What is Cinder Hills OHV Area dispersed camping?
About 940 years ago Sunset Crater erupted and buried the country northeast of the San Francisco Peaks in black cinder. The national monument protects the cone itself; immediately south of it the Coconino National Forest did the opposite and opened 13,500 acres of cinder hills and craters to cross-country off-highway vehicle riding, one of the few places in Arizona where you can legally point a dirt bike at a hill and go. The Cinder Hills OHV Area is that place, at about 6,700 feet among scattered ponderosas, and the Forest Service allows dispersed camping throughout it: free, no sites, no facilities, 14 days.
The result is two campgrounds in one. Along FR 776 and the first mile of FR 777, which are hardened, the toy haulers and motorhomes gather on broad flats and ride out from camp. Beyond, where the roads turn to deep cinder, overlanders and tent campers climb the shoulders of the cones for a view that runs from the Peaks to the Painted Desert. The 2022 Tunnel Fire burned through here and closed the area for a time; it is open again, and the burned snags are part of the scenery now. A 53,000-acre buffer around the OHV zone stays closed to cross-country travel, which keeps the riding inside the lines. It is for riding families who want to camp where they ride, and for overlanders with four-wheel drive and traction boards who want a free, legal, spectacular spot near Flagstaff; it is not for anyone who wants quiet on a weekend or a toilet at any time.
What you get is free camping on a volcano with a sunrise view of the Peaks and legal cross-country riding out the tent door. What you do not get is water, a toilet, trash service, shade, shelter from the wind, or silence from May through October.
How to camp Cinder Hills right
Pay nothing, know the lines. Free, 14-day limit, camp inside the OHV area on existing disturbed ground, not along the entrance road before you reach it. OHVs need the Arizona decal, and certain routes are restricted to licensed vehicles for safety; cross-country riding is legal only inside the designated 13,500 acres.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-17 north to Flagstaff, then US 89 north past the Flagstaff Mall about 7 miles to Forest Road 776 on the right, signed for Cinder Hills. About 2 hours 45 minutes from Old Town. FR 776 is graded and firm; camping begins once you are inside the Hills. There is no connection to the Sunset Crater-Wupatki loop road (FR 545), and driving cross-country toward it is prohibited. Fill water and fuel in Flagstaff; there is nothing out here.
Pick the season and the day. May through October. Snow closes the cinder roads in winter and the open flats are brutally windy in spring. Weekends in season are loud; a Tuesday in September is the Cinder Hills at its best.
Pick your campground. The big flats a mile or two in on FR 776 are where the toy haulers circle up and the generators run; if that is your scene it is a good one with plenty of room. If it is not, air down, take FR 777 or one of the cinder tracks up onto a cone’s shoulder, and camp where a two-wheel-drive van cannot follow.
Do not get stuck. Cinder is dry sand with sharp edges. Air down, carry a shovel and traction boards, bring a full-size spare for the lava, and keep two-wheel-drive rigs on FR 776.
Water, toilets, trash, glass. None of the first three; bring a portable toilet and pack it all out, and read the Leave No Trace entry if you are new to dispersed camping. The ban on glass containers in the Cinder Hills is specific and enforced. Bonito Campground next door has water and flush toilets for a fee.
Fire. The Coconino’s restrictions often start in May and go to Stage 2, which bans all wood and charcoal fires, and this is one of the first areas to get there. Check before you go.
Wind and sky. Stake everything and park the rig as a windbreak. After dark the flats sit under the same International Dark Sky the monuments next door were named for; see the stargazing guide.
Dogs. Fine, under control, and kept clear of the riding lines.
Skip it if you want pines and quiet. Lockett Meadow is in the aspens on the far side of the Peaks, Marshall Lake is free dispersed camping with elk instead of engines, and Lakeview has a lake and a toilet for $30.
The cinder the monument saved and the forest opened
Everything here is young. Sunset Crater erupted around 1085, the last gasp of the San Francisco volcanic field, and threw ash and cinder over more than 800 square miles, building a cone about 1,000 feet tall and sending the Bonito and Kana-a lava flows out of its base. The Sinagua farmers who lived in the area were driven out for a time and then came back, because the cinder held moisture and made the thin soil better for corn; their pueblos at Wupatki, a few miles north, date from the decades after the eruption. The hills you camp on are the eruption’s fallout, and they have not had 940 years to grow much more than scattered ponderosa.
The federal government took the ground with the rest of the plateau when the San Francisco Mountains Forest Reserve was created in 1898 and Theodore Roosevelt consolidated the Coconino National Forest on July 2, 1908. The cone was nearly blown up anyway. In 1928 the studio Famous Players-Lasky planned to set off explosives on the flank of Sunset Crater to film a landslide for a Zane Grey picture, Avalanche; the public outcry led Herbert Hoover to proclaim Sunset Crater National Monument in 1930. The monument protected the cone and the lava flows. The cinder country south of it stayed ordinary national forest, which is the whole reason this guide exists.
The two agencies then went in opposite directions. The Park Service closed the trail up Sunset Crater in 1973 because hikers were eroding the cinder cone faster than it could hold itself together, and shut the ice cave in the Bonito flow in 1984 after a partial collapse; backcountry hiking in the monument is still prohibited. The Forest Service, with the same cinder on its side of the line, designated 13,500 acres of it as an off-highway vehicle area open to cross-country travel, one of very few such areas in Arizona, and drew a 53,000-acre buffer around it that is closed to cross-country riding and open only on designated routes. The agency does not publish the year the area was designated, and we did not find a source for it. The logic is plain enough: cinder recovers from tire tracks the way sand does, and the Forest Service chose to concentrate the riding on the ground that could take it. In 2016 the monument, with Wupatki and Walnut Canyon, was named an International Dark Sky Park; the sky over the OHV flats is the same one.
Fire rewrote the place in 2022. The Tunnel Fire started on April 17 near US 89 in the Timberline area north of Flagstaff, ran northeast on the spring wind, burned 26,532 acres of the Coconino and the whole of Sunset Crater monument, and destroyed 30 homes and 24 outbuildings before it was declared contained in early June; its cause was never determined. The OHV area closed and reopened with burned snags standing across the cones, and in December 2022 the Park Service took over 98 acres of forest land around the monument’s visitor center, which had survived. The riding resumed the next season, louder than ever on weekends.
Why it matters
Cinder Hills is a case study in how two federal agencies can look at the same black gravel and make opposite decisions: the Park Service fenced its cinder cone in 1930 and closed its trail in 1973, and the Forest Service opened 13,500 acres next door to anyone with a dirt bike. Both were right about the cinder, which erodes under feet and heals under tires, and the result is the only place within three hours of Scottsdale where free camping, legal cross-country riding and a volcano all occupy the same ground. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict depends on who you are. If you ride, it is the best weekend in the state. If you do not, come on a Tuesday in September with four-wheel drive and traction boards, climb a cone’s shoulder before dark, and watch the sun come up on the Peaks.