What is Clear Creek Campground?
West Clear Creek comes off the Mogollon Rim through one of the deepest and least visited canyons in Arizona, then flattens out into a cottonwood bottom just east of Camp Verde before it meets the Verde River. Clear Creek Campground sits on that bottom: 18 family sites on flat, grassy ground under big cottonwoods, plus a group site for up to 80 people, with the creek running along the edge of the loop. At 3,236 feet it is Sonoran Desert, not pine forest, and the campground is open all year.
That is the thing to understand about it. This is not a place to escape July. It is the campground you book for a November weekend when the Rim is freezing and the Valley is finally pleasant, or for March when the creek is up and the cottonwoods are leafing out. The creek is shallow and cobbled at the campground, good for wading and for kids with nets, with a few deeper pools and smallmouth bass and sunfish for anyone who brought a rod.
What you get is the closest reservable creekside camping to Scottsdale, with water, a toilet, a camp host and the sound of running water at night, 1 hour 45 minutes from Old Town on pavement. What you do not get is shade from the heat, a shower, a hookup or a real swimming hole; for that you drive 12 miles of gravel to Bull Pen. It is a first-camping-weekend campground, and a very good one from October to May.
How to camp Clear Creek right
Reserve the creekside sites. A single site is $27 a night including one vehicle, $10 for a second. Thirteen sites and the group site are on recreation.gov up to six months out; five sites are first come, first served and the host cannot hold them. The sites on the outer edge of the loop back onto the creek and you fall asleep to water; the inner ones are grassy and fine but feel like a park. Group rates run $108 to $182 depending on headcount. Senior and Access interagency passes get 50 percent off single sites; the standard America the Beautiful pass does not apply here. Check-in 2 p.m., check-out 11 a.m., 7-day limit.
Get there. Take Loop 101 north to I-17, then I-17 north about 70 miles to Camp Verde. Any of the three Camp Verde exits works; the simplest is exit 287 onto SR 260 east (General Crook Highway). Go about 5 miles east on 260 and turn north on Forest Road 626, a short gravel road that reaches the campground almost immediately. Figure about 1 hour 45 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. Any sedan can do it. The campground is a single loop with a camp host near the entrance; parking is at the sites, with no overflow, and the group area has its own lot that fits roughly 15 to 20 RVs.
Pick the season. Open year-round, but from June through September it is Camp Verde weather, with highs over 100 and warm nights. The good months are October through May; weekends from March through May and October through November sell out. Fire restrictions usually arrive in late spring; call the Coconino fire line at 928-226-4607 before you count on a campfire.
Water and toilets. Potable water and vault toilets. No showers, and portable showers and toilets are not allowed. Firewood is sold by the host when it is available; do not cut or split wood in the campground.
Wade here, swim at Bull Pen. Bring water shoes: the creek bottom is cobble and the best wading pools are a short walk upstream. For a real swimming hole, drive the extra 12 miles of gravel to Bull Pen Day Use Area on the same creek, day use only, and go early, because the pullouts fill by mid-morning on a warm weekend.
Respect the canyon above you. West Clear Creek drains a huge canyon. During monsoon season a storm on the Rim can raise the creek at the campground under a clear sky. Keep gear and kids out of the channel when there is weather upstream, and read up on flash floods if that is new to you.
Dogs and limits. Dogs on leash, no horses, quiet hours 10 to 6, generators off during them.
Make it a day trip too. Montezuma Castle is ten minutes back toward the interstate and open 9 to 5; Montezuma Well is twenty minutes north; and the day trips guide has the rest of the Verde Valley.
Skip it if you need cool nights in summer or want solitude. Beaver Creek off I-17 to the north is the sister campground with the sycamores and the petroglyphs; Fossil Creek, permit required, is the swimming water everyone is actually looking for.
The creek where the Verde Valley’s settlement, and its removal, began
The Verde Valley was farmed long before Camp Verde. The Sinagua built the pueblos and cliff houses that are now Montezuma Castle, Montezuma Well and Tuzigoot between about 1100 and the 1400s, irrigating from the creeks and springs, and then left; by the time the first wagons came down from Prescott the valley belonged to the Yavapai and the Tonto Apache, who farmed and gathered along the same creeks.
The settlement began at this creek. In 1865 a party from Prescott came east into the valley, drawn by water and grass, and put in corn at the mouth of Clear Creek where it meets the Verde, a few miles downstream of the campground; they were the first Anglo farmers in the valley, and they were raided from the start. Infantry arrived the same year and set up a camp about five miles south of present-day Camp Verde to protect them; Camp Lincoln followed in 1866, a mile north of the later fort, and was renamed Camp Verde, and in 1871 the post was rebuilt at its present site. General George Crook made it a hinge of his Apache campaigns, cutting a supply road from Fort Whipple through Camp Verde to Fort Apache along the Rim, the General Crook Trail that SR 260 past the campground is still named for.
What followed is the valley’s hardest history. In 1872 about 1,500 Yavapai and Apache were confined to a reservation along the Verde near the fort, and the Army’s job became keeping them there. Crook’s winter campaign of 1872 and 1873 broke the resistance in the Tonto Basin. Then, in 1875, the government closed the Verde reservation and marched its people, in February, across the mountains to San Carlos, some 180 miles away; the Yavapai-Apache Nation, headquartered in Camp Verde today, still marks the removal every year as Exodus Day. Families began drifting back to the valley around the turn of the century, and the Nation’s small parcels at Camp Verde, Middle Verde and Clarkdale, 642 acres in all, are what remains of a homeland. Camp Verde was renamed Fort Verde in 1879, fought its last major action at Big Dry Wash on the Rim in 1882, was abandoned in 1891 and sold at auction in 1899.
The valley became ranch and farm country, and the creek bottom east of town became fields. The Clear Creek Church, built in 1898 a few miles from the campground, served the farms along the creek as the town’s only church until 1913 and then as a schoolhouse. Local citizens opened a museum in the fort’s old administration building in 1956, and Fort Verde became a state park in 1970. The Forest Service’s campground on the creek bottom belongs to the interstate era, when I-17 made Camp Verde a two-hour drive from Phoenix and the agency built simple family campgrounds along the valley’s creeks; it publishes no construction date, and we have not found one. The group site and the recreation.gov booking are later additions.
The canyon above was the last thing protected. In 1984 Congress designated the West Clear Creek Wilderness, 15,238 acres of the gorge that runs 30 miles back toward the Rim, one of the deepest and least visited canyons in the state, and Bull Pen, 12 miles up the gravel from the campground, became its day-use door. The creek that cools your feet at the campground has come through that wilderness, which is why it still runs clear and why a storm you cannot see can raise it.
Why it matters
Clear Creek is where the Verde Valley’s modern history starts, in a cornfield at the creek’s mouth in 1865, and where its worst chapter was staged, at a fort built to protect those fields and then to empty the valley of the people who had farmed it first. It is also, less grandly, the closest place to Scottsdale where you can reserve a campsite beside running water in January. The two facts belong together: the creek that drew the settlers is the amenity that draws you. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: book an outer-loop site for a weekend between October and May, wade here and swim at Bull Pen, give the morning to Montezuma Castle, and do not come in July.