What is Craggy Wash?
Every winter resort town in the desert has a free campground just outside the city limits that the agency never built and cannot close. Lake Havasu City’s is Craggy Wash. North of town, where SR 95 runs between the Mohave Mountains and the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge, a dirt track leaves the highway eastward into a wide, rocky wash on BLM land, and from November to March the first mile of it is a village: fifth wheels, Class As, vans, a volunteer host’s compound, rock fire rings and solar panels, all on hard-packed ground at about 850 feet with a view of the Mohaves and strong cell signal. There is no water, no toilet, no trash can and no fee.
The BLM’s Lake Havasu Field Office formalized the arrangement in 2008 with a short set of supplementary rules: stays at Craggy Wash are limited to 14 days, camping is prohibited within one mile of the city limits, vehicles may not exceed 15 mph, and you must keep your campsite free of trash and litter. Restoration areas along the first mile are signed closed to camping. Beyond the crowd, the track climbs the wash for several miles, getting washboarded and rockier, and the camping gets quieter with every mile until it is just you, the creosote and the occasional side-by-side.
It is not scenic in the way the lake is, and nobody pretends otherwise. It is level, legal, free and 15 minutes from the London Bridge, groceries, a laundromat and a state park dump station, which for a certain kind of traveler is the whole list. What you get is ground and rules. What you do not get is anything else, including quiet in the first mile.
How to camp Craggy Wash right
Know the rules, because they are the whole campground. Free. 14 days, then move on; the general BLM rule is 25 miles away and 28 days before you return. No camping within a mile of the city limits or in signed restoration areas. 15 mph on the track. Pack out every piece of trash; the host has tracked arrivals in some winters and the Field Office does patrol.
Get there. About 3 hours 50 minutes from Old Town either way around. Loop 101 west to US 60 to Wickenburg, US 93 north to I-40 at Kingman, I-40 west 25 miles to SR 95 south, then about 15 miles down toward Lake Havasu City; the Craggy Wash turnoff is a dirt road on the left (east) roughly 10 miles north of town, near 34.593, -114.362. Or I-10 west to Quartzsite, SR 95 north through Parker and all the way through Lake Havasu City and 10 miles beyond. The first mile of dirt is fine for anything; after that, scout on foot before committing a trailer, and watch for the red-painted rocks that mark oil-pan height.
Drive past the first mile. The pullouts by the highway fill with long-stay rigs and generators by Thanksgiving, and the trash complaints are about that stretch. Two to three miles up the wash the road gets rougher, the rigs get smaller and you can sleep without hearing a television. Cell service is strong on the main carriers near the highway and fades up the wash, so if you work from the road, pick your spot by signal.
Pick the season. November through March is the season and the crowd; it is why the snowbird exists as a word. April and October are warm and nearly empty and the best time to be here. May through September is over 105 degrees and the wash is deserted, for good reason.
Water and everything else. None at all. Dump and fill at Lake Havasu State Park in town before you come out; there is nothing here and the nearest public water is a long drive on a Sunday. The Field Office at 1785 Kiowa Avenue (928-505-1200) answers rule questions and sells the shoreline passes for the lake.
Fire. Existing rock rings only, and only when the Field Office has no restrictions in place. Bring your own wood; there is none to gather.
Noise. Generators, OHVs on weekends, occasional target shooting farther up the wash. Camp off the main track, not beside it.
Dogs. Fine, under control; the wash is full of them in winter.
Skip it if you want a real campsite. Crossroads on the Parker Strip costs $5 and has a toilet; the boat-in sites at Cattail Cove have a beach; Burro Creek on US 93 has water and a canyon. For free ground closer to Scottsdale, Saddle Mountain west of Buckeye is the same idea with a better view and no London Bridge.
The free campground a resort town cannot close
The river that makes all this possible was Mohave country first. The Mohave, Aha Macav, held the lower Colorado from Black Canyon below the site of Hoover Dam to well below Parker, farming the floodplain each spring after the flood went down. When the government drew the Colorado River Indian Reservation in 1865 and the Fort Mojave reservation in 1870, many Mohave simply refused to move, and officials let them stay in the Mohave Valley. Their descendants are enrolled today at Fort Mojave and in the Colorado River Indian Tribes, and the lake’s name is theirs: Havasu, from the Mojave word for blue.
The lake came from California. The Bureau of Reclamation built Parker Dam between 1934 and 1938 so that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California could fill the Colorado River Aqueduct, and the district paid nearly the whole cost. Arizona objected to a California dam on an Arizona bank; in 1935 Governor Benjamin Moeur sent National Guardsmen to the river to stop the work, and the Interior Secretary paused construction until the courts and Congress settled it in exchange for federal approval of Arizona’s Gila River irrigation project. The reservoir, 19,300 acres when full, was named in 1939, and the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge was set aside along its northern reach in 1941. During the war the Army Air Corps opened Site Six, a rest camp for airmen on the east shore, the first settlement on the ground the city now covers. Much later the lake took on a second job as the intake for the Central Arizona Project, the canal that carries Colorado River water to Scottsdale’s taps; the drought entry explains what that means now.
The town was one man’s idea. Robert P. McCulloch, who made chainsaws and outboard motors, bought 3,353 acres on Pittsburgh Point in 1958, and on September 30, 1963 the Mohave County Board of Supervisors created the Lake Havasu Irrigation and Drainage District, which is the city’s legal birthday. McCulloch Properties flew prospective buyers in free from across the country, 2,702 flights between 1964 and 1978, and when the City of London put its 1831 bridge up for sale, McCulloch bought it in 1968 for $2.5 million, shipped it in numbered blocks and rebuilt it over a dredged channel; it was dedicated on October 5, 1971. The city incorporated in 1978. It was, from the start, a place for people from colder states, and every winter since, the retirees have come.
Craggy Wash is what the public land around a town like that turns into. The BLM never built a campground here; people simply began parking in the wash because it was flat, free and close to the groceries, and the agency’s choice was to fight it or manage it. In 2008 the Lake Havasu Field Office chose to manage it, publishing supplementary rules in the Federal Register on March 4 that named Craggy Wash as a dispersed camping area and fixed its terms: 14 days, nothing within a mile of the city limits, 15 mph, no trash left behind. Volunteer camp hosts, one couple of whom have kept the camp for the better part of a decade, do most of the enforcing. The arrangement is fragile and the trash arguments are perennial, but it has held for nearly two decades, which for an unbuilt campground is a long time.
Why it matters
Craggy Wash explains the lower Colorado in one dusty mile: a river taken from the Mohave and dammed for Los Angeles, a lake named in a language most of its boaters cannot place, a town invented by a chainsaw millionaire for people fleeing winter, and the public land next door quietly absorbing everyone who cannot or will not pay for a resort. It is also the plainest example in Arizona of how the BLM manages dispersed camping when it is overrun: with a page of rules and a volunteer in a trailer. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is narrow. If you are self-contained, want to spend nothing, and need to be in Lake Havasu City for a reason, drive past the first mile and it works. If you want a campsite, it is the wrong lake.