat is that Alderwood has disappeared from the Tonto National Forest’s current website, which does list Haigler Canyon as open, free and year-round on the same roads. That may mean a missing web page or a site the district stopped maintaining. The Payson Ranger District, (928) 474-7900, administers this country now that the Young office is closed, and a call before you go is worth it. It is a camp for one couple or one small family with a high-clearance vehicle, a filter and a plan B; it is not for groups, trailers or anyone who needs to know in advance that a site will be there.
What you get, if the spur is open and nobody beat you to it, is a trout creek to yourself under big trees with a wilderness boundary a short walk downstream. What you do not get is water, a second site, a paved road or any certainty.
How to camp Alderwood right
Pay nothing, call first. No fee, no reservation, no Tonto Pass needed here. Groups over 75 need a district permit. Call the Payson Ranger District before you drive out, because the site is unlisted and the district can tell you whether the spur is open.
Get there. SR 87, the Beeline, to Payson, then SR 260 east about 24 miles to Colcord Road (FR 291). Turn right, follow it 3 miles to FR 200, and take FR 200 about 6 miles, past the Haigler Canyon sites, to FR 202A on the right; the Alderwood spur is about half a mile. About 2 hours 40 minutes from Old Town, the last 10 miles on dirt. From Young, it is 3 miles north on SR 288 to FR 200, then 9 miles west. Go in on Colcord Road rather than up from Young; it is the shorter dirt and the same road the Forest Service gives for Haigler Canyon. Both forest roads are unpaved, narrow in places and slick when wet; the Forest Service advises four-wheel drive or chains after rain or snow, and a high-clearance vehicle is the realistic minimum for the spur.
Pick the window. May through October. Late May and early June, before the monsoon muddies the road and after the creek has settled from snowmelt, is the best week; late October, when the alders turn, is the other. July and August storms on the Rim bring the creek up fast.
Have a plan B. If the site is taken, Haigler Canyon a mile or two back has room, tables, toilets and the same price. Take FR 202A only if you are set on solitude, because if someone is already at Alderwood there is nowhere else to park, and backing a trailer out of that spur is a bad hour.
Water. None provided. Filter the creek or carry a gallon a day per person.
Camp above the creek. Haigler Creek drains the Rim, and a storm miles away can bring it up in minutes. Pitch well above the high-water line and read the forecast for the Rim, not just for the canyon; the flash flood entry explains why.
Fire and bears. The Tonto is usually under fire restrictions by June; check before you plan on the ring. Black bears work these canyons; food and trash stay in the vehicle every night.
Fish. Rainbow trout are stocked in the warm months and some wild fish hold over; an Arizona license is required, and the water downstream into the wilderness is the prettier stretch.
Dogs. Allowed, leashed around the site and under control on the creek.
Skip it if you want a campground with more than one site that you know is open. Colcord Ridge is the free pine camp at the top of Young Road, when it is not closed for restoration; Upper Canyon Creek is the free trout-creek alternative on FR 33; Valentine Ridge and Airplane Flats are the other small camps on this side of the Rim.
One table on a creek named for a ranch
The canyons below the Rim were Apache hunting ground from the 1500s, after the Salado farmers who had lived along the Salt to the south were gone by about 1400. Ranchers and miners of European descent pushed the Apache out in the 1870s, and the valley the creek drains toward, Pleasant Valley, filled with cattle and then with sheep. What followed was the deadliest range feud in American history. The Pleasant Valley War between the Graham and Tewksbury families ran from 1882 to 1892 and killed somewhere between 35 and 50 people; its graves are in the Young cemetery and the Perkins Store where two men were shot in September 1887 still stands. That month, Sheriff William Mulvenon’s posse from Prescott stopped at the Haigler ranch on the north side of the valley on its way to the Perkins Store shootout. The ranch is gone, and the creek, the canyon and the campground down the road have kept the family’s name. Zane Grey turned the feud into To the Last Man in 1921.
The federal government arrived for the water. The Tonto Forest Reserve was proclaimed on October 3, 1905, to protect the Salt watershed above the Roosevelt Dam then being built, and became the Tonto National Forest in 1907; the Pleasant Valley Ranger District was run from Young for most of the century since. The country downstream acquired one more story in 1927, when the pilot Martin Jensen crash-landed in a box canyon of what is now the Hellsgate Wilderness with Leo, the MGM lion, in the back of his plane. Both survived; the canyon became Leo Canyon, and an aircraft enthusiast lifted the wreck out by helicopter in 1991.
Young stayed remote. It did not get outside electric power until 1965, and the roads to it, FR 512 north to SR 260 and SR 288 south toward Roosevelt, are still partly unpaved. The Forest Service built its small camps on Haigler Creek in the plain style of the mid-century: a few tables, a toilet and a fire ring on the flats where FR 200 touches the water, with Alderwood the smallest of them at the end of its own spur. The agency does not publish the year, and the single-site layout suggests it was never meant to be more than a fishing camp. In 1984 Congress created the Hellsgate Wilderness, 37,440 acres along Tonto and Haigler creeks, and the boundary runs a short walk downstream of the Alderwood table.
The last chapter is one of retreat. The Young office closed and the Payson Ranger District took over administration of Pleasant Valley. In 2024 the district issued a five-year occupancy order closing creekside camps elsewhere that had been used to death, and somewhere in the same period Alderwood dropped off the Forest Service’s website while Haigler Canyon stayed listed as open, free and year-round. Whether that means a site quietly abandoned or a web page never rebuilt, nobody we found could say.
Why it matters
Alderwood is the Tonto at its most minimal: a creek with a name from a range war, a single table the Forest Service may or may not still own up to, and a wilderness boundary a few hundred yards away. It explains how much of the national forest’s recreation was built, one fishing camp at a time, and how quietly it can be let go. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is honest rather than enthusiastic. Go only with a high-clearance vehicle, a filter and a plan B at Haigler Canyon; go in late May or late October; call Payson first; and if the table is there and empty, you will have a trout creek to yourself for the price of nothing.