What is Clints Well Campground?
Clints Well is a junction first and a campground second. Here, at 6,868 feet in the ponderosa a few miles behind the Rim, SR 87 up from Payson meets Lake Mary Road (Forest Highway 3) down from Flagstaff, about 38 miles north of Payson and 55 miles southeast of Flagstaff. There is a gas station, a cafe, a highway maintenance yard and, a few hundred yards up Lake Mary Road, a small Forest Service campground in the Coconino National Forest.
The sites, on the order of seven (the Forest Service does not publish a count), have tables and fire rings; there are vault toilets; there is no water and no trash service; and the fee is $8 in spring and summer and nothing the rest of the year. Up to eight people and two vehicles per site, first come, first served. Its value is position. The Rim Road and the edge of the Mogollon Rim are nine miles south; C.C. Cragin Reservoir is ten miles east; the Cabin Loop trails through the old fire-guard cabins are just east of the junction; Flagstaff is an hour north. A few miles up Lake Mary Road is Happy Jack, not a town but a locale with the Mogollon Rim Ranger Station at 8738 Ranger Road and a private lodge and RV park, and the address every campground in this district lists as its town.
What you get is a cheap, quiet-enough place to sleep in the pines at the exact point where the roads to everything else divide. What you do not get is a view, water, a reservation, or distance from the highway: the sites nearest Lake Mary Road hear every truck downshifting for the junction.
How to use Clints Well right
Treat it as the campground you use, not the one you go to. It is where you sleep when you left Scottsdale late, when Rock Crossing and Blue Ridge are full, or when you want to be first on the Rim Road or the reservoir in the morning without driving it in the dark.
Pay like this. $8 per night for a single site in spring and summer, paid at the campground; free in the off-season. First come, first served, 14-day limit, no reservations and no group camping.
Get there. Take SR 87, the Beeline, the whole way: through Payson, past Pine and Strawberry, up the long grade onto the Rim, past the FR 300 turnoff, to the Clints Well junction. Turn left onto Lake Mary Road; the campground entrance is almost immediately on the right. Figure about 2 hours 20 minutes from Old Town with no traffic, all of it paved. The gas station across the highway is open long hours and sells ice, water and the basics; the real grocery is in Payson.
Water. None. The name refers to a historic well at the junction, not a tap in the campground. Fill at home or in Pine, because the gas station sells it only by the bottle. Pack out your trash.
Pick the season. Open year-round but unplowed, and the Rim country holds real snow from November into April. May through October is the practical season, May to June and September to October the best of it. Early October, with the fee gone and the aspens turning along Lake Mary Road, is pleasant, and the free campground makes a fine cold-weather base for the General Crook Trail and the Cabin Loop trails, as long as you watch the forecast for the first snow.
Camp by the rules. Quiet hours 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., no generators. Campfires in the rings only, and only when the Coconino is not under fire restrictions; the restrictions hotline is 928-226-4607. Take the site furthest back from Lake Mary Road.
Dogs. Leashed. No horses.
Skip it if you want a destination. Drive six more miles down the Rim Road to Kehl Springs and sleep on the edge of the world for the same $8, or pick a free pull-off along FR 300. For a lake, book Rock Crossing above C.C. Cragin.
A well, a wagon road and a logging camp
The country behind the Rim was Yavapai and Tonto Apache ground, high pine used for hunting and gathering in summer, crossed by foot trails that ran from the Verde Valley to the White Mountains. The Army’s interest in it began with the Apache wars. In 1871 General George Crook surveyed a route along the very edge of the escarpment, where the canyons that cut the plateau to the north are still shallow, to tie Fort Whipple and Camp Verde to the isolated post at Fort Apache. Construction began in 1872, pack trains were using it by 1873, and the first wagon train crossed in September 1874. The General Crook Trail still runs a few miles south of the junction, and parts of it are the Cabin Loop.
In July 1882 the Rim saw the Battle of Big Dry Wash, fought near General Springs, off the Rim Road southeast of here, the last major fight between the Army and Apaches in this country. After that the Rim belonged to sheep and cattle, and to anyone who could find water on top of a limestone plateau where water drains straight down. The well that names the junction belongs to that era: local accounts say a man named Clint dug it in the 1880s, and that ranchers and travelers watered there until the name stuck. We could not find his full name in a source we trust, and we would rather leave it blank than invent it.
The junction mattered because of where it sits. In the late 1800s this area, then called Long Valley, was the only practical route over the Rim between Winslow and Strawberry, Pine, Payson and the Phoenix side. The Forest Service put its Long Valley Ranger Station here in the early 1900s and built fire guard cabins along the Rim, at General Springs in the mid-1910s and at Buck Springs in 1923. The Rim Road, FR 300, followed in the late 1920s and took over the job Crook’s road had done.
The postwar years brought logs. In 1947 the Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Company founded Happy Jack as a logging camp up Lake Mary Road; at its peak it housed about 500 people on a few acres. Around 1974 the camp closed and Happy Jack was relocated closer to Clints Well, and in 1983 its post office moved down to Long Valley, by the junction, which is why so many Rim campgrounds now give Happy Jack as their address. The water problem got its industrial answer in 1965, when Phelps Dodge dammed East Clear Creek ten miles east to make what is now C.C. Cragin Reservoir.
The campground itself is the quiet residue of all this, a few sites at the crossroads that the Forest Service keeps for people passing through. Nothing about it has been reinvented lately, and nothing about it needs to be.
Why it matters
Clints Well explains why the Rim country is laid out the way it is. Water decided where people stopped on a plateau that holds none on the surface, the Army’s road and then the Forest Service’s road decided where they drove, and logging decided where the towns went. The junction is where those lines cross, and a crossroads is still all it is. For a Scottsdale visitor that is the point: an $8 bed in the pines two hours and twenty minutes from Old Town, from which the Rim Road, the reservoir and Flagstaff are each a short drive in the morning. Bring water, take the back site, and do not expect a view.