What is Childs?
In 1908 the Arizona Power Company started building a hydroelectric plant on the Verde River at a place called Childs, fed by a flume that carried nearly all of Fossil Creek down from the hills. The Childs plant and its sister at Irving lit Jerome’s mines and then Phoenix for more than 90 years, and Fossil Creek ran as a trickle the whole time. In 2004 APS agreed to decommission both plants and return the water; the creek came back blue, and the plant site became this: a bare flat beside the river at 2,626 feet, a vault toilet, some mesquites and cottonwoods, and free camping.
It is undeveloped in the full sense. No sites, no tables, no water, no trash cans. People park where the ground is flat and camp along the river bench. The Verde here is a designated Wild and Scenic River, cold and clear at low flow and a brown torrent after storms, running through a canyon with nothing in it. A mile upstream, across a ford, are the ruins and pools of Verde Hot Springs, which is why most people come, and which is why warm weekends bring a crowd that does not match the emptiness of the map.
What you get is a free night on a real river in a deep, dark canyon, with a hot spring for the morning. What you do not get is anything the Forest Service built beyond one toilet, any cell service, any help if the road beats your vehicle, or any guarantee that the ford is passable when you arrive.
How to camp Childs right
Pay nothing, reserve nothing. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit. No permit for Childs itself. The ground is national forest and the Coconino’s dispersed camping rules apply.
Mind the Fossil Creek corridor. From April 1 to October 1 the Fossil Creek permit area along FR 708 and FR 502 restricts parking, camping, fires and glass, and requires a permit to park at the creek. Childs sits outside the permit lots, but you drive through the corridor to reach it; expect rangers at the junction and confirm the current rules with the Red Rock Ranger District at (928) 203-2900 before a warm-season trip. Fossil Creek itself is a separate guide.
Get there in daylight. Take I-17 north about 85 miles to SR 260 at Camp Verde and go east about 7 miles to Forest Road 708, Fossil Creek Road. Turn right. FR 708 is graded dirt for most of 15 miles, steep and rough on the descent off the mesa, to the junction with FR 502. Turn south on FR 502 for the last 6 miles down to the river; the Forest Service describes this stretch as very bad, and it is: washed-out dips, drop-offs and clay that turns slick in rain. High clearance is the minimum. Do not let a phone route you through Dugas Road from I-17; people have gotten stuck on cliffs that way. Figure 2 hours 50 minutes from Old Town, an hour of it on dirt, and arrive before dark the first time; finding a flat spot among the mesquites by headlight is miserable.
Pick the season. October through April. Summer is over 100 degrees in the canyon, and monsoon rain makes the road and the ford dangerous. The flash flood rules apply to the Verde itself, which rises brown and fast with storms far upstream.
Camp upstream of the toilet. The best spots are along the river bench under the trees, away from the turnaround where groups park their trucks and run generators.
Water and waste. None. Bring a gallon per person per day and a filter for emergencies, a shovel, and a trash bag per day; you pack out everything.
Fires. Only outside Stage 1 and Stage 2 restrictions, which usually begin in late spring. Along the river a Wild and Scenic order limits fires to pans and stoves; Childs campers are exempt from that order, not from the forest-wide one. Bring a fire pan anyway.
Walk to the springs early. Verde Hot Springs is a mile upstream with a river ford. Check the Camp Verde gauge before you leave home: at high water the ford is not an option and you will have driven three hours for a cold river. Go before the day crowd crosses.
Dogs. Fine, under control; the ford is deep for small dogs.
Skip it if you want a developed campground or a car-friendly road. Clear Creek near Camp Verde is paved to the gate, and Beaver Creek has water and tables under sycamores. The Verde River entry covers the whole river from Paulden to the Salt.
The power plant that drank a creek
Fossil Creek got its name in the 1860s, when a party traveling with Territorial Governor John Goodwin saw its travertine, the pale calcium carbonate that coats everything the spring water touches, and took it for petrified wood. Yavapai and Apache families had lived along it and the Verde for centuries; the Yavapai name for the creek is Hakhavsuwa. The spring at its head pours out 72-degree water at a steady rate all year, and that steadiness is what made it worth stealing.
In 1900 a rancher named Lew Turner bought the Fossil Creek water rights with the idea of making electricity for the copper mines at Jerome, and brought in three partners to form the Arizona Power Company. Construction began in 1908, and the numbers still impress: 600 men, most of them Apache and Mojave laborers, 400 mules and 150 wagons moving over a 40-mile trail from Mayer, building a 25-foot diversion dam across the creek, 8,800 feet of concrete flume along the canyon wall, and a powerhouse on the Verde at a place the company named for S. W. Childs, its bond broker at the Bonbright firm in New York. The Childs plant went online in 1909. The Irving plant, named for Irving Bonbright, was added upstream in 1915 and 1916, and together the two made 4.2 megawatts. A 75-mile line reached Phoenix in 1919, and by 1920 Childs-Irving was supplying as much as 70 percent of the electricity used in the capital. Phoenix’s first electric decade ran on Fossil Creek.
The plant made a resort possible. In the early 1920s Floyd Williams and his son built the Verde Hot Springs Hotel on the far bank a mile upstream, reached by the power company’s road and a crossing of the river; it burned to the ground in 1962, and its concrete shell and spring-fed pools are what people soak in today. The plants ran on through the century with a shrinking crew, the Arizona Power Company folded into Arizona Public Service, and Fossil Creek, with nearly all of its flow in the flume, ran as a trickle for 96 years.
Protection came before restoration. Congress designated 40.5 miles of the Verde, including this stretch, as Wild and Scenic on August 28, 1984, and the Childs-Irving complex, already named an engineering landmark in the 1970s, joined the National Register of Historic Places on August 9, 1991. Then APS did the arithmetic. The plants produced little, their license was up for renewal, and a restored creek was worth more in goodwill than 4.2 megawatts; the company agreed to decommission them, shut both plants in 2005, and in 2008 removed the diversion dam, the flumes and the access roads and replanted the dam site. Fossil Creek went back to full flow within hours and began building hundreds of new travertine dams along six miles of canyon. In 2009 Congress named 16.8 miles of it a Wild and Scenic River. The powerhouse at Childs came down with the rest, and the flat where it stood, with its one vault toilet, is where you camp.
Why it matters
Childs is the rare place in Arizona where a river was taken and given back. For nearly a century this flat held the machine that lit Jerome and then Phoenix on water that should have been in Fossil Creek, and the blue creek a few miles up the road exists because a utility decided in 2005 that it was worth more wild. The camping is a byproduct: free ground on a Wild and Scenic river, with a burned hotel’s hot pools a mile upstream, at the end of a road that keeps the crowd honest. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is firm: go between October and April, in a high-clearance vehicle, before dark, with every drop of water you need and a fire pan, and read the Camp Verde gauge before you count on the springs.