What is Canyon Point Campground?
Canyon Point is the Rim’s full-service campground: just over 100 sites (the Forest Service counts 103 units, Recreation.gov 113) spread across several loops of ponderosa pine and aspen at 7,500 feet, right off SR 260 a few miles west of Forest Lakes. Thirty-two sites have electric hookups, five are doubles for 16 people, and two group sites hold 25 and 55. There are showers, flush toilets, drinking water, a dump station, firewood for sale, a camp host and an amphitheater where forest naturalists give evening programs in summer. Nothing else on the Mogollon Rim comes close, which is why it fills with RVs from the Valley and with families who have never camped before.
The compensation for the crowds is the setting and two short trails that leave from the campground. The Sinkhole Trail walks out to one of the collapsed limestone sinkholes that give the area its name, and the Back Alley Trail reaches an overlook on the edge of the Rim with the usual 2,000-foot drop and a view to the Mazatzals. Willow Springs Lake is 5 miles west, and the dirt Rim Road starts across from the visitor station.
What you get is a hot shower, a 30-amp plug and a reservation in the pines two hours from Scottsdale, with a lake and an overlook within a short walk or drive. What you do not get is solitude or silence: it is a big, busy campground beside a highway, and it sounds like one.
How to camp Canyon Point right
Reserve, or come in the shoulder weeks. A standard single is $38 per night for up to eight people and one vehicle; electric singles are $50; doubles $92 or $120; group sites $222 to $260. Every extra vehicle is $12 per night, cash or card at the kiosk. Most sites are on recreation.gov from about mid-May to mid-October; roughly 20 are first come, first served and assigned at the kiosk, and the shoulder weeks in late April to mid-May and in October are walk-in only, weather permitting. Book the electric loop only if you need it; the standard loops are the same pines at twelve dollars less, and the plug-in sites sell out first and sit closest together.
Get there. Take Loop 101 or Loop 202 to SR 87, the Beeline, about 90 minutes to Payson, then SR 260 east roughly 35 miles: past Christopher Creek, up the switchbacks onto the Rim, past the Rim Visitor Information Station and the Woods Canyon and Willow Springs turnoffs. The campground entrance is on the right at milepost 287, about 4.5 miles east of the visitor station and 19 miles west of Heber. It is paved to your site. Figure about 2 hours 20 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. Stock up in Payson; Forest Lakes, three miles east, has gas and a small store and not much else.
Pick the season. Generally May 1 to October 31, conditions permitting. Late May to early July is dry and warm. July and August bring an afternoon storm most days, and nights are in the 40s. September is prime, and an October weekday, with the aspens turning along SR 260 and half the loops empty, is the best version of this place.
Water, toilets, showers. All three, plus a dump station open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. No sewer or water hookups at sites, so arrive with tanks full.
Fire. Fire restrictions on the Rim usually start by June; when they do, the fire rings go cold and gas stoves are the rule. Firewood is sold at the campground when fires are allowed.
Walk the Sinkhole Trail early. The first hour of light, when the sinkhole and the Rim overlook are empty and the elk are still moving, is the one quiet hour the campground offers.
Dogs. Welcome on a leash and never left alone at the site. Horses and pack animals are not allowed.
Skip it if you want the Rim without the neighbors. Book Sinkhole down the road, Aspen on Woods Canyon Lake, or drive out the Rim Road and camp for free.
A mine, a subdivision and a fire that stopped half a mile short
The top of the Rim was Western Apache summer range for centuries, hunted and gathered by bands who wintered in the canyons below, and the escarpment itself carries the name of a Spanish governor of New Mexico, Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollón, who never saw it. The Army came along the edge first. Between 1872 and 1874 General George Crook’s soldiers built a supply road along the Rim between Fort Apache and Camp Verde, and its line survives as the Rim Road, Forest Road 300, which leaves SR 260 across from the visitor station four miles west of the campground. For the next eighty years the Rim top was Forest Service timber and cattle range with no road worth the name up from the Valley.
The country around Canyon Point was mined before it was camped. The Denison family opened a manganese mine in 1939 on the flat that is now Forest Lakes, two miles east, worked it through the war, and turned to logging in the 1960s. In May 1964 they subdivided the first unit of Forest Lakes Estates and formed an owners’ association; ten more units followed through May 1969, and a summer-cabin town grew up on the old mine site at 7,582 feet. It is the only town on the Rim between the Payson side and Heber, and its 155 year-round residents (as of 2020) are outnumbered a hundred to one on a July weekend.
The highway made all of it reachable. The Payson-to-Show Low road over the Rim was designated SR 160 in 1955 and renumbered SR 260 in 1969; Arizona Game and Fish created Willow Springs Lake in 1967 for the recreation the road would bring, adding it to the chain of Rim lakes the agency had begun with Woods Canyon. The Forest Service built Canyon Point beside the highway in the years after, on the flat pine bench nearest the new town and the new lake. Neither the Forest Service nor Recreation.gov gives a construction year, and this guide will not invent one; the layout, with big loops and long pull-throughs, says it was planned for trailers from the start.
The fire came in June 2002. The Rodeo Fire, set by a seasonal tribal firefighter near Cibecue on June 18, and the Chediski Fire, lit as a signal by a stranded quad rider two days later, merged on June 22 into what was then the largest wildfire in Arizona’s history, 468,638 acres across the Rim country to the southeast. Forest Lakes was evacuated at 1 p.m. on June 22. The fire reached within half a mile of the settlement on June 28 and stopped there; no homes were lost, and the campground reopened to a landscape that was green on one side of the highway and black on the other for years.
The last change was comfort. In the 2010s the Forest Service added 32 electric sites, showers, flush toilets and a dump station, moved the campground onto recreation.gov, and made Canyon Point the only full-service campground on the Rim. That decision is why the loops are full of motorhomes from the Valley and why first-time campers are sent here; it is also why the Sinkhole and Back Alley trails, which lead from the loops to a collapsed limestone sinkhole and the edge of the Rim, are the quietest part of the place.
Why it matters
Canyon Point explains how the Rim became the Valley’s summer backyard: a wagon road, then a state highway, then a lake built for the highway, a subdivision on a mine, a campground beside the highway and finally hookups and showers for the people the highway brought. It also explains the Rodeo-Chediski Fire’s half-mile, the margin by which this stretch stayed a forest. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is plain: if your group needs a shower, a plug or a loop of its own, this is the Rim campground, two hours and twenty minutes from Old Town; book the standard loop, walk the Sinkhole Trail at dawn, and come in October if you can.