What is Burro Creek Campground?
Burro Creek drains 57 miles of the Aquarius Mountains and the country west of Bagdad before it meets the Big Sandy, and for most of that length it is a dry wash. Where US 93 crosses it on a tall steel arch bridge south of Wikieup, it is not. The creek cuts a canyon here through dark volcanic rock, and the water pools deep and clear beneath saguaro-studded cliffs, with cottonwood and willow along the banks. The BLM calls it a transition zone between the Sonoran and Mojave deserts, and the plants agree: saguaro and cholla on the slopes, Joshua trees not far north.
The campground sits on a bench above the creek at 1,960 feet: 23 sites and a group site, each with a shaded table, a fire ring and a grill, two day-use picnic sites, flush toilets in two buildings, drinking water, a dump station, a small interpretive desert garden and a watchable-wildlife exhibit. Most Valley residents have never heard of it, because it is on the way to Las Vegas rather than anywhere people camp on purpose.
Desert bighorn sheep work the cliffs across the creek. Vermilion flycatchers, herons, Gila woodpeckers and raptors work the riparian strip, and the BLM points to sites 7, 8 and 9 as the birding sites. Javelina and foxes come through at night. What you get is the most civilized BLM campground in Arizona beside a swimmable desert creek, for $14. What you do not get is quiet: the highway bridge is a quarter mile away and US 93 is the truck route to Las Vegas.
How to camp Burro Creek right
Reserve the big-rig sites, wing the rest. $14 per night, $50 for the group site. The group site and sites 7, 9 and 10 through 17 are on recreation.gov and must be booked at least seven days ahead; sites 1 through 6, 8 and 18 through 23 are first come, first served and usually open outside holiday weekends. The BLM’s 14-day limit applies. Sites 10 through 17 are the level pull-ins built for motorhomes and fifth wheels and they go first; tent campers want 7, 8 and 9 on the creek side.
Get there. About 2 hours 5 minutes from Old Town. Loop 101 west to US 60 (Grand Avenue) northwest to Wickenburg, then US 93 north toward Kingman for about 60 miles of fast, empty highway through Nothing and past the Santa Maria River. At milepost 140.2, just south of the Burro Creek bridge, turn west onto the signed campground road and go 1.25 miles on pavement. The next services north are in Wikieup, 10 miles on; Wickenburg has everything. Cell service is poor; download maps before Wickenburg.
Pick the season. October through April. The BLM describes the summer as desolate, and at this elevation it means highs over 105. Wildflowers come March through May after a wet winter, and that is when the creek runs best. February with a good book is the campground at its finest.
Water and facilities. Drinking water at several faucets, flush toilets, a dump station. No hookups, no showers. Trash service is provided.
The creek. Swimming and wading are at your own risk; the pools under the bridge are deep, cold and clear enough to see the bottom in spring, and by early summer they shrink and warm. Short trails lead down from camp. The canyon floods in monsoon and winter storms, so stay off the bars when rain is upstream. The gravel bars downstream carry agate and jasper, and collecting a few hand samples is legal on this BLM land.
Dogs. On leash.
Skip it if silence is the point. US 93 is a major truck route and the bridge is a quarter mile away; the canyon dampens it but does not erase it. Alamo Lake is 90 minutes southwest with real quiet and a lake. For a cool-weather alternative at altitude, Hualapai Mountain Park above Kingman is an hour north. If a swimmable creek in February is the point, this is it.
A bridge-builders’ canyon
The Big Sandy valley that US 93 follows between Wikieup and the Santa Maria is Hualapai country, the southern edge of a people whose range ran from here north to the Grand Canyon, with Yavapai bands in the mountains to the south and east. A perennial pool in a desert canyon was never anonymous to them; it was a camp, a hunting stand and a crossing. The Anglo names came with the prospectors of the 1860s to 1880s, who worked the Aquarius Mountains and the copper outcrop at Bagdad upstream and threaded wagon roads from Prescott to the Colorado River crossings down the Big Sandy. Burro Creek is named for the feral burros of the Big Sandy country, which the BLM still manages as a herd today.
For most of a century the canyon was something you went around. The first highway bridge over Burro Creek was built in 1954, a modest span on an alignment that carried State Route 93 until 1964; that old road and old bridge, now maintained by the BLM, are what you drive to reach the campground today. The state’s ambition was larger. In the early 1960s Arizona was building a direct highway from the Nevada line at Hoover Dam southeast to Wickenburg and Phoenix, and Burro Creek Canyon was the one obstacle on it that could not be graded around.
The answer was the Burro Creek Bridge, finished on March 23, 1966: a two-hinged steel deck arch spanning 680 feet, designed under state bridge engineer Ralph Hoffman, who had also worked on Navajo Bridge, and costing almost $1.5 million. It was one of the few large Arizona bridges of the interstate era not built for an interstate, and it is still the most dramatic structure on US 93, a thin arch high over a blue pool with saguaros on the cliffs on either side. ADOT’s photographers have been shooting it from the creek bottom ever since.
The campground came after the bridge, built by the BLM’s Kingman office on the bench below it, and it was built to a standard the agency rarely reaches: flush toilets in two buildings, piped water, a dump station, shaded tables, an interpretive desert garden with a packed-dirt path and a bench, and a watchable-wildlife exhibit with signs angled for viewing from a seat. The BLM’s own page does not give the construction year, and this guide will not guess one; the architecture and the fixtures say 1970s or 1980s. It was meant as the showpiece recreation site on the Kingman-to-Wickenburg road, and for a BLM campground in the low desert it still is.
The highway caught up with it. US 93 was widened to four lanes through here in the 2000s, and a twin arch went up beside the 1966 span to carry southbound traffic; ADOT’s records put the second bridge’s completion between 2005 and 2008 depending on which milestone is counted. The two arches together are the view from camp, and the trucks on them are the sound. In the 2020s the BLM put the group site and about half the individual sites on recreation.gov with a seven-day advance rule, left the rest first come at $14, and otherwise changed nothing, which is why the interpretive signs are faded and the toilets still flush.
Why it matters
Burro Creek is what happens when a highway department has to cross a desert canyon: a bridge worth stopping for, a campground built in its shadow, and a perennial creek that most of the traffic above never knows is there. It is also the best argument on this site for the BLM as a campground operator, with water, flush toilets and a dump station for $14 in a place the Forest Service would have left a vault toilet and a fee tube. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is a winter weekend or a Vegas-bound overnight: two hours up US 60 and US 93, reserve 10 through 17 if you are towing, bring a swimsuit in March and earplugs every month.