What is Cottonwood Campground?
Canyon de Chelly is a national monument on paper and Navajo land in fact: about 40 families still farm and graze the canyon floor, the Park Service and the Navajo Nation co-manage the place, and the only campground inside the boundary belongs to Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation. Cottonwood Campground is a grove of big old trees on the flat ground where Chinle Wash leaves the canyon, a half mile from the Welcome Center. It has about 90 sites on paved pads with picnic tables and charcoal grills, two tent-only group sites, flush toilets, a $5 water-and-dump station near the exit, and nothing fancier than that. You pay $30 cash in an envelope, choose any empty site, and the office at the gate checks the stub on your windshield in the morning. It is about 5 hours 15 minutes from Old Town and about 5,500 feet up.
The canyon is the reason to come. Two paved rim drives, each about 35 miles round trip, lead to overlooks of 800-foot sandstone walls, Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings and Spider Rock, a spire of roughly 800 feet. The White House Trail, 2.5 miles round trip and 600 feet down to a cliff dwelling, is the one hike you may do without a guide. Everything else on the canyon floor requires a Navajo guide and a backcountry permit, because people live there. The monument charges no entry fee; the campground and the permits are how the Nation earns from it.
What you get is shade, flush toilets, a fair price and a five-minute drive to the rim. What you do not get is showers, hookups, numbered sites, water in winter, a campfire or a drink; alcohol is banned across the Navajo Nation.
How to camp Canyon de Chelly right
Bring cash. $30 per night for up to seven people, first come, first served, paid at the Navajo Parks office at the entrance (8 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or in the drop box in exact amounts; keep the stub on the windshield. Group sites are $60 by reservation at 928-674-2106. Water fill and dump are $5. No federal passes, no discount cards.
Get there. About 5 hours 15 minutes from Old Town. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, to Payson, SR 260 east to Heber, SR 377 north to Holbrook, I-40 east 50 miles to exit 333 at Chambers, then US 191 north 75 miles through Ganado to Chinle. Going I-17 to Flagstaff and I-40 east is about the same time with more freeway. In Chinle turn east on Indian Route 7 toward the monument; the campground entrance is on the right just before the Welcome Center. Chinle has gas and groceries. Everything is paved. The Navajo Nation observes daylight saving time while Arizona does not, so your phone will jump an hour in summer and the office hours are on Navajo time.
Pick the season. Open all year, with fewer sites in winter. April to early June and September through October are best, and the cottonwoods go gold in late October. Summer brings 90-degree afternoons and monsoon storms with the occasional flash flood in the canyon; winter nights drop into the teens, the water is off and only part of the campground stays open, and you will have the rim to yourself.
Pick the site. The loops are unnumbered. Arrive before dark and take a site under the biggest trees along the outer edge; the center is open and the highway noise from Chinle reaches it.
Water. Potable water at the station near the exit, shut off roughly November to March. Fill and dump on the way in if you are staying several nights. Flush toilets, no showers. The dump station has been closed for sewer repairs at times; do not count on it.
Do the canyon in the right order. White House Trail at first light, when the wall is in shadow and the descent is cool; the South Rim overlooks in the afternoon when the light comes around onto Spider Rock; a guided tour of the floor on the second day, booked through the Welcome Center or in Chinle, with the Nation’s per-person permit on top of the guide’s fee. The petroglyph entry explains what you are looking at on the walls and why you do not touch it.
Follow the Nation’s rules. No open fires (charcoal in the grills is fine), no alcohol anywhere on the Navajo Nation, no drones, and ask before photographing people or homes. Lock the car; the overlook lots have had break-ins. If you buy jewelry or rugs from the vendors at the overlooks, the buying guide tells you how to do it well.
Dogs. On leash in the campground, not on tours. Watch for goatheads in the grass, bring booties or stay on the pavement, and expect friendly loose dogs from town; do not feed them.
Skip it if you want a wilderness site. It is a parking-lot-flat campground with aging restrooms and highway noise, not a backcountry camp. For that, drive 10 miles up the South Rim to Spider Rock Campground, a Navajo family’s private campground near the overlook. For a lake and real quiet, Tsaile Lake is 30 miles east. On the way up or back, Sleeping Bear at Monument Valley or McHood Park at Winslow break the drive.
The canyon that stayed Navajo
People have lived in Canyon de Chelly for more than 4,000 years, which is longer than almost anywhere else in the national park system, and the campground sits where all of them came out to the plain. Archaic hunters camped in the alcoves first. Ancestral Puebloan farmers built pit houses on the canyon floor and then the alcove villages, White House among them, that the overlooks are aimed at, and left for better farmland in the mid-1300s. Hopi families, their descendants, farmed corn and peaches in the canyon off and on from about 1300 into the 1700s before settling the mesas to the west. Then the Navajo came. The Diné moved into the canyons from northern New Mexico in the early 1700s, planted orchards, ran sheep and made Tséyi’, “in the rock,” one of the strongholds of their country. They have not left.
Everyone who tried to remove them came up the canyon from where the campground now stands. In 1805 a Spanish force under Lieutenant Antonio Narbona killed 115 Navajos and captured 33 at the alcove on the north rim that has been called Massacre Cave since. In the winter of 1863 to 1864 Colonel Kit Carson’s troops swept the canyon from end to end, killed 23 people, seized 200 sheep and cut down the peach orchards, and the Navajo, starved out, surrendered and were marched to Bosque Redondo in New Mexico, the Long Walk. The treaty of 1868 let them come home, and they came home to Canyon de Chelly and replanted the peaches. A trading post opened at the canyon mouth in 1896, on the site where Thunderbird Lodge stands now, and the town of Chinle grew up around it.
The monument was built on that fact rather than against it. When President Hoover established Canyon de Chelly National Monument on April 1, 1931, 83,840 acres of canyon floor and rim, the land stayed Navajo trust land; the Park Service was given charge of the archaeology and the visitors, and the Navajo kept ownership, the farms, the orchards and the sheep. It remains the only Park Service unit owned by a tribe and managed with it, which is why the canyon floor requires a Navajo guide, why about 40 families still live and farm inside the boundary, and why the monument has never charged an entrance fee. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 25, 1970. Spider Rock, the 800-foot spire at the junction of the canyons, is where Spider Woman lives in Navajo tradition; the overlook is as close as anyone gets.
The campground followed the Park Service pattern of the postwar decades: a big flat loop under the cottonwoods at the canyon mouth, 94 units by a 1980 count, open all year, run by federal rangers. At some point in the last two decades management passed to Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation under a cooperative management agreement, and the campground became the Tséyi’ Diné Heritage Area, with the Nation’s $30 fee, the Nation’s rules on alcohol and fire, and the Nation’s office at the gate. I could not pin the year of the handover from any source I would stand behind; the Park Service’s own pages now simply point visitors to the Nation. The site count has drifted to about 90, the restrooms have aged, and the water still goes off in winter. What has not changed is the arrangement the monument was founded on: this is Navajo land, the Park Service is a guest, and so are you.
Why it matters
Canyon de Chelly is the one place in the national park system where the people whose ancestors built the ruins still farm beneath them, and the campground is the cheapest way to live inside that fact for two nights. Everything about it that is inconvenient, the cash envelope, the dry winter, the no-fire and no-alcohol rules, the guide requirement, is the Navajo Nation running its own land, which is the point. For a Scottsdale visitor it is five hours and worth two days: the White House Trail at dawn, the rim in the afternoon, a guide on the floor. Arrive before dark, take a site under the big trees, keep the kibble inside the tent, and remember whose canyon it is.