What is Bear Canyon Lake?
Bear Canyon Lake is the Rim lake with a filter on it. Arizona Game and Fish built it, like the others, by damming a canyon on top of the Mogollon Rim, but this canyon is narrow and steep, so the lake is a long, deep sliver, about 60 surface acres and up to 50 feet deep, at 7,560 feet, and the only way to the water is a foot trail down from the parking areas above. No ramp, no dock, no store. Game and Fish stocks it with catchable rainbows about six times a year, motors are limited to electric, and the depth keeps the water cold and clean through August when shallower lakes struggle.
Around the canyon rim, among mixed conifer, oak and aspen, is the camping area: free, rustic, first come, first served, with fire rings, a few vault toilets, no water and no trash service. The Forest Service calls it partially developed and does not publish a site count. It is really a cluster of dispersed sites with toilets, and it is treated as undeveloped for fire restrictions, which matters in June.
What you get is a Rim lake and a Rim campsite for nothing, with far fewer people than Woods Canyon or Willow Springs a few miles east. What you do not get is a ramp, a tap, a trash can, a signal or a campfire in a dry June.
How to do Bear Canyon Lake right
Pay nothing, bring a license. No fee to fish, launch or camp, and no reservations. You need an Arizona fishing license. The 14-day stay limit and the forest’s dispersed-camping rules apply.
Get there. Take Loop 101 or Loop 202 to SR 87, the Beeline, to Payson, then SR 260 east about 30 miles up onto the Rim to the Rim Visitor Information Station. Directly across the highway, the gravel Rim Road (FR 300) heads west; follow it past the Woods Canyon Lake turnoff and watch for FR 89 heading north to the lake. The Forest Service puts the dirt at about 14 miles, and it is washboard, dust and the occasional rocky stretch, fine for a sedan in dry weather at 20 miles an hour, miserable in mud. Figure about 2 hours 50 minutes from Old Town with no traffic, the last 45 minutes on dirt. Gas, groceries and a phone signal are in Forest Lakes, about 20 miles back east on SR 260. There is no cell service at the lake.
Pick the season. May 1 through November, roads permitting. The Rim roads close with the first lasting snow and reopen when they melt, which can be late April or late May. June and September are best, when the campers thin out and the trout are active. July and August afternoons storm; the dirt roads are the problem afterward, not the lake.
Water and trash. No drinking water anywhere, and no trash service. Bring a gallon per person per day plus what you need to drown the fire, and more trash bags than you think; this is a pack-it-in, pack-it-out area and the Forest Service means it.
Fire. Fires are allowed in existing rings only when no restrictions are in effect. When the Apache-Sitgreaves goes into restrictions, usually by June in a dry year, there are no fires at all in undeveloped areas like this one, and that includes charcoal. Gas stoves are fine.
The carry. The trail from the main parking area to the water is short but steep. Hauling a hard kayak down is a two-person job and hauling it back up is worse. Bring an inflatable or a float tube, or fish from shore, which works here because the lake is deep right off the bank. Camp on the rim of the canyon, not in it, and arrive Thursday for a holiday weekend; the sites with a view down to the water are few.
Dogs. On a leash. The trail is steep enough that a big dog will manage it better than you will.
Skip it if you want to float a real kayak off a ramp a few feet from the car; Woods Canyon and Willow Springs have that, and Canyon Point has the showers. For a free Rim night without the lake, the Rim Road itself is lined with sites. Bear Canyon is for people happy to fish from the bank or carry a float tube in exchange for solitude.
A canyon Game and Fish dammed and the Forest Service left alone
The canyons that drain the top of the Rim northward toward Chevelon Creek and the Little Colorado were dry most of the year before the dams, running only with snowmelt, and the Western Apache who summered up here hunted them rather than fished them. The Army’s road came along the edge in 1872 to 1874, General Crook’s supply line between Fort Apache and Camp Verde, and Forest Road 300, the Rim Road you drive to reach FR 89, follows it. The Apache and Sitgreaves national forests were proclaimed in 1908, combined under one administration in 1974, and the Black Mesa Ranger District has managed this stretch of the Rim ever since.
The lakes are the state’s doing, not the Forest Service’s. From the 1950s Arizona Game and Fish set about building a series of fishing lakes on the Rim by throwing earthen dams across its canyons, on Forest Service land, for the recreation the new highway from Payson would bring; the Forest Service’s own page for Bear Canyon says exactly that, one of several in a series built by Game and Fish. Willow Springs Lake was created in 1967. Bear Canyon’s own year is the gap in this history: the Forest Service page does not give it, the Game and Fish page would not load for this guide, and the federal dam inventory’s listing for a Bear Canyon dam in Coconino County carries a date this guide cannot square with the others and will not repeat. What the lake’s shape says is clear enough: Game and Fish picked a canyon so narrow and steep that the dam made a 60-acre lake 50 feet deep, with no bench for a ramp or a campground at the water, and that accident of topography is the whole character of the place.
The Forest Service’s choice was to leave it that way. Where Woods Canyon and Willow Springs got boat ramps, stores and campgrounds with fees, Bear Canyon got parking areas on the canyon rim, a few vault toilets, a trail to the water and nothing else. The camping area is listed as partially developed, with no site count, no water and no trash service; for fire-restriction purposes it is treated as undeveloped, which means that when the Rim goes into restrictions, usually by June in a dry year, there are no fires here at all, not even charcoal, while the developed campgrounds a few miles east still allow them in their rings. It is a free lake because it is a cheap lake to run.
The Rodeo-Chediski Fire of June 2002, 468,638 acres, burned the Rim country to the east and southeast and stopped half a mile from Forest Lakes; the Bear Canyon drainage lay west of the burn and kept its mixed conifer, oak and aspen, which is why the camping area still has shade that parts of the Rim Road east of Woods Canyon lost. Since then the changes have been small: a stocking schedule of about six releases a season, an electric-motor rule, and a steady increase in the number of people who have discovered that the trail down to the water is a filter worth passing through.
Why it matters
Bear Canyon explains the division of labor that made the Rim what it is: the state built the lakes, the federal forest decided how much to build around them, and where it decided to build nothing, the lake stayed quiet. It is also a reminder that free and rustic on the Rim means something specific, including no campfire in June and every scrap of trash going home in your car. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is a June or September weekday with a float tube, a full water jug and a sedan driven slowly: nearly three hours from Old Town, the last 45 on gravel, for a deep cold trout lake that most of the Rim’s visitors never walk down to.