What is Arcadia Campground?
The Swift Trail leaves the cotton fields south of Safford at about 3,000 feet and, within a dozen miles, has climbed into ponderosa pine. Arcadia is the campground at that transition: 19 sites at 6,770 feet where Wet Canyon comes down out of the Pinaleños, set in pine, Gambel oak and bigtooth maple along a creek bed that runs in spring and after storms. Each site has a table and fire ring; the vault toilets are accessible; there is drinking water from a seasonal system; a reservable group site operates April through October. It is the second campground on the road and the first worth stopping at, and because it sits well below the end of the pavement, it is the one Mount Graham campground you can reach with a modest trailer and no dust.
The Arcadia National Recreation Trail #328 leaves from near the campground and climbs about 5 miles and 2,300 feet through the burn scars and surviving forest to Shannon Campground at 9,025 feet, with a spur to Heliograph Peak and its lookout. Most campers do the first mile or two for the morning shade and the views back down to the Gila valley. Above Arcadia, the Swift Trail keeps climbing past the Noon Creek and Wet Canyon picnic areas to the dirt, Shannon, the Columbine Visitor Center and finally Riggs Flat Lake, which is the Mount Graham most people have in mind; Arcadia is the gentler version, 2,000 feet lower and an hour closer.
What you get is pavement to a pine campground with water, a toilet that works for a wheelchair and a real trail from the loop, for $20 and no reservation. What you do not get is the alpine Mount Graham, a hookup, a guarantee the water is on, or a site when the Safford families fill it on a summer Friday.
How to camp Arcadia right
Pay on site. $20 a night single, $40 double, first come, first served, cash or check at the tube, or buy a pass online; pass discounts apply only to the site the pass holder occupies. Day use is $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week. Two vehicles and ten people per site, 14-day limit. Only the group site reserves, and only April 1 to November 1.
Get there. US 60 east through Superior, Miami and Globe, then US 70 east to Safford, about 165 miles; 8 miles south on US 191 to the AZ 366 turnoff; then 11.6 miles up the Swift Trail to the campground entrance on the right. About 205 minutes from Old Town, every mile paved. The Swift Trail is a mountain road from the start, with hairpins and grades that the Forest Service says trouble vehicles over 22 feet; take it slowly and watch for cyclists. Sites have individual pull-ins and there is a small lot at the group area. Safford has the last groceries and gas.
Pick the season. Year-round when AZ 366 is open; the road closes below the campground in heavy snow and above it every winter. April through October is the real season, with fire restrictions likely in May and June and afternoon lightning on the mountain from July into September.
Water. Potable, seasonal; the Forest Service listed the system as seasonal with winter closures in its most recent update, and it has been off well into spring. Confirm before you count on it and carry a backup.
Pick the site for the forecast. The sites along the creek bed are the shady ones and the ones to avoid if storms are forecast, because Wet Canyon earns its name; the upper sites are sunnier and drier. Read the flash flood entry if the idea of a dry creek filling is new.
Vehicles. RVs to 22 feet, trailers under 21 feet, no hookups. Longer rigs struggle on the switchbacks both above and below camp.
Hike in the morning. The Arcadia Trail from camp has its first two miles of climbing in shade before nine; turn around at the switchbacks if you are not going all the way to Shannon, which is a 5-mile, 2,300-foot one-way grind through the 2017 burn.
Animals. Horses and pack stock are not allowed. Black bears live here; store food in bear-proof containers or a locked vehicle with the windows closed. Dogs on leash.
Skip it if you want the alpine Mount Graham; at 6,770 feet Arcadia is pleasant, not cold, in July, and Riggs Flat and its lake are 13 dirt miles higher. For the other sky-island campgrounds on the same long weekend, Rose Canyon on Mount Lemmon and Bonita Canyon in the Chiricahuas are the paved-road rivals, and Cochise Stronghold is the low, warm one. Pair Arcadia with a night at Riverview on the Gila and the drive earns itself.
A sacred mountain, a CCC winter camp and a telescope
Mount Graham is Dzil Nchaa Si’an, Big Seated Mountain, to the Western Apache, and it is not a figure of speech: the mountain figures in Apache origin stories, holds medicine plants and is the home of the Gaan, the mountain spirits, which is why the San Carlos Apache fought the observatory a century after they lost the mountain. The Pinaleños rise 7,000 feet above a Gila valley that Hohokam, Sobaipuri and then Apache people farmed, and the Army came to take it. Camp Grant, moved from the San Pedro to the mountain’s southwest foot as Fort Grant in 1872, was the base for campaigns against the Apache, and in the 1870s and 1880s Mormon and Anglo farmers settled the valley at Safford while the first wagon tracks climbed toward the mountain’s springs and timber.
The federal government took the mountain in 1902 as a forest reserve and in 1908 folded it into the Crook National Forest, later absorbed by the Coronado; T. T. Swift, the Coronado’s first supervisor, gave his name to the road that was slowly hacked up the east face. The road and the campgrounds you use are the work of the 1930s. The Civilian Conservation Corps ran camps on Mount Graham that followed the seasons, Treasure Park and Columbine high up in summer, Arcadia and Noon Creek low down in winter, and their crews built the Swift Trail’s major improvements, most of the mountain’s campgrounds and trails and the 99-foot lookout tower on Heliograph Peak that the Arcadia Trail still climbs to. The campground is on the ground of the CCC’s winter camp, which is why it is where it is: low enough to work in January, high enough for pines.
The state took over the road as State Route 366 in 1960, 6.3 miles at first and then 22 more to the Columbine Ranger Station, all gravel; the lower 21.7 miles were paved over the following decades and ADOT celebrated the last improvements on June 30, 1992. The upper 13 miles are graded dirt to this day and close every winter, which is the line that separates Arcadia from Riggs Flat. The Mount Graham red squirrel, a subspecies found nowhere else, was thought extinct in the 1950s, rediscovered in the 1970s and listed as endangered in 1987 with fewer than 400 animals. A year later, in 1988, Congress authorized the Mount Graham International Observatory on the summit over the objections of the Apache and the squirrel’s defenders, one of the bitterest public-land fights in Arizona’s history; the Large Binocular Telescope saw first light with one mirror on October 12, 2005 and with both on January 11, 2008.
Then the mountain burned, twice. The Nuttall Complex Fire of 2004 burned more than 30,000 acres and cost over $8.5 million before monsoon rain and 800 firefighters held it off the observatory and the cabins. On June 7, 2017 lightning struck chaparral above the Swift Trail and started the Frye Fire, which burned 48,443 acres, about 76 square miles, closed every campground and trail in the Pinaleños on June 19 and was pushed back from the telescopes in late June; the Swift Trail reopened that September. The squirrel population fell from 252 in 2016 to 35 in October 2017 and had climbed only to 67 by 2022. The burn scars and the surviving forest the Arcadia Trail climbs through are the Frye’s work, and the bear-proof storage rules in camp are partly the result of a mountain with less food on it.
Why it matters
Mount Graham is the sky island where every Arizona argument about public land has been had at once: a sacred mountain, a CCC road, an endangered squirrel, a university telescope and two of the biggest fires in the state’s southern ranges. Arcadia sits at the bottom of all of it, on the ground where the CCC wintered, at the exact elevation where the pavement still runs and the pines begin. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is practical: three and a half hours on pavement for a $20 pine site with water, no reservation and a real trail, the easiest Mount Graham there is, and the right first night before the dirt to Riggs Flat.