What is Crossroads Campground?
Between Parker Dam and the town of Parker the Colorado runs cold, clear and slow for 16 miles through a canyon of volcanic rock lined, on the Arizona side, with resorts, bars and RV parks that have been serving Phoenix boaters since the 1950s. The California side is quieter. Parker Dam Road runs the length of it as a BLM back country byway, the “Thread of Life,” with pullouts, OHV areas, day-use beaches and two campgrounds. Crossroads is the small one: 26 sites on dirt pads along the riverbank at about 375 feet, each with a table and a grill, served by one accessible vault toilet, a dumpster, an information kiosk and a volunteer host. Site 1 is the accessible site. The river is right there, with a beach, and a kayak goes in from the sand.
What Crossroads does not have is water, hookups or a boat ramp, which is how the BLM keeps it at $5 a night. The Rock House Visitor Center, a mile up the road, has a free launch open year-round and the Strip’s visitor information. Empire Landing, the BLM’s bigger Parker Strip campground, is farther north. From November to March the campground is a mix of snowbirds, anglers and Valley families who figured out that this is the cheapest riverfront in Arizona or California. From May to September it is where you park to watch the boats.
What you get is the river at your feet for the price of a coffee, a host who knows which sites are leaving, and the Arizona shore’s lights across the water. What you do not get is a tap, a shower, a ramp of your own, or silence on a summer weekend. The water you are camping beside is the Colorado after Hoover and Parker have had their way with it, which is why it is clear and 55 degrees in January; the lexicon entry explains what the dams did to the river and what the drought is doing to the dams.
How to camp Crossroads right
Pay the host or the tube. $5 per night, first come, first served, 14 days in any 30. There is no reservation system; the BLM page links to recreation.gov, but Crossroads is not bookable there. Cash in the fee tube or to the host, who is on site in season. Winter weekends fill by Friday afternoon; a Tuesday in January has a dozen empty sites.
Get there. About 3 hours 5 minutes from Old Town. Loop 101 west to US 60 (Grand Avenue) to Wickenburg, west on US 60 to the SR 72 junction past Hope, and northwest on SR 72 through Bouse to Parker. Cross the Colorado River bridge into California, turn right onto Parker Dam Road, and Crossroads is 7 miles ahead on the right. From Lake Havasu City it is about 45 minutes south over Parker Dam, but the dam bars oversized vehicles and anything towing a trailer, so anyone with a rig comes in through Parker. The last approach is a short dirt spur off the pavement; the pads are dirt, mostly level. Fill water and tanks in Parker, because the campground has neither a tap nor a dump station.
Pick the season. November through March. Daytime highs in the 60s and 70s, cold clear water, coots on the river and bass boats idling past. April and October are warm and quiet. From Memorial Day to Labor Day it is 110 degrees, the Strip is a wakeboard lane from dawn, and the Arizona resorts across the water run music until late.
Choose the site by who is with you. Site 1 is the accessible site and the flattest. The sites at the north and south ends have the beach, but the shoreline there is soft and sloped, so a middle site is the better pick for anyone who walks with difficulty. All 26 sites take RVs and trailers towed by passenger vehicles; nothing here needs clearance.
Water and fire. No water, so bring every gallon. Grills at each site; bring wood or charcoal. Check Lake Havasu Field Office fire restrictions in spring, when the tamarisk along the bank is dry. One vault toilet and one dumpster are the facilities, and trash goes in the dumpster, not the fire ring.
The river. Cold, clear and moving. The current on the Strip is gentle but it is a current, and the water is 55 degrees in winter; life jackets in anything that floats. Launch a kayak at Rock House a mile north and drift back to camp. The river is a boundary water, so check both states’ fishing rules, and OHVs on this side must be California-legal.
Dogs. Leashed.
Skip it if you need a shower, a hookup or a quiet summer. Buckskin Mountain and River Island state parks are a few miles upriver on the Arizona side with both. For a Colorado River beach without the resort strip, Three Dunes on Lake Havasu is an hour north; for a free BLM night in the same country, Craggy Wash is the dispersed alternative. For five dollars and the river at your feet, nothing on the Strip comes close.
The river that became a lake with a current
The Strip is an artifact of two dams and a lawsuit. Before either, this reach of the Colorado was a wide, warm, silt-brown river that flooded its bottomlands every spring, and the people who farmed those bottomlands were the Mohave and the Chemehuevi, the southernmost band of the Southern Paiute, who had moved onto the river from the Mojave Desert in the 1800s. Congress set aside the Colorado River Indian Reservation for them on March 3, 1865, for “the Indians of said river and its tributaries,” and the reservation’s northern boundary is still where Parker Dam Road ends. In 1945 Hopi and Navajo families were relocated onto the same reservation, and the four tribes govern it together today as the Colorado River Indian Tribes.
The California bank got its name from a prospector who happened to be famous. Wyatt Earp spent part of each year on this river from 1906, working more than a hundred copper and gold claims in the Whipple Mountains and living in a cottage at nearby Vidal with Josephine Marcus from 1925 to 1928. The settlement of Drennan, dating to 1910, was renamed Earp for him around the time of his death in Los Angeles on January 13, 1929; the post office took the name in 1930. A small cemetery in Earp holds a fake Earp grave, for amusement only. The real one is in Colma, California.
Then came the dam. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California needed a diversion point for the Colorado River Aqueduct that would carry river water 240 miles to Los Angeles, and it paid for nearly the whole cost of Parker Dam, which the Bureau of Reclamation built between 1934 and 1938. To reach bedrock the engineers excavated 235 feet below the riverbed; the dam is 320 feet high in all and only 85 feet of it shows, which is why it is called the deepest dam in the world. Arizona did not want it. In 1935 Governor Benjamin Moeur sent National Guard troops to the Arizona bank to stop construction on his side of the river, the Interior Secretary halted the work, and the Supreme Court sided with Arizona, finding that Congress had never authorized the dam and that California could not build on Arizona land without consent. Arizona consented in exchange for federal approval of its Gila River irrigation project, and the dam went up. Lake Havasu, 647,000 acre-feet of it, filled behind it and drowned the Chemehuevi Valley upstream.
The second dam made the Strip. Headgate Rock Dam, finished in 1941 just above Parker to divert water onto the reservation’s farms, backed the river up into Lake Moovalya. Between the two dams the Colorado became something new: a 16-mile reservoir with a current, running cold and clear because Parker Dam released water from the bottom of Lake Havasu, with rock walls on both sides and no silt. Phoenix and Los Angeles boaters found it in the 1950s. Resorts, trailer parks, bars and launch ramps went up along the Arizona bank, which is private and state land, and the Arizona side of the Strip has been a party ever since. The California bank was mostly federal, and the BLM developed it more slowly and more quietly: a visitor station in the old Rock House, day-use beaches, OHV areas and two campgrounds, Empire Landing and Crossroads.
In 1994 the BLM designated the 11 miles of Parker Dam Road between Earp and the dam a back country byway, the Thread of Life, with interpretive pullouts for the river’s prehistoric and historic sites; its own page lists Patayan and Yuman peoples among the river’s earlier residents. By 2017 Crossroads was the only BLM site on the Strip still open to tents, which is roughly its position today: a $5 campground, run by a volunteer host, on the quiet side of a river that most of the Valley knows only from the deck of a wake boat.
Why it matters
The Parker Strip is the Colorado as the Valley actually uses it: not a wild river but a plumbed one, two dams and a lawsuit old, run for Los Angeles taps and reservation farms, and borrowed on weekends by boaters from Phoenix. Crossroads is the cheap seat for watching that arrangement work. The water is cold because of Parker Dam, clear because of Lake Havasu’s silt trap, and steady because of Headgate Rock, and the people who farmed the bottomland before any of it are still across the river on land set aside in 1865. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: three hours of driving buys a $5 riverfront site that no Arizona resort can match in January, as long as you come in through Parker, bring your own water and stay home in July.