What is Cholla Campground?
Roosevelt Lake is the biggest lake entirely inside Arizona, a 1911 reservoir on the Salt River that fills the Tonto Basin between the Four Peaks, the Sierra Ancha and the Superstitions. Cholla is its flagship campground: 206 sites in four loops on a bench above the north shore, 5 miles north of Roosevelt Dam, with every site under a steel shade ramada and every loop served by flush toilets, hot showers and potable water. The Forest Service calls it one of the largest solar-powered campgrounds in the country, and the panels are easy to spot above the restroom buildings.
This is camping for people who want the lake and the stars without giving up plumbing. Sites are generous and mostly level, trailers up to 32 feet fit, and the paved boat ramp with a courtesy dock sits at the front of the campground. What you give up is privacy and shade beyond the ramada; the ground is open desert scrub at about 2,100 feet, and the views to the Sierra Ancha across the water do most of the work. Bald eagles nest on the lake, which is why some coves close to boats from December through June.
What you get is the easiest real lake-camping trip from Scottsdale: two hours of pavement, a hot shower, a ramp, a dump station and 206 chances at a site. What you do not get is a wilderness feeling, a swim from your tent, or a reason to be here between June and August.
How to camp it right
Reserve in winter, walk in otherwise. $25 a night for a single site, $50 for a double, with an $8 charge for each vehicle beyond two, paid at a card-only fee machine at the entrance. From November 1 to March 15 the odd-numbered sites can be booked on recreation.gov; even-numbered sites, and all sites the rest of the year, are first come, first served. Senior and Access passes take half off a single site. On a February or March weekend the reservable loops fill by Friday evening but the first-come sites usually last until Saturday afternoon.
Leave the Tonto Pass logic at the gate. The nightly fee is separate from the Tonto Pass, which you only need for shoreline areas like Bermuda Flat and Cholla Bay and for the other boat launches around the lake. The Roosevelt Lake Visitor Center at milepost 242.8 sells it, along with maps and water.
Get there. Take Shea Boulevard east to SR 87, the Beeline, and climb north through the Mazatzals for about 60 miles to the SR 188 junction. Turn right and follow SR 188 southeast for 28 miles, past the Tonto Basin store and the visitor center, to the signed Cholla entrance on the left. It is roughly two hours from Old Town, all of it paved. The Globe route via US 60 is similar in time and much less scenic.
Pick the season. Open year round, worth it from October through April. The Forest Service is blunt about summer: highs over 100 degrees from June through August, and RV air conditioners that cannot keep up. Spring brings the wildflowers on the basin slopes and the bass to the shallows.
Check the level before you tow. Roosevelt has spent most of the last two decades well below full, and the shore below the campground is a long walk down a bare bathtub ring. The campground ramp is usable only when the lake is above 2,110 feet; check SRP’s daily figure before towing a boat up, and drive to Bermuda Flat for water access if you want to swim.
Water, toilets and the dump. Potable water, flush toilets and showers are all here, and a dump station across from the Christmas Loop opens on weekends from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pack out what the dumpsters will not take.
Dogs and javelina. Dogs on leash. Expect javelina through camp after dark and keep food in the vehicle.
Skip it if 206 sites and a ramp sounds like a parking lot. Windy Hill across the lake is quieter and nearly as equipped, Schoolhouse at the upper end is the tent camper’s choice, Indian Point is the primitive one, and Burnt Corral on Apache Lake is the prettiest if you can stand 30 more minutes of road. Stop at Tonto National Monument either way.
A campground built for a lake that filled once
The Tonto Basin was farmed before it was flooded. Salado people irrigated the valley from about 1250 and built the cliff dwellings at Tonto National Monument in the hills above the Salt, then left in the 1400s; the basin was Western Apache and Yavapai country until General Crook’s campaigns of the 1870s cleared it for ranchers. The town of Roosevelt, the farms along Tonto Creek and the Salado fields are all under the lake.
The lake came from the first federal dam. The Reclamation Service, created by the 1902 act, chose the Salt River as one of its five original projects on March 14, 1903, and built Roosevelt Dam at the head of the basin with cement burned on site and a road, the Apache Trail, built to reach it. Floods interrupted the work in 1905; the dam was finished in 1911 for about $10 million, the largest masonry dam in the world at the time, and Theodore Roosevelt himself dedicated it on March 18, 1911. The reservoir behind it, about 21,500 acres when full, became the Valley’s fishing lake and the reason Scottsdale’s canals run; it was named a National Historic Landmark in 1963.
Cholla exists because the dam was rebuilt. Under the Plan 6 program, from 1989 to 1996, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Salt River Project raised Roosevelt Dam 77 feet to 357 feet, encased the old masonry in concrete, added about 20 percent to the reservoir’s storage for flood control and the Central Arizona Project, and spent about $430 million. SR 188 was realigned onto higher ground, the Roosevelt Lake Bridge was built to carry it across the lake’s arm, and the Forest Service built a new set of recreation sites on the shoreline the enlarged lake would reach when full: Cholla, Windy Hill, Schoolhouse and the rest, with their ramadas, flush toilets and solar power. The old shoreline camps went under the new high-water line. In 1999 the National Historic Landmark designation was withdrawn because the original dam could no longer be seen; the same year the Tonto Pass began paying for the shoreline sites around the lake.
The lake has reached that line once. In February 2009, after a wet winter, the enlarged Roosevelt filled to 100 percent for the first time and the water lapped the campgrounds as designed. Most years since it has run far below, and the long bare slope between Cholla’s ramadas and the water is the gap between the lake the Forest Service built for and the lake the drought has delivered. Bald eagles nested on the lake through all of it, and the seasonal cove closures from December through June are the one rule here with teeth.
What is coming is more of the same lake, managed harder. SRP runs Roosevelt as the Valley’s main storage, the Forest Service runs Cholla as its showcase campground, and the two meet at a ramp that works only above 2,110 feet. The 206 sites are not going anywhere; the water comes and goes.
Why it matters
Cholla is the Salt River Project you can sleep in. The dam that made Scottsdale possible is five miles away, the lake it holds is the one the Valley’s taps depend on, and the campground was built at the exact elevation Reclamation promised the enlarged lake would reach, which it has done once in 30 years. For a Scottsdale camper it is the easiest real lake trip there is: two hours of pavement, a hot shower, a ramp and almost always a site. Go between October and April, reserve an odd-numbered site away from the ramp, check the lake level before you tow, and walk up to the dam to see what $430 million of concrete looks like.