What is Blue Lake Campground?
Somebody saved this pin because Google Maps labels it “Blue Lake Campground,” and it is worth a few hundred words to say plainly that it is not a place you can go. The coordinates land on West Blue Lake, listed by the USGS with the alternate name Blue Lake: a small lake at about 7,255 feet on the forested plateau south of the Mogollon Rim, in Navajo County, about 9.6 miles east-southeast of Forest Lakes and 16 miles northwest of the village of Cibecue. It is on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, and it sits well inside the White Mountain Apache Tribe’s closed area.
The tribe’s Game and Fish map hatches the whole northwestern reservation, including everything north of Cibecue and Carrizo, as closed. Its FAQ says closed areas are for tribal members; its camping regulations restrict all camping to established sites in designated camping areas. The designated campgrounds, every one of them, are on the open eastern side of the reservation around McNary, Hawley Lake, Sunrise and Reservation Lake, or along the Black and Salt rivers on a Special Use permit. A lake 16 miles up unsigned dirt roads north of Cibecue is none of those things.
What you get here is a correction. What you do not get is a campground, a permit, a road you may drive, or a reason to try; the useful part of this page is the list of places that are open, and the history of why this one is not.
How to visit it right
Do not. No fee, no reservation and no permit exist for this lake, because no permit covers it. The tribe’s $15 per vehicle daily camping permit is good only at designated campgrounds in open areas, and its fishing and recreation permits say the same.
Get as far as Cibecue, if you must. For the record, Cibecue is about 3 hours from Old Town: US 60 east through Globe, down and up through Salt River Canyon, then the signed Cibecue road north from US 60 about 15 miles. That is the end of the public road for a visitor without tribal business. The country beyond, toward the Rim and this lake, is reservation back road inside the closed area, patrolled by tribal game wardens who do not read Google pins as permission.
Go to the open lakes instead. On the reservation: Lower Log Road and Upper Log on the North Fork of the White River, Hawley Lake, Horseshoe Cienega, Sunrise Lake, Reservation Lake and Pacheta Lake, all with tables, fire rings, toilets and trout, all on the $15 daily permit sold at Hon-Dah and in Whiteriver. They are 60-plus miles east of Cibecue, reached from SR 260 and SR 73, not from US 60.
Or go to the Forest Service side. If the Rim country near Forest Lakes was the attraction, the boundary is 10 miles north of this lake and the national forest beyond it has Woods Canyon Lake, Willow Springs and Bear Canyon lakes with no permit beyond a campground fee, and Canyon Point with showers. All of it is a full hour closer to home.
If you want the Salt River country. The tribe does open the Salt River corridor along US 60 for primitive camping on a Special Use permit, and Second Campground on the Carrizo side is the designated option; that is the nearest legal tribal camping to Cibecue.
Season, water, dogs. Not applicable here; see the open-lake guides.
Sovereignty. The reservation is not public land. The tribe decides what is open, sells permits for what is, and closes what it wants closed. That is the whole rule, and it is a reasonable one.
Skip it entirely. This entry is the catch. If a future tribal map opens the Cibecue country, the tribe’s website will say so; until then, this pin is a lake you will see only from a USGS quad.
The valley the Army attacked and the tribe kept
Cibecue is the center of Western Apache country in a way the tourist lakes to the east are not. The Cibecue bands farmed the creek bottoms and hunted the plateau under the Rim, where this lake sits, long before any map, and they were still doing it when the Army arrived. In 1870 the Army built Camp Apache, later Fort Apache, on the White River at the suggestion of White Mountain Apache leaders who had watched what happened to the Navajo and chose an alliance. In 1871 General George Crook enrolled 50 White Mountain men as scouts, and the reservation drawn in the early 1870s kept most of the homeland, Cibecue included, in Apache hands. That is the single fact behind everything on this page: the plateau is tribal land, not national forest, because the tribe held it through the wars.
The wars came to Cibecue anyway. In the summer of 1881 a medicine man named Nock-ay-det-klinne was holding dances on Cibecue Creek that the agent and the Army read as a threat, and on August 30, 1881 Colonel Eugene Carr rode in with 85 soldiers and 23 Apache scouts and arrested him at his camp. His followers attacked the column; most of the scouts, the largest mutiny of Native scouts in the Army’s history, turned on the soldiers; the medicine man was killed in the fight and Carr retreated to Fort Apache, which was attacked two days later. The Battle of Cibecue Creek set off a general outbreak that sent Geronimo, Juh and Naiche off the San Carlos reservation and into the last five years of the Apache wars. Three of the scouts were hanged at Fort Grant the next year. The valley never forgot any of it, and a visitor’s sense that this country is less welcoming than the Hawley Lake side is not wrong, only badly informed about why.
The Army left Fort Apache in 1922 and the Bureau of Indian Affairs turned it into a boarding school. The tribe adopted a constitution under the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 and elected its first tribal council in 1936, and that government is the one that writes the recreation rules today. Its most consequential early act for this story was conservation: in 1955 the tribe closed streams holding the last native Apache trout to fishing, the first formal protection for a fish that by the 1960s survived in about 30 miles of water. The Game and Fish Department that grew from that work built the eastern lakes into a permit economy, stocked them, and drew the line between open and closed country. The trout was listed as endangered in 1967, downlisted to threatened in 1975, and removed from the list on September 4, 2024, the first sport fish ever recovered, with the tribe credited as its first steward.
Then the plateau burned. On June 18, 2002 the Rodeo Fire started near the Cibecue rodeo grounds, set by a tribal member working as a seasonal firefighter who wanted the work; two days later a stranded quad rider lit a signal fire near Chediski Peak, and on June 23 the two merged. The Rodeo-Chediski Fire burned 468,638 acres, the largest in Arizona’s history until 2011, and 280,992 of them, 60 percent, were on the reservation, including the country around this lake. The arsonist got ten years; the tribe got a scarred forest it is still managing, and a reason beyond tradition to keep the western plateau closed.
What has not changed is the map. The tribe’s Game and Fish hatching covers the whole northwestern reservation, its FAQ says closed areas are for members, and its camping rules allow camping only in designated areas, all of which are east. Nothing on the tribe’s site suggests that will change, and nothing a visitor does from a Google pin will hurry it.
Why it matters
West Blue Lake is a lesson in whose map you are reading. Google’s shows a campground; the tribe’s shows a closed area; the second one is the law. The valley below it is where the Apache wars turned for the worst in 1881 and where Arizona’s largest fire to that date started in 2002, and the tribe that held this ground through both has decided to keep it for itself, which it is entitled to do. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is short: the White Mountain Apache lakes are some of the best camping in the state, every one of them is 60 miles east of here on a $15 permit, and the right response to this pin is to delete it and book Hawley or Pacheta instead.