What is the Box Canyon camping?
Between Florence Junction and Florence, SR 79 runs along the west edge of the Mineral Mountains, and the dirt roads that leave it eastward lead into the Florence OHV area, a web of jeep and side-by-side trails on BLM land that converges at a junction called Five Points. The Google Maps pin is at the mouth of the busiest of those roads, Cottonwood Canyon Road, where a wide gravel flat beside the highway becomes a seasonal RV town from December through March.
The land status matters. A check of the BLM’s surface-management map puts the pin and the first several miles on Arizona State Trust land, where camping requires a State Land Department recreation permit, $15 a year for one person or $20 for a family. About 5 miles in, the road crosses onto Bureau of Land Management land under the Tucson Field Office, where dispersed camping is free, first come, first served, 14 days in any 28. Nothing anywhere along the road is developed: no toilets, no water, no trash. Past the camps, the road climbs to Five Points at about 2,700 feet, and from there Box Canyon Trail drops south through a slot barely one vehicle wide to Price Road and back to the highway near Florence. It is the drive everyone comes for.
What you get is free or nearly free camping an hour from Old Town with a famous trail system out the door and a town ten minutes away for groceries. What you do not get is quiet, shade, a toilet, water, or any protection from the weather that turns the slot canyon into a river. For a hike instead of a drive, Picketpost Mountain is 20 minutes up US 60.
How to camp Box Canyon right
Pay like this. Buy the State Trust permit online from the State Land Department before you leave, $15 a year for one person or $20 for a family, if you are stopping on the flats near the highway; rangers patrol them. The BLM land farther in is free, 14 days in any 28, no permit and no reservation. OHVs need the Arizona OHV decal.
Get there. US 60 east to Florence Junction, then SR 79 south about 7 miles to East Cottonwood Canyon Road on the left; the turnoff is signed and obvious from the RVs. About 65 minutes from Old Town. The first miles are wide graded gravel that any vehicle can handle, including large trailers. Beyond the cattle guards it narrows and roughens; high clearance past Five Points, and Box Canyon itself is OHV and short 4x4 territory. Do not take a trailer past Five Points. Florence, 10 minutes south, has gas and a grocery store.
Pick the season. November through March for camping. The rest of the year this is a sunrise-only place; from May to September the flats are over 100 by mid-morning and the excessive-heat rules apply to the drive, not just the hike.
Choose State Trust or BLM. The easy pull-throughs near the highway are Trust land and fill with fifth-wheels from December to March. For free and quieter, keep going past the cattle guards until the road starts climbing and the rigs thin out, and camp in the first side wash with a used fire ring. Fires in existing rings only, and not at all under county restrictions.
Water, toilets, trash. None. Carry water, bring a portable toilet or a trowel, pack out everything including what the last camper left.
Noise and neighbors. OHVs from dawn, quarry trucks on weekday mornings, cattle through camp, and shooters near the pavement. This is a staging area with a view, not a retreat.
Box Canyon. Drive or ride it early on a weekday in January when the walls are in shade and the sand is firm, and turn around at the first sign of weather. The canyon has no exits when it runs. Stay out if rain is forecast anywhere upstream in the Mineral Mountains, and read the flash flood entry if you are new to Arizona washes.
Military land. The Florence Military Reservation adjoins the area; warning signs go up during live-fire training. Obey them.
Dogs. Fine off the OHV routes, leashed near camps; the cattle and the side-by-sides are the hazards.
Skip it if you want quiet desert camping; drive farther from town. For a morning worth pairing with an afternoon here, Boyce Thompson Arboretum and Picketpost are 20 minutes up US 60, and the free sites at Oak Flat above Superior are the quieter overnight. For the Superstitions proper, Peralta is 30 minutes north.
Prison town, POW camp and the checkerboard that decides where you pay
The Gila River below the Mineral Mountains was Hohokam farmland for a thousand years, watered by canals off the river whose descendants, the Akimel O’odham, live on the Gila River Indian Community a few miles downstream. The hills east of the river were hunting and quarrying ground, and the Spanish and then the Americans crossed them on the way to somewhere else until 1866, when Levi Ruggles, a Civil War veteran and Indian agent, laid out Florence on the south bank of the Gila and got it a post office. Silver found in the hills to the northeast in 1875 opened the Silver King mine and made Florence the seat of the newly created Pinal County, and prospectors worked the Mineral Mountains above the townsite through the 1880s without finding another Silver King. The town settled into farming on the Gila canals, ranching on the open range east of it, and in 1909 the state’s business: the territorial prison moved here from Yuma, and Florence has been a prison town since.
Statehood in 1912 drew the lines you camp by. Arizona received its trust lands as a checkerboard of sections set aside to fund schools, and the flats beside SR 79 landed in the state’s share; the hills behind them stayed federal, first as unreserved public domain and later under the Bureau of Land Management. That is the whole reason the first five miles of Cottonwood Canyon Road need a $15 permit and the sixth is free. The State Land Department manages its sections to earn money, which means permits and the eventual possibility of sale; the BLM manages its for multiple use, which here means cattle, a quarry, and recreation.
The war put the Army next door. Camp Florence, a 500-acre prisoner-of-war camp just north of town, held German and Italian prisoners captured in North Africa during the Second World War; they picked cotton in the Gila fields for 50 cents an hour and could buy tobacco but not cigarettes. The Gila River War Relocation Center for interned Japanese Americans was a few miles west. The ground north of town is today the Arizona National Guard’s Florence Military Reservation, which is why live-fire warnings still go up on the edge of the OHV area and why some of the hills south of Box Canyon are fenced.
Recreation is the newest layer. The BLM got its organic act in 1976 and stopped treating land like this as surplus; the jeep and motorcycle routes that had grown up through Box Canyon and over the ridges to Five Points were mapped, signed and in time designated as the Florence OHV area, one of the busiest in the state, with cross-country travel banned and travel confined to the inventoried routes. The winter RV camps on the Trust flats grew with the snowbird boom of the 1990s and 2000s, when Florence itself went from 7,500 people in 1990 to more than 25,000 by 2010, most of them in subdivisions and prisons. What has changed lately is enforcement: the State Land Department patrols the flats for permits, the sheriff checks OHV decals at Five Points, and the BLM has closed and rehabilitated some user-made spurs. The quarry trucks and the shooters near the highway have not changed at all.
Why it matters
Box Canyon is a lesson in reading an Arizona map. The same gravel road crosses state school-trust land, federal BLM land, a National Guard boundary and a working quarry in six miles, and the rules for sleeping on it change at every cattle guard. That checkerboard, drawn at statehood, governs half the open desert around the Valley, and the permit you buy for the flats here is the same one you need for the Trust sections north of Scottsdale. For a visitor the verdict is practical: free or $15 camping an hour from Old Town with a famous slot-canyon drive out the door, loud, treeless and busy from December to March, worth it for the trails and not for the peace, and never when rain is in the forecast.