What is Buffalo Crossing Campground?
The East Fork of the Black River comes off the Big Lake plateau and runs south through a long meadow valley before it drops into the canyon toward the reservation, and the Forest Service put six campgrounds along it, the East Fork Recreation Area. Buffalo Crossing is the oldest, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s: 16 single sites at 7,540 feet on a bend of the river, with tables, rock fire rings, three vault toilets, and the stream a few steps from most of the pads. Ponderosa and spruce give shade; the meadow across the water gives elk.
It is a fishing campground more than anything. The Game and Fish Department stocks the East Fork with rainbows through summer, wild browns hold in the deeper runs, and Apache trout, the state fish, turn up in the colder tributaries. The Black River Mainstream Trail leaves the campground downstream for the remote water below Bear Creek, where the serious anglers go. There is no lake, no store and no hookups, which keeps the big rigs at Big Lake and the valley quiet.
What you get is the sound of a real trout river at night, big sites, and a valley with five more campgrounds to fall back on. What you do not get is water, a reservation, or anything closer than 5 hours from Scottsdale.
How to camp it right
Pay on arrival, no booking. $14 per vehicle per night, $7 with a Senior or Access pass, $14 for a second unit, paid at the campground. No reservations. 14-day limit. The concessionaire hosts live at Horse Springs up the road and come through to collect.
Get there. US 60 east through Globe, Show Low and Springerville, then US 180/191 to Alpine, about 4 hours 45 minutes. From Alpine go 2 miles north on US 191 to Forest Road 249, turn west and follow 5 miles of graveled road to Forest Road 276, then south 6 miles to the campground; allow 30 minutes on the gravel and 5 hours 15 minutes in all. From the west, the Beeline and SR 260 to the Sunrise turnoff, SR 273 to Big Lake, then FR 249 east to FR 276, is about 5 hours and wider gravel.
Pick the month. About May 1 to October 31, weather permitting. June is dry and warm by day; July and August bring daily monsoon storms and nights in the 30s and 40s; September is the month, with elk bugling in the meadows and the aspens turning on the ridges. October is cold and empty and the water at Horse Springs is off.
Water. None here. Fill at Horse Springs 2 miles up the road in season, or in Alpine. Carry more than you think; at 7,500 feet you drink it.
Fish it properly. The stocked rainbows sit in the obvious pools at camp; the browns are a mile downstream where the trail follows the river into the canyon. An Arizona license is required, and the Black River has special regulations on some stretches; read the current booklet before you keep anything, and release every Apache trout you cannot identify with certainty.
Bears and elk. Both are regulars. Food and coolers go in the vehicle at night. Elk in the meadow at dusk are the evening entertainment; keep the dog from joining them.
Dogs. Leashed or restrained.
Skip it if it is full or you need water. Horse Springs has 27 sites and water two minutes away; Diamond Rock has the CCC shelters; the free, unmarked West Fork is across the ridge on FR 68. For a hookup, a store and a lake, go back to Big Lake.
The river the Apache trout came back to
The Black River is the boundary between two Arizonas. A few miles downstream of Buffalo Crossing it becomes the northern edge of the White Mountain Apache reservation, and everything above it, the East Fork valley included, was Apache country long before the Forest Service drew a recreation area on it. The Army came in 1870 with Fort Apache, Mormon settlers founded Alpine as Bush Valley in the late 1870s, and the meadows along the East Fork became summer range for their cattle and sheep. The Apache trout, a yellow-gold native found nowhere else on earth, lived in every cold stream of the headwaters.
The campground is a New Deal artifact. Civilian Conservation Corps crews built the first camp on the East Fork at Buffalo Crossing in the 1930s, choosing the bend where the river slows and the bench is wide, and laying out the rock fire rings and the river-edge pads that are still in use; the Forest Service’s own page describes it as “an old Civilian Conservation Corp era site.” Horse Springs, Diamond Rock and the rest followed over the decades as the valley became the Alpine district’s fishing destination, and the six camps were eventually grouped as the East Fork Recreation Area, an 8-mile stretch from Diamond Rock down to here. A concessionaire took over day-to-day operation, which is why the fee is collected by hosts rather than a tube.
The fish nearly vanished while the campgrounds grew. Stocked rainbows and browns outcompeted and hybridized with the Apache trout through the middle of the century; recovery work began on the reservation in the 1940s, and by the 1960s the species survived in roughly 30 miles of stream. It went onto the first federal endangered list in 1967, was downlisted to threatened in 1975 as hatchery work and barrier dams took hold, and was named Arizona’s state fish in 1986. In 2024 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed it from the list entirely, the first sport fish ever delisted because it had recovered, with the White Mountain Apache Tribe and the Game and Fish Department sharing the credit. The East Fork is one of the places you can now catch one legally, and should let it go.
Fire is the other modern story. The Wallow Fire started on May 29, 2011 from an abandoned campfire southwest of Alpine and burned 538,049 acres across the Apache-Sitgreaves and into New Mexico, the largest wildfire in Arizona history at the time. Alpine, Nutrioso and Greer were evacuated and the Apache National Forest was closed while it ran. The East Fork campgrounds survived, but the ridges you drive past on FR 249 and FR 276 are still a mix of black snags and young aspen, and the two campers whose fire started it were ordered to pay $3.7 million in restitution.
The most recent closure was mundane. The Forest Service shut Buffalo Crossing into the summer of 2024 to replace the East Fork bridge on FR 276, which is why some older listings still show it closed. It is open, it is the same 16 sites, and the bridge is new.
Why it matters
Buffalo Crossing is the oldest campground on one of the few rivers in Arizona where the native fish is winning. It explains the White Mountains in miniature: Apache land on one bank and national forest on the other, a New Deal campground that the Forest Service never had money to modernize and so never ruined, a fire that rewrote the forest around it, and a trout that went from 30 miles of stream to delisting in a lifetime. For a Scottsdale camper it is a 5-hour drive to a $14 site with no water and no reservation, which is a hard sell for a weekend and an easy one for a week in September. Go for the fish and the sound of the river, fill up at Horse Springs, and take the upstream site.