What is C.C. Cragin Reservoir?
Most Arizona reservoirs are wide bowls. C.C. Cragin is a slot. The dam, built by Phelps Dodge in 1965 to move water from the Little Colorado basin to its mines, backs East Clear Creek up into a canyon so narrow that the reservoir is miles long and sometimes less than a hundred yards wide, with sandstone and limestone walls rising straight out of the water. It holds about 15,000 acre-feet when full, sits at 6,695 feet, and since 2005 has belonged to the Salt River Project, which pipes part of it over the Rim to Payson, the town’s drought insurance. The name honors a former SRP general manager; the old name, Blue Ridge, has refused to die.
For a visitor, it is a paddle before it is anything else. Motors are limited to electric or 10 horsepower, there is no shoreline to speak of, and a kayak or canoe can run for hours between the walls with nothing to see but rock, pines on the rim and the occasional osprey. Game and Fish stocks rainbow trout, and browns and brookies hold in the cold inlet water. Swimming is technically allowed away from the ramp and practically impossible. It is for paddlers who want quiet water in a canyon, anglers willing to carry a boat, and nobody who wants a beach, a picnic table or a place to pitch a tent.
What you get is the best canyon paddle in Arizona for the price of a fishing license. What you do not get is water, shade at the ramp, camping, a trailer launch in low-water years, or the road at all from November into April.
How to paddle C.C. Cragin right
Pay nothing, carry a license. No day-use or launch fee. An Arizona fishing license is required to fish, and green sunfish, illegally introduced, should be killed, not released.
Get there. Take SR 87, the Beeline, through Payson, Pine and Strawberry, up the Rim to Clints Well, then about 4 miles northeast on SR 87 to gravel Forest Road 751. Follow it about 6 miles southeast, past Rock Crossing Campground, as it drops steeply into the canyon to the ramp. The gravel is passable by passenger cars in most weather. Figure about 2 hours 40 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. The ramp area is small: a few dozen designated spaces, one vault toilet, a dock. On a summer Saturday it is full by nine.
Pick the season. FR 751 closes in winter, usually November into April. Late May to June and September are the months, and the morning is the time: the canyon funnels wind, and by late morning a paddle up-canyon is a slog and the return a sleigh ride. In monsoon season the canyon is a lightning trap; be off the water by early afternoon, and know that the wind arrives before the storm does.
Obey the vehicle order. Past Rock Crossing Campground, FR 751 is closed to vehicles over 22 feet and vehicle-and-trailer combinations over 50 feet, and you may park only in designated spaces. The order runs through January 2027 and the Forest Service tickets.
Check the ramp. It has been closed to trailers because low water exposed boulders. Hand-carry boats are unaffected, which is why the lake is quiet. Confirm current status with the Mogollon Rim Ranger District, 928-477-2255, before you bring a trailer.
Paddle it. Launch at dawn, go up the main arm toward the East Clear Creek inlet, and plan on three to five hours round trip to see the best walls. There are only a handful of spots to get out, so bring everything you need in the boat and know where you will land. Fill water bottles in Payson or Clints Well; there is nothing here but the toilet.
Camp elsewhere. No drinking water, no tables, no camping at the reservoir. Rock Crossing, 2 miles up the road, has water, bear lockers and partial reservations; Blue Ridge Campground is about 10 miles; Clints Well is the cheap late-arrival option at the junction.
Dogs. Leashed at all times.
Skip it if you want a lake with a shore. Knoll Lake on the Rim Road has a campground on the water and the same motor limit, and Woods Canyon Lake has a store, rentals and a trail around it. If you want to paddle between cliffs, nothing else in the state comes close.
The copper company’s lake that became Payson’s
Nothing about this reservoir was built for a kayak. East Clear Creek drains the plateau north of the Mogollon Rim toward the Little Colorado, through country that was Sinagua and later Apache range; the Rim just south of it is where George Crook’s troops cut their military road between 1871 and 1874 from Fort Whipple past Camp Verde to Fort Apache, the line Forest Road 300 follows now. Clints Well grew up where the Payson road met it. The canyon became federal land when the San Francisco Mountains Forest Reserve was created in 1898 and stayed so when Theodore Roosevelt folded it into the Coconino National Forest on July 2, 1908.
The dam came from the other side of the state. Phelps Dodge, the copper company, needed water for its mines and smelter at Morenci and had been taking it from the Black River on the Salt’s headwaters, water the Salt River Project considered its own. The deal that settled the argument was an exchange: in 1965 Phelps Dodge built Blue Ridge Dam across East Clear Creek, impounding about 15,000 acre-feet of Little Colorado basin water, and pumped it over the Rim into the East Verde, which flows to the Verde and the Salt and SRP’s reservoirs. For every acre-foot it put into the Verde, it could take one from the Black River for Morenci. The result was a copper company owning a trout lake in a canyon with no mine within a hundred miles, which is why the lake looks like a flooded slot and not a recreation project: it was engineered to store water, not to have a shore.
The exchange ran for forty years, and then the whole arrangement was tidied up in the Arizona Water Settlements Act of 2004, the federal law that resolved the Gila River Indian Community’s claims and a tangle of related disputes. As part of it, Phelps Dodge handed the dam, the reservoir and the pipeline to the Salt River Project in 2005, and SRP renamed the lake for C.C. Cragin, a longtime general manager. It also wrote in a share for the town below the Rim: Payson, which had been rationing groundwater through every drought, secured a right to an annual share of the reservoir. Payson spent the following decade building the pipeline and treatment plant to bring that water down from the Rim, the biggest public-works project in the town’s history and the reason it can now say it has a renewable supply. The Forest Service, meanwhile, rebuilt the ramp area with designated parking and a single vault toilet, and left the canyon otherwise alone.
The name change did not take. The Forest Service uses both names, the signs mostly say Cragin, and everyone from Payson to Flagstaff still says Blue Ridge. What has changed is the water level. Drought years draw the reservoir down, and in 2024 low water exposed boulders at the foot of the ramp; the Forest Service closed it to trailers and issued Order 03-04-07-24-02, which bans vehicles over 22 feet and combinations over 50 feet beyond Rock Crossing Campground and swimming within 50 feet of the ramp, through January 2027. The practical effect has been to hand the lake to paddlers, who never needed the ramp anyway.
Why it matters
C.C. Cragin is the strangest lake within three hours of Scottsdale and the one that best explains how Arizona moves water: a copper company dammed a creek on the wrong side of the Rim, pumped it over the top to trade for a river on the other side of the state, and forty years later a federal settlement turned the whole contraption into a small town’s water supply and a national forest’s quietest reservoir. For a Scottsdale paddler the verdict is unqualified. It is the best canyon flat water in the state, free, motor-limited and nearly empty on a weekday. Go in June or September, launch at dawn, carry everything, and call Blue Ridge whatever you like.