What is Black Canyon Rim Campground?
Black Canyon Rim is the small campground at the far eastern end of the Rim’s SR 260 corridor, past Forest Lakes and the crowds, where the plateau flattens into open ponderosa parkland. Twenty sites sit on sandy, level ground at 7,600 feet, each with a fire ring, grill and table, with drinking water, accessible vault toilets, trash service and a camp host. Some sites take rigs up to 40 feet; all take tents. Black Canyon Lake, a Game and Fish trout lake with a 10-horsepower motor limit, is about 2.5 miles up the road, and the General Crook National Recreation Trail, which follows the 1870s military wagon road along the Rim, passes the campground.
Two things set it apart. The wild horses of the Heber herd graze through camp most mornings, and a short walk from the loop is the grave of Stott, Scott and Wilson, three young men hanged from a pine here in August 1888 during the Pleasant Valley War, the Tonto Basin feud that killed more people than the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The country around the lake burned in the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire, and you can see where the pines stop.
What you get is a quiet, well-kept Rim campground with water and a host, horses in the morning and a piece of real history in the trees. What you do not get is a sure reservation, a sure trout lake or any shade on the burned ridges above the water.
How to camp it right
Treat it as first come. $20 per night for a single site, up to eight people and one vehicle; $12 per night per extra vehicle. The Forest Service says reserve on recreation.gov, but the listing has shown the campground as not reservable; check it, and plan on first come, first served. Arrive by early afternoon Friday and you will have a choice of sites; arrive Saturday and you will have the leftovers.
Get there. Take Loop 101 or Loop 202 to SR 87, the Beeline, 90 minutes to Payson, then SR 260 east for about 45 miles: up the Rim, past Woods Canyon, Willow Springs and Canyon Point, through Forest Lakes, and on toward Heber. About 13 miles short of Heber, turn south on signed Forest Road 86 (Black Canyon Road); the campground is about 3 miles in on graded sand and gravel that any car handles when dry. Figure about 2 hours 35 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. Gas and groceries are in Forest Lakes, 8 miles west, or Heber, 13 miles east.
Pick the season. May 1 to about Columbus Day weekend in mid-October, weather permitting. June and September are best. Nights are cold at 7,600 feet even in July; afternoon storms are routine from mid-July into September.
Water and toilets. Potable water and accessible vault toilets, yes. No showers, no hookups, no dump station; Canyon Point, about 10 miles west, has both.
Fire. Rings only, and only when the Apache-Sitgreaves is not under fire restrictions. Check the forest alerts page the week you go.
The horses and the grave. The horses are real and not shy; keep food in the car, not the tent, do not feed them, and keep dogs leashed when they come through. Walk the short path from the loop to the Stott, Scott and Wilson grave, the piece of Rim history the brochures skip. For how a free-roaming herd ends up in a national forest, the Salt River wild horses entry tells the Valley version of the same story.
The lake. Black Canyon Lake is 2.5 miles up the road, free, with two vault toilets, no water and a 10-horsepower limit. Its level and stocking have been inconsistent since the 2002 fire; check the Game and Fish stocking schedule before you build a trip around the fishing, and bring a hat, because the burned ridges have no shade.
Dogs. On a leash, and close when the horses come through.
Skip it if a sure trout lake is the point; camp at Sinkhole and fish Willow Springs, or go on to Fool Hollow at Show Low for showers and a stocked lake. If everything with a toilet is full, the Rim Road dispersed sites are the fallback. Come here for the quiet, the horses and the history.
Three hanged men and a herd of horses
The Rim here is the top edge of Western Apache country. The White Mountain Apache’s Fort Apache Reservation still begins a few miles south of the campground, and the forest the horses graze was Apache hunting ground until the Army came in the 1870s. General George Crook had a wagon road cut along the Rim between Fort Apache and Camp Verde to move troops against the Apache, and the General Crook National Recreation Trail that passes the campground follows it past the campground, marked with chevrons on the pines.
The settlers who followed the soldiers were Latter-day Saints working south from the Little Colorado colonies. John Bushman scouted the forest in 1882, a party came in that December, and by April 1883 two cabins stood and grain was planted at what became Heber, named for one or another of two church leaders; only four families stuck. Below the Rim, meanwhile, the Pleasant Valley War was under way. The Graham and Tewksbury families and their allies killed somewhere between 35 and 50 people between 1882 and 1892, the bloodiest range feud in the West, and the killing spilled up onto the plateau. In August 1888 a posse that included Glenn Reynolds and, by most accounts, Tom Horn took three young men accused of rustling, Stott, Scott and Wilson, and hanged them from a ponderosa in the Black Canyon country. Their grave is the fenced plot a short walk from the campground loop. Zane Grey retold the feud as To the Last Man in 1921.
For most of the next century the Black Canyon country was a logging woods. Bill Porter built Heber’s first sawmill along Black Canyon south of the present highway; it burned in 1935, and the mill Lorin Porter moved to Heber in 1946 ran until 1984. Logging and ranching carried the town until the mid-1990s, when a federal injunction to protect the Mexican spotted owl shut the national forests to the saws. Recreation had arrived in the meantime: Arizona Game and Fish built the 60-foot earth dam that made Black Canyon Lake, 78 acres of trout water, in 1964, and the Forest Service laid out the campground on the sandy flat above it. The horses came by their own route. Congress protected free-roaming horses and burros in 1971, and the Forest Service drew a Heber Wild Horse Territory around this part of the Black Mesa district in the 1970s; the herd that walks through camp descends from those horses and from animals that drifted off the reservation to the south, and how many belong to which has been argued in court and in Heber ever since.
The fire rewrote the map. The Rodeo-Chediski Fire started on the reservation on June 18, 2002, merged with a second fire on June 23 and was not controlled until July 7. It burned 468,638 acres, evacuated some 30,000 people and destroyed 268 structures in Heber-Overgaard, most of them in Overgaard. Around Black Canyon Lake it stripped the ridges to the rock, and the lake’s level and stocking have been uneven since, which is why the campground, spared in the pines, is a better bet than the fishing. The horses came through it, and the argument about how many should stay is the Black Mesa district’s longest-running one.
Why it matters
Black Canyon Rim is a small campground with an unusually complete story: an Apache boundary, an Army road, a Mormon village, the end of a range war, a sawmill economy that burned twice, a 1964 fishing lake, a wild-horse argument and the biggest fire in Arizona’s history to that date, all within three miles of the loop. It also happens to be the quietest Rim campground with running water that a car can reach. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: come for the pines, the horses and the grave, treat the lake as a bonus, arrive Friday early, and do not expect the reservation page to help you.