What is Blue Ridge Campground?
Blue Ridge is the modest campground of the three that serve C.C. Cragin Reservoir. It sits in ponderosa pine at 6,929 feet on the gentle north slope behind the Mogollon Rim, a mile of gravel off SR 87 near the Blue Ridge Ranger Station, with a small loop of sites, each with a table, fire ring and grill, and with potable water and vault toilets. The Forest Service does not publish a site count; it is on the order of ten. There are no hookups and no reservations, and the fee is $20 a night for up to eight people and two vehicles.
It is not a destination campground. The reservoir is about 10 miles away by road, Rock Crossing is closer to it, and the Rim edge with its views is back toward Clints Well. The lake itself is a long, narrow flooded canyon of East Clear Creek, built by a copper company, which is a story told below. What Blue Ridge offers is paved access to within a mile, water, a toilet, and a site on a Friday night when Rock Crossing’s first-come loop has been full since noon.
What you get is pines, cold nights, a short drive to a paddling lake and a place that fills last. What you do not get is a view, a shoreline or quiet from the highway, which is close enough to hear. For a paddling trip to Cragin or a long day on the Arizona Trail, that is enough.
How to camp Blue Ridge right
Pay at the campground. $20 per night, first come, first served, cash or check in the fee tube. Two vehicles per site, eight people. 14-day limit. There is no host most of the season, so bring exact change.
Get there. Take SR 87, the Beeline, the whole way: through Payson, past Pine and Strawberry, up the Rim, and past the FR 300 turnoff to Clints Well, where SR 87 meets Lake Mary Road. Stay on SR 87 northeast for about 9 miles, past the Blue Ridge Ranger Station, to the signed Moqui-Blue Ridge Campground turn at Forest Road 138; the campground is about a mile in on the right. Figure about 2 hours 30 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. Clints Well has a gas station and a small store; the real grocery is in Payson.
Pick the season. May to September. The gate is locked the rest of the year, and the campground sits high enough that a late snow in May or an early one in late September is not a surprise. June and the first half of September are the dry, clear windows. Afternoon storms arrive on schedule in July and August; see the monsoon field manual for the drill.
Water and toilets. Potable water and vault toilets. No showers, hookups or dump station; the nearest dump is in Payson.
Fire. Rings only, and only when the Coconino is not under restrictions, which it usually is by June. Hotline 928-226-4607. Bring a stove either way.
Use the reservoir. FR 751 leaves SR 87 about 5 miles back toward Clints Well and drops about 6 miles of gravel to the ramp. The lake is a flooded canyon with no shoreline to speak of, no wake, and water the color of pine shadow; it is a paddling lake, not a beach. The road closes for winter. Check it at the ranger station on your way in.
Dogs. Leashed or contained. No horses or pack animals in the campground.
Skip it if you want to wake up near the water or on the Rim. Try for Rock Crossing first, 2 miles from the reservoir; if you want the Rim edge and the view, go to Kehl Springs. If both are full, Blue Ridge is the one that still has a site, and it has water, which the Rim dispersed sites do not.
The lake a copper company built on the wrong side of the Rim
Nothing about C.C. Cragin Reservoir makes sense until you know who paid for it. East Clear Creek drains north off the Rim toward the Little Colorado, away from Phoenix, away from every farm and city that wanted water. The country around it was Apache and Yavapai range in the 1800s, crossed in the 1870s by General Crook’s Army road along the Rim edge, logged and grazed through the twentieth century, and otherwise left alone. It had no reason to be dammed.
Phelps Dodge gave it one. The copper company needed water for its mines at Morenci, on the far side of the state, and the water it wanted was in the Black River, on the Salt’s headwaters, where the Salt River Project held the rights. In 1962 the two signed an exchange: Phelps Dodge would build a reservoir on the Rim and deliver its water into the Salt system by pumping it over the Rim into the East Verde, and in return it could take an equal amount from the Black River. The company built Blue Ridge Dam on East Clear Creek, finished it in 1964, and began storing water in 1965. SRP had done the same trade with the same company twenty years earlier, when Phelps Dodge paid for Horseshoe Dam on the Verde; this was the second time the Valley got a reservoir out of a mine’s thirst. Blue Ridge Ranger Station, a mile from the campground, grew up to manage the recreation that followed on a lake nobody had planned for, and the Forest Service built Blue Ridge and Rock Crossing campgrounds in the decades after the dam. I could not find a date for Blue Ridge Campground itself; the Coconino does not publish one.
The exchange ran for forty years and ended in 2002. Phelps Dodge sold its land in the area to SRP, and a 2004 act of Congress, part of the Arizona water settlements, renamed the project for C.C. Cragin, an early Salt River Project superintendent, and set up its transfer. SRP acquired the reservoir in February 2005 and deeded it to the Bureau of Reclamation that September 30, keeping the job of running it. The reason SRP wanted a lake on the wrong side of the Rim was the same as Phelps Dodge’s, a way to move water into the Verde and Salt system, and it added a new one: Payson, Pine and Strawberry, which had been short of water for decades, got a pipeline from the reservoir and now draw their municipal supply from it.
That is why the campground has two names on its signs and why nobody in Payson calls the lake Cragin. It is also why the lake looks the way it does: a drowned canyon with no beaches, drawn down every summer as water is pumped over the Rim, with a paved road to the ramp that is closed half the year. The campgrounds that serve it were built for fishermen and are now used by paddlers, Arizona Trail hikers and Valley families who could not get a site anywhere else on a Friday. The Rim’s recreation grew up around a piece of industrial plumbing, and Blue Ridge Campground is the plainest piece of it.
Why it matters
Blue Ridge is a small campground attached to a large idea: that Arizona’s water moves by deals, not by gravity. A copper company built a lake on the far side of the Rim so it could drink from a river two hundred miles away, the Valley’s water utility inherited it, and a Rim town that spent decades rationing now turns on the tap because of it. The campground is the fallback of the three on this lake, with water and a toilet and a highway hum, and on a July Friday that makes it the most useful of them. Stop at the ranger station, check the road to the ramp, and take the site that is there.