What are the Ashurst Lake Campgrounds?
Ashurst Lake is a round, shallow natural lake in open ponderosa country on Anderson Mesa at 7,132 feet, about 20 miles southeast of Flagstaff, and it has a quirk the other plateau lakes envy: it holds water through drought years when Mormon Lake is a meadow and Marshall Lake is a puddle. The springs that feed it are steadier than most, and a low Game and Fish dam finished in 1954 holds the result at about 230 acres. Arizona Game and Fish stocks it with trout, the 10-horsepower limit keeps the boats small, and the fishing from the dam and the west shore is steady from ice-out into June and again in the fall.
Two campgrounds share the shore. Ashurst Lake Campground has 25 sites by the main boat ramp on the west side; Forked Pine Campground, a mile farther around the lake on the same gravel road, has 24. Both are basic: picnic table, fire ring and grill at each site, potable water, vault toilets, a camp host in season, and room for tents, trailers and motorhomes up to 35 feet. No hookups, no showers, no dump station. The setting is the point: open sky, a lake you can walk to in a minute, elk in the meadows, and the San Francisco Peaks on the horizon.
What you get is a quiet, cheap fishing camp that is easier to book than anything on Lake Mary Road. What you do not get is shelter. Ashurst sits in a shallow bowl with nothing to the southwest, and from late morning until near sunset it blows; windsurfers drive up from the Valley for exactly this reason, and tents come down for it.
How to camp Ashurst Lake right
Book half, gamble on the rest. $27 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people at either campground; $10 for a second vehicle; day use $12 per vehicle from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fourteen sites at each campground are on recreation.gov and the rest are first come, first served, which on a June Friday means arriving by early afternoon. Senior and Access passes take half off the camping fee.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17, I-17 north to exit 339 (Lake Mary Road), then Lake Mary Road southeast 19 miles, past Lakeview and Pine Grove, to Forest Road 82E on the left. FR 82E is 4 miles of maintained gravel, fine for any car and most trailers, washboarded by August. Ashurst Lake Campground is at the end of the pavement’s memory; Forked Pine is a mile farther around the shore. About 2 hours 35 minutes from Old Town, all but the last 4 miles on pavement.
Pick the season. Early May to mid-October. The lake is at its best from ice-out through June and again in September. July and August afternoons bring lightning over open water, and this is not a place to be in a kayak when the sky turns; the monsoon manual applies at 7,000 feet as much as in the Valley. Once the host leaves in mid-October the water is shut off, only the toilet by the main ramp stays open, camping is free, and you are on your own. June nights still drop into the 30s.
Pick the site for wind. Forked Pine’s sites back into the trees and take the southwest blow better than Ashurst’s open loop. If you are in a trailer it matters less; if you are in a tent it is the whole trip.
Camp by the rules. Within a mile of the lake, camping is limited to the designated sites in the two loops; the old shoreline pull-offs are closed. Fires in the rings only, and the Coconino is usually under restrictions by June. Pack out trash in the shoulder season when the dumpsters are gone.
Fish early, paddle early. The wind comes up by ten and lies down near sunset. Trout hold along the dam and the west shore; the last hour of light is the best one. One electric motor or one gas motor of 10 horsepower or less per boat.
Dogs. On leash at all times. No horses or pack animals.
Skip it if a calm evening by the water is what you want. Dairy Springs in the trees above Mormon Lake is a better bet, and Marshall Lake is the free option when it has water. If you want trout and a boat, Ashurst wins.
The senator’s cabin a mile from the shore
Anderson Mesa is a basalt tableland pocked with shallow basins, and for a thousand years the basins that held water drew people. The Sinagua farmed the mesa in the 1100s and left pueblos and field houses around its lakes; the Hopi, Navajo and Western Apache used the same water holes for centuries after. When Americans arrived in the 1870s the mesa was open range with reliable springs, which in northern Arizona was wealth.
In 1878 William Henry Ashurst and his wife Sarah, who had come west from Nevada with a growing family, built a one-room cabin in a box canyon at Ashurst Springs, about a mile east of the lake that would carry their name. William trapped wild horses and ran sheep and was often away; Sarah cooked over the fire, made the children’s clothes and taught them to read. Prescott was a hundred miles off and the nearest neighbour thirty. The family summered at the cabin every year from 1878 to 1890 and wintered there until 1883, and gave up the place in 1893. Their second child, Henry Fountain Ashurst, born in a wagon near Winnemucca in 1874, was a small boy when they arrived. He went on to be elected in 1912 as one of Arizona’s first two United States senators and served until 1941, famous in Washington as the “silver-tongued orator of Congress” and at home as the man who grew up in a box canyon on Anderson Mesa. The cabin outlasted the ranch; in 1968 the Babbitt Land and Cattle Company, which by then owned the range, donated it to the Pioneer Arizona museum north of Phoenix, which hauled it off the mesa by cable tramway after a winter’s snow had snapped the ceiling beams. It stands there today. No source we found states outright that the lake was named for the family, but the cabin a mile away and the dates make the inference a safe one.
The lake itself was natural, which on the plateau is rare, and steadier than most because of its springs. Arizona Game and Fish made it a fishery on purpose: in 1954 the department finished a low earth dam, 12 feet high and 707 feet long, across Ashurst Run, raising the natural level and firming up about 230 acres of water. The lake has been stocked with rainbow trout ever since and picks up brook trout and the occasional northern pike. The dam is the reason the shore fishing is good: the deepest water is along it, and the trout cruise the drop-off at dusk.
Recreation followed in the Forest Service’s usual pattern. The Coconino built the two campgrounds and the ramp on the west and east shores sometime after the dam, in the decades when Lake Mary Road was paved and Flagstaff’s weekend traffic found the mesa; we could not pin the construction years from any source and will not guess. The 10-horsepower motor limit kept Ashurst out of the ski-boat era that made Upper Lake Mary loud, and the shallow bowl, open to every southwest wind, made it the plateau’s windsurfing lake instead. More recently the forest restricted camping within a mile of the water to the designated sites, closing the shoreline pull-offs that had worn the banks bare, and turned the loops over to a concessionaire with half the sites on recreation.gov.
What has not changed is the water. In the drought years of the 2000s and 2020s, when Mormon Lake went to grass and Marshall Lake to mud, Ashurst kept its trout. That is the whole case for the drive.
Why it matters
Ashurst is the plateau in miniature: a natural lake made reliable by a small dam, a ranch family whose name outlived the ranch, a Forest Service campground built for anglers and kept small on purpose, and weather that does the crowd control. It explains why the Flagstaff lakes feel different from the Rim lakes: older, emptier, built around fishing rather than boat ramps. For a Scottsdale visitor it is the easy trout camp when Lake Mary is booked, two and a half hours up I-17 with four miles of gravel at the end. Take the sheltered side, fish the dam at dusk, and tie everything down before you sleep.