What is Aspen Campground?
Aspen is the Rim’s flagship campground and it behaves like one. 136 sites spread through four loops on the hill above Woods Canyon Lake, alternating open meadow and ponderosa woods so that half the campground gets morning sun and elk and the other half gets shade. Every site has a table and a fire ring with a grill, the loop roads are paved, there is potable water at spigots, there are nine vault toilets with several newer accessible ones, and hosts sell firewood and run the kiosk. Forest Service rangers give talks on summer weekends at an amphitheater. The lake, its loop trail and the store with boat and kayak rentals are a short walk down the hill.
It is $35 a night, which makes it the most expensive Forest Service campground on the Rim, and it is sold out for every summer weekend the moment the six-month window opens. The Forest Service keeps 55 sites first come, first served, assigned at the kiosk, which is the only reason a spontaneous Thursday trip is possible. The elevation is a little under the lake’s 7,510 feet, call it 7,500, which means July highs in the 80s and nights in the 40s. Bears, skunks, deer and elk all walk the loops; the Forest Service lists them as common visitors rather than possibilities.
It is for families who want a lake, a store, a ranger program and a paved loop, and who are willing to plan in January for July. What you get is the biggest, best-run campground on the Mogollon Rim, with water and a lake you can walk to. What you do not get is a shower, a hookup, a quiet loop in July, or a site without a plan.
How to camp Aspen right
Book the minute the window opens. Open recreation.gov exactly six months before your Friday arrival at 8 a.m. Arizona time, because that is when the summer weekends go, and have a second-choice loop ready. $35 a night for up to eight people and one vehicle, $12 per extra vehicle, collected at the kiosk. If you missed the window, arrive Thursday before noon and try the 55 first-come sites, which the host assigns at the kiosk, not the website. From late April to mid-May the whole campground is walk-in only while the season gets going.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, 75 miles to Payson. Turn east on SR 260 and drive about 31 miles, up the long grade to the top of the Rim. Across from the Mogollon Rim Visitor Center turn left on Forest Road 300 and follow the pavement about 5 miles; turn right on Forest Road 105, the unsigned paved road toward Woods Canyon Lake, and the campground entrance is about a mile down on the left. Figure about 140 minutes from Old Town. Everything is paved, which is part of why everyone comes. FR 300 is gated by snow in winter and generally reopens in April.
Pick the season. May 1 to October 31, conditions permitting. June and September are the best months. From early July through mid-September a monsoon thunderstorm rolls through most afternoons, and the Rim edge is where lightning lands; be back from the vista trails by early afternoon. Pack a real jacket and a warm sleeping bag in every month; July nights here are in the 40s.
Pick the loop. The meadow loops are sunnier and see more elk; the wooded loops are shadier and closer to the lake path. Trailers to 32 feet on paved loop roads; no hookups; quiet generators only.
Water and the rest. Potable water on site. Vault toilets. No showers; Canyon Point, 10 miles east, has them. The lake dump station charges a fee.
Bears. Not a formality here. Bring the routine you would use in the Sierra: coolers and all food in the vehicle at night and whenever you leave camp, trash in the bins, nothing scented in the tent. A bear that gets a cooler here gets relocated or killed. Horses and pack animals are not allowed.
The lake. A short trail drops to the shore, the loop trail around the lake and the store, which rents rowboats and kayaks and sells licenses, groceries and firewood. Electric motors only. Rainbow and tiger trout are stocked April through September.
Dogs. Leashed and attended; aggressive or noisy dogs get asked to leave.
Skip it if price or competition puts you off. Mogollon is $18 and two miles away with pull-off sites; Rim Campground sits on the edge itself; and Sinkhole at Willow Springs Lake is the same idea at the next lake east. If you want 136 neighbors, hosts and a ranger program, this is the one.
A lake built for fishing on a rim built for war
The Rim was a frontier before it was a resort. The 2,000-foot escarpment of Kaibab limestone and Coconino sandstone that drops away a mile south of the campground is the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau and, for most of history, the edge of Apache country: Western Apache bands summered on the plateau above and wintered in the basins below, and the canyons that drop toward Chevelon Creek were their hunting ground. The Army came to end that. Between 1872 and 1874, during General George Crook’s campaigns, his troops built a military road along the top of the Rim between Fort Apache and Camp Verde, a supply line that let the cavalry move above the Apache strongholds rather than through them. Forest Road 300, the Rim Road you drive from SR 260 to the campground turnoff, follows the Crook Trail’s line and carries its name on signs along the way.
The forest came next. The federal government created the Sitgreaves National Forest in 1908 out of the old Black Mesa Forest Reserve, taking in the Rim top, and the Apache National Forest to the east the same year; the two were merged under one supervisor in Springerville in 1974, which is why the sign at the kiosk says Apache-Sitgreaves. For its first half century the Rim top was timber and summer range, reached by the Crook road and a few logging tracks, with no lake anywhere on it. Woods Canyon was a dry canyon with a creek in it.
The lake is a mid-century invention, and the dam that made it is the one date we could not fix from a source we trust, so we will say the 1950s. An earthen dam across Chevelon Creek in Woods Canyon impounded 55 acres of water 40 feet deep at the maximum, the first and most accessible of what became the Rim Lakes, a chain of small reservoirs built for recreation and fishing rather than for any city’s tap. Willow Springs, Bear Canyon, Knoll and the others followed. The Forest Service laid out campgrounds on the rim above the new lake, and Aspen, with its four loops, paved roads, water system and amphitheater, grew through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s into the largest of them as Woods Canyon Lake became the Valley’s default mountain weekend. The store and marina on the shore went to a concessionaire; the stocking truck from Arizona Game and Fish became a weekly summer event.
Fire has twice come close. The Dude Fire of 1990 burned below the Rim to the west; the Rodeo-Chediski Fire, started on June 18, 2002, burned about 470,000 acres of the Rim country to the east, the largest fire in Arizona to that date, and emptied Show Low and Heber-Overgaard before it stopped short of the Rim Lakes. The burn is still visible from the Rim Road east of the campground turnoff, and it is the reason the Apache-Sitgreaves takes its fire restrictions and its bear-and-food rules as seriously as it does. The modern layer is administrative: reservations moved to recreation.gov with a six-month window in the 2010s, summer weekends began selling out the morning they opened, and the Forest Service held back 55 sites for the people who show up on a Thursday.
Why it matters
Aspen is the Rim’s history stacked in one campground: a military road from the Apache wars underfoot, a national forest drawn in 1908, a lake built in the fifties for no purpose but pleasure, and a reservation system that now rations the result. It explains why the Rim is the Valley’s mountain and not Flagstaff: two hours, pavement to the tent, a lake, a store and 30 degrees of relief. For a Scottsdale family the verdict is the one the website enforces. Book at 8 a.m. six months out, put the cooler in the car every night, and be off the Rim edge before the clouds build.