What is Castle Hot Springs Road dispersed camping?
Northwest of Lake Pleasant the Hieroglyphic Mountains break into low volcanic hills, and Castle Hot Springs Road threads through them from SR 74 near Morristown to the old resort and on to the lake’s north end. Most of the ground along it is Bureau of Land Management land under the Hassayampa Field Office, and on BLM land you can camp on any existing disturbed site, for free, for 14 days in any 28. There are no designated sites, no toilets, no water and no trash service. The Google Maps pin, about 10 miles north of the highway, is one of many flats where people have camped for years.
Two things make this different from the Forest Service dispersed camping north of Carefree. First, the land is a checkerboard: Arizona State Trust sections, which need a $15 annual permit, are mixed in with BLM, and the resort and several ranches are private. Second, this is the Lake Pleasant Herd Management Area, 103,000 acres the BLM manages for a few hundred wild burros, mostly gray, descendants of prospectors’ animals. They will wander through camp. It is a place for self-contained campers with a map app, a portable toilet and a tolerance for gunfire on Saturday afternoons; it is not a place for a first night in a tent.
What you get is a free night under a dark sky 80 minutes from Old Town, with saguaros, a view of the Bradshaws and burros at dawn. What you do not get is a toilet, a ranger, quiet on a weekend, or any guarantee that the flat you picked is not State Trust land.
How to camp Castle Hot Springs Road right
Know whose land you are on. Free on BLM land, 14 days in 28, existing sites only, roughly 300 feet off the road, nothing new carved into the desert. State Trust parcels need the State Land Department recreation permit, $15 a year per person or $20 per family, bought online; they are not signed, so check a map app with a public-lands layer before you unroll anything. Groups and commercial use need a BLM permit. Private land, including the resort and the ranches, is closed.
Get there. Take Loop 101 west to Union Hills Drive, then 83rd Avenue and Lake Pleasant Parkway north to SR 74 (the Carefree Highway), and go west about 11 miles to Castle Hot Springs Road, signed on the right. The pavement runs a few miles north; after that it is graded gravel that any car handles when dry. The pullouts begin as soon as the dirt does, and the better camps are 8 to 12 miles in as the road climbs into the hills toward the resort. Figure 80 minutes from Old Town. Cow Creek Road, which branches east toward Crown King, is the rough one; high clearance only.
Pick the season. October through April. From May through September it is 100-plus with no shade and nothing here is worth that. Rain at any season turns the gravel to clay and the spurs to grease; if it has rained in the last two days, go somewhere else.
Drive past the first pullouts. They are the ones with the broken glass, the shot-up appliances and the weekend shooters. Keep going until the road has climbed, pick a flat that already has a fire ring, and park so you are not visible from the road.
Water and waste. None provided. A gallon a day per person, a trowel or a portable toilet, waste buried 6 inches deep and 200 feet from any wash, and every scrap of trash goes home with you. The nearest water and toilets are at Lake Pleasant Regional Park, which charges entry.
Shooting and fire. Recreational shooting is legal on most of this land. Camp away from berms and bench rests, and do not shoot from camp. BLM fire restrictions in central Arizona typically run from late spring through the monsoon; exploding targets, fireworks and tracer rounds are banned on Arizona BLM land year-round. Bring a stove.
Burros and dogs. The burros come through at first light and dusk; keep food sealed, give them room, and drive out slowly at night. Dogs are fine, but keep them leashed around the burros, which will kick. The desert wildlife guide covers the rest of what lives here.
Skip it if you want a developed night with water nearby. The Lake Pleasant campgrounds are 20 minutes back toward the highway, and the park itself has toilets, showers and a ramp. For free camping with pines instead of casings, Hazlett Hollow is at the far end of the Crown King road.
A resort road that the desert took back
The hot springs at the top of this road were a Yavapai place first. The Guwevkabaya band treated the warm water in the canyon as neutral ground for healing and, by the accounts settlers later wrote down, tried to keep its location from outsiders. They could not. A gold strike on the Colorado near Yuma in 1862 sent prospectors up every wash in the Hieroglyphic Mountains, and Colonel Charles Craig is credited with finding the springs in 1867. The Army spent the next decade fighting the Yavapai across this country, and permanent settlement waited until the 1880s. The prospectors left two things behind: a few shafts in the hills, and their pack animals. The burros that walk through your camp are the descendants of animals turned loose when the placer boom ended, protected since 1971 by federal law and managed today by the BLM as the Lake Pleasant Herd Management Area, 103,000 acres with a target population of 140 to 250.
The road itself was built for rich people. Frank M. Murphy, the mining magnate behind the Prescott railroads, bought the springs in the 1890s and opened Castle Hot Springs in 1896, Arizona’s first resort, with a rail spur and a wagon road from Hot Springs Junction on the Santa Fe line. His brother, Territorial Governor Nathan Oakes Murphy, moved his office here from Prescott in winter, so for a few seasons the territory was run from a hotel at the end of this gravel. Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Astors came; Theodore Roosevelt stayed in 1911 on his way to dedicate the dam that bears his name; Cecil B. DeMille shot The Squaw Man on the grounds in 1914. Walter Rounsevell, the former general manager, bought the place in 1926 and expanded it.
Below the resort, the valley changed. In 1927 the Maricopa Water District finished the Carl Pleasant Dam on the Agua Fria, the largest multiple-arch dam in the world at the time, and the irrigation lake behind it, about 3,700 acres, was the first Lake Pleasant. The resort, meanwhile, had a war: Rounsevell leased it to the Army in 1943 and 1944 as a rehabilitation center, and a wounded Navy lieutenant named John F. Kennedy spent three months here recovering after his PT boat was cut in half. Business came back by 1950. Then, weeks before Christmas in 1976, a fire destroyed the main hotel. The owners gave the property to Arizona State University, which ran a conference center for a few years and sold it in the 1980s, and for four decades the road ran to a ruin.
The lake grew while the resort sat empty. The Central Arizona Project began diverting Colorado River water into Lake Pleasant in 1973, and in 1994 the New Waddell Dam was finished, roughly tripling the lake and submerging the 1927 dam; the county park around it now covers more than 23,000 acres. The drought that followed kept the new lake from filling until 2005. In 2014 the Watt family bought the ruined resort for about $2 million, spent three years and a reported $25 million rebuilding it, and reopened it in 2019 for its own guests only. The road is its driveway again, and the camps along it are what they have been since the resort burned: free, unmanaged and increasingly busy.
Why it matters
This road explains the north Valley’s relationship with its public land better than any sign. The desert was Yavapai, then a mining district, then the approach to the most exclusive resort in the territory, then a forgotten strip of BLM checkerboard that Phoenix grew toward until it became the closest free camping to a million people. The burros, the bullet casings and the $25 million resort at the end are all the same story. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is conditional: it is a real free night under dark sky 80 minutes from Old Town, worth doing on a cool weeknight with a map app, a portable toilet and no illusions, and not worth doing on a Saturday in March unless you enjoy the sound of other people’s target practice.