What is Buffalo Pass Campground?
The Chuska Mountains run north to south along the Arizona-New Mexico line for 80 miles, a long, flat-topped range of Chuska sandstone capped with ponderosa, aspen and dozens of small lakes, and only three roads cross it. Buffalo Pass, on Navajo Route 13 between Lukachukai and Red Valley, is the northern one. It was a wagon trail and then a notorious dirt road until the Nation paved it in 1999, and it is still a serious piece of driving, with 14-percent grades and curves that drop away toward the Red Valley side. At the top, around 8,450 feet, the Navajo Nation keeps a small picnic area in the trees, and around it are the fire rings and flat spots the camping apps call Buffalo Pass Campground.
That is all it is: tables, rings, big pines, a stand of aspen, and a view east that falls 2,500 feet to Red Valley with Shiprock standing on the plain beyond. There are no toilets, no water, no host and, too often, trash from the weekend before. From just past the pass a dirt road leads north to Big Lake and the doubletrack of the Chuska mountain-bike route, and another climbs south behind Roof Butte, at 9,883 feet the high point of the range.
What you get is the highest and farthest night in this collection, a sky as dark as any in the Four Corners and a cool June when the Valley is at 110. What you do not get is a single facility, a fee station or a sign; you get a permit requirement you must meet on your own, a litter problem that is partly yours to fix, and the knowledge that the pass sits above the mesas where the Lukachukai uranium mines were dug.
How to camp Buffalo Pass right
Buy the permit first. A Navajo Nation camping permit is required, listed at $15 per person per night by Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation and sold online or at 928-871-6647 on weekdays. The Chuska route guide published with the Nation’s cooperation is blunt about it: at-large camping is not allowed, and overnight permits come from Navajo Parks. Carry a printed copy; there is no signal on the pass and nobody to sell you one.
Get there. About 6 hours 25 minutes from Old Town, paved all the way. SR 87 to Payson, SR 260 to Heber, SR 377 to Holbrook, I-40 east to Chambers, US 191 north to Chinle, Indian Route 64 east 30 miles to Tsaile, Indian Route 12 north 12 miles to Lukachukai, then Route 13 east about 8 miles up the mountain to the pass. The picnic area is on the pass itself; park in a pullout and walk your gear in. Fuel up in Chinle; Lukachukai has a small store. The Nation runs on daylight time in summer, an hour ahead of Scottsdale.
Pick the season. June through mid-October. Expect frost in June and September, afternoon storms in July and August, and snow that closes the road by November. In winter, check whether Route 13 is open before you commit; it often is not, and the Nation does not plow it reliably.
Camp back from the road. The west side of the pass, a few hundred yards from the pavement, turns the trucks grinding up the grade into a murmur. If you have high clearance and a dry forecast, the dirt spur north to Big Lake is a better bed than the roadside. Mornings in June are in the 30s; pack as for Flagstaff in April.
Water and toilets. None. Bring everything, including a toilet, and pack all of it out. Do not drink from springs or stock ponds below the old mine mesas to the east.
The walking. The NavajoYES Chuska Mountain Bike Route passes the picnic area and uses marked dirt roads and doubletrack to Big Lake and up Roof Butte; those are the trails. Stay on them. The Nation asks hikers to carry a backcountry permit, and the country off the roads is sheep camps and private grazing, not public land.
Rules, bears and dogs. No alcohol, firearms or fireworks on the Navajo Nation. Fires only in existing rings when no restrictions are posted; in a dry June, assume none. Black bears are active here in summer; store food in the vehicle. Dogs are fine on leash and away from livestock. Ask before photographing people, homes or sheep camps, which are working places, and leave the site cleaner than you found it; the chapters notice.
Skip it if you want a toilet or a fallback. Wagon Wheel, two miles below on the creek, is a lunch stop rather than a bed; Tsaile Lake and Cottonwood Campground at Canyon de Chelly have facilities and are the places to go if the weather turns. For a Navajo-run campground with hogans and a host, Spider Rock is 90 minutes back toward Chinle.
The pass above the uranium mesas
The Chuskas were a timber source before they were anything else to outsiders. Tree-ring dates on the roof beams at Chaco Canyon, 60 miles east on the San Juan Basin, show ponderosa cut in these mountains and carried to the great houses as early as 974, which makes the range one of the oldest documented logging grounds in North America. The Diné who came after the Puebloans made the Chuskas, Ch’óshgai in Navajo, the eastern wall of their country, grazing sheep on the mesa top in summer and farming the valley at Lukachukai, “white reeds,” below. Kit Carson’s campaign and the Long Walk of 1864 emptied the valleys; the Treaty of 1868 brought the people back to a reservation whose core included the mountains, and the Lukachukai and Red Valley chapters on either side of the pass are the communities that grew from that return.
The 20th century came to the Lukachukais as uranium. Navajos had long known the yellow outcrops on the mesas; in 1949 the ore was identified for what it was, and from 1949 to 1968 a string of companies worked dozens of mines around Cove, the chapter just east and south of Buffalo Pass, under leases that paid royalties to the Tribe and wages to Navajo miners who were told little about what they were breathing. When the market collapsed the companies left, and the open adits and waste piles stayed above the homes and stock ponds. The federal government has spent decades on the consequences; in March 2024 the EPA added the Lukachukai Mountains Mining District, spanning the Cove, Lukachukai and Round Rock chapters, to the Superfund National Priorities List. The pass itself was never mined, but the history explains why the Nation wants visitors on the pavement and the marked routes and nowhere else.
The road is the other story. Route 13 climbed out of Lukachukai as a wagon track and then a dirt grade that was impassable in snow and frightening the rest of the year, and the picnic area at the top was a local stop long before it was a waypoint on anyone’s app. The Nation paved the whole route over the pass to Red Valley and on to Shiprock in 1999, which opened a 45-mile shortcut between Canyon de Chelly and the San Juan Basin and put the pass within reach of any sedan in summer. It did not add a toilet, a tap or a trash can, and it did not make the grade any gentler; the 14-percent pitches on the Red Valley side are the steepest paved highway in this collection.
Recreation on the pass is recent and informal. The Navajo Nation’s picnic area is a few tables and rings; the camping around it exists because people stopped and stayed. The NavajoYES Chuska route guide, written with the chapters’ cooperation, is the first attempt to put the pass, Big Lake and Roof Butte into a published recreation framework with rules attached, and its first rule is the permit. Whether Buffalo Pass stays open to visitors depends on whether the chapters see permits bought and trash carried out; Grand Falls, on the other side of the Nation, is what happens when they see the opposite.
Why it matters
Buffalo Pass is the Navajo Nation’s high country stripped to its parts: a paved pass through a sacred range, a thousand-year-old timber source, a uranium district on the Superfund list, and a picnic ground where the only infrastructure is the view. It explains why the Nation’s camping rules are strict and why its enforcement is thin, and it puts the Four Corners’ two stories, beauty and extraction, within a mile of each other. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is a conditional yes: buy the permit, bring everything including a toilet, camp off the pavement, stay on the marked routes, and treat the pass as the high, cold, dark night it is rather than a campground it is not.