What is Christopher Creek Campground?
Christopher Creek comes off the Rim in See Canyon and runs cold and clear through a narrow valley of ponderosa and oak before it reaches the little village of the same name. The campground sits on that creek, 43 sites split between two loops on either bank at 5,640 feet, with the water close enough to most sites that it is the thing you hear at night. The creek is stocked with rainbow trout each spring and holds brook and brown trout the rest of the year; in May the pools are deep enough for kids to swim, and by late June in a dry year they are not.
It is the archetype of the Payson-area campground and the one that fills first. Sites are small and close together, parking is tight, and there is a steady hum from SR 260 a quarter mile away. A single group site takes up to 25 people and five vehicles. The village, a short walk or two-minute drive, has a couple of restaurants and a store. The Rim lakes are ten minutes up the hill and Horton Creek is ten minutes back toward Payson. It is for families who want a creek at the tent door and a restaurant within walking distance, for anglers in May, and for anyone planning six months ahead; it is not for big rigs or for anyone who expects to drive up on a July Friday and find a site.
The owner’s map listed a “Verde Glen Campground” nearby. There is none on Christopher Creek; Verde Glen is a stretch of the East Verde River off the Control Road, about 20 miles west, where a Payson Ranger District order has prohibited overnight camping since July 2024. What you get here is the creekside pine campground everyone pictures. What you do not get is space, a shower, a dump station, or a site you did not book in winter.
How to camp Christopher Creek right
Reserve six months out. $24 a night for a single site, $80 for the group site, $8 for a second vehicle. April 1 to 14 is first come, first served; April 15 to October 31 sites are reserved on recreation.gov, three days to six months ahead (12 months for the group). A few sites stay first come all season, paid at a card-only machine. Set an alarm for the day six months before your target weekend, because that is when the creekside sites go; midweek in May and after Labor Day you can sometimes get one a few days out. Senior and Access passes take half off. The day-use area along the creek is separate and needs a Tonto pass.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, 75 miles to Payson. Turn east on SR 260 at the main junction and drive about 21 miles, past Kohls Ranch and up a long grade, to the signed campground turnoff on the right just before the village. A quarter mile of forest road brings you to the entrance. Everything is paved. Figure about 120 minutes from Old Town. Each site has a short parking pad; the Forest Service says parking is limited because the sites are small and close to the creek, and it means it. A second vehicle costs $8 and may not fit.
Pick the season. April through October. Mid-May to June and late September to October are best; the creek is highest in spring and lowest in late June. In July and August the monsoon arrives most afternoons, and a creek campground is not where you want to be when it rains hard upstream; know where the high ground is and read the flash flood entry.
Pick the site by the sound. The sites right on the water are also the ones that hear the least highway, so study the recreation.gov map before you choose.
Water and facilities. Potable water on site, vault toilets. No showers, dump station, hookups or firewood; buy wood in the village and do not haul it up from the Valley.
Fish and swim. Rainbow trout go in each spring and brookies and browns hold over; an Arizona license is required. The pools below the loops are kid-deep in May and early June.
Bears. The Forest Service flags increased bear activity on this creek in drought years. Everything with a smell goes in the vehicle, every night, dog food included.
Dogs. On leash. No OHVs in the campground, no generators in quiet hours.
Skip it if you cannot get a site. Sharp Creek, 1.5 miles east, is bigger, newer and almost as good, with less of a creek; Ponderosa is closer to Payson with more room for trailers; and the Rim lakes above, starting with Woods Canyon, have their own campgrounds ten minutes up the hill.
The Frenchman’s creek under the Rim
The valley this campground sits in was Tonto Apache country, and the Mogollon Rim above it was an Apache stronghold until George Crook’s campaigns of the early 1870s. Between 1871 and 1874 Crook’s troops cut a military road along the top of the Rim from Fort Whipple past Camp Verde to Fort Apache, a few miles above the creek; the Rim Road, Forest Road 300, follows it today, and the Rim country below opened to settlers in the decade after.
One of them gave the creek its name. Isadore Christopher, a French-born scout and cartographer by the local account, settled here in the 1880s and built up the 160-acre CI Ranch on the creek. The story everyone in the village tells is that Apaches burned his cabins while he was away, that soldiers found a bear carcass he had hung inside and buried it as his body, and that the scouts Tom Horn and Al Sieber carried the tale; no date survives for it. He cured pork in brine in a hollowed-out log and sold the meat to Fort McDowell and to Winslow, and the log is on display at the Rim Country Museum in Payson. His second wife, Mary Hope, lived on the ranch until her death in the early 1900s. That history comes down through a local tavern’s account rather than a historian’s, and the dates in it are loose, which is worth knowing.
The federal government arrived for the water. The Tonto Forest Reserve was proclaimed on October 3, 1905, to protect the Salt River watershed above the Roosevelt Dam then under construction, and it became the Tonto National Forest in 1907; the creek has been national forest since, apart from the private ranch land downstream that became the hamlet. Zane Grey hunted this country from a cabin northeast of Payson and set his Rim novels in it, and the Valley families who read them began driving up once the roads allowed. In 1938 Mrs. Ashby and her family bought land on the creek and opened the first barbecue restaurant in Christopher Creek, the start of the village’s life as a stop for people on their way to the Rim. The Forest Service built the campground on the stretch of creek it owned, two loops on either bank in the plain style of the era; the agency does not publish the year.
Fire has shaped the view on the drive in. The Dude Fire started by lightning on June 25, 1990, below the Rim northeast of Payson, in a June when Phoenix hit 122 degrees; it burned more than 30,000 acres, killed six firefighters of the Perryville inmate crew in Walk Moore Canyon and destroyed Zane Grey’s cabin. The memorial is a few miles west of here off SR 260, and the fire’s scar is still readable on the slopes above the highway. Christopher Creek itself was spared, which is one reason its big ponderosas are now the exception along this stretch of the Rim.
The last change is administrative. In July 2024 the Payson Ranger District issued an occupancy order running to 2029 that banned overnight camping at Verde Glen on the East Verde and at other creekside spots that had been used to death, pushing more of the Valley’s demand onto the reservable sites here. Bear warnings have become routine in drought summers. The village had 121 residents in the 2020 census, which is fewer than the campground holds on a July Saturday.
Why it matters
Christopher Creek is the template for what the Valley means by “going up to the Rim”: a cold creek in big pines, a two-hour drive, a village with a restaurant, and a campground that has not grown since it was built because the valley is too narrow to let it. Its history is the Rim country’s in brief, from an Apache stronghold to a Frenchman’s ranch to a forest reserve, a barbecue stand and a reservation system that fills in minutes. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is simple: if you can book a creekside site for a weekend in late May or late September, do it, bring one vehicle and a trout rod, and put the cooler in the truck at night. If you cannot, Sharp Creek is a mile and a half away and nearly as good.