What is Dairy Springs Campground?
Mormon Lake is the largest natural lake in Arizona, the Forest Service says, and then adds “sometimes.” It is a broad, shallow basin about 7,000 feet up on the plateau, about 12 square miles and 10 feet deep when full, that fills after big snow winters and spends most years as a riparian marsh or a grass flat with elk on it. The two campgrounds on its wooded west side, Dairy Springs and Double Springs, were built for the lake and have outlived its reliability, which makes them quiet, forested campgrounds with a view of a very large meadow.
Dairy Springs is the bigger of the two: 30 sites and a group site for 40 under dense ponderosa at 7,170 feet, each with a table and grill, with potable water, vault toilets and a campfire amphitheater where the concessionaire runs programs on summer weekends. Three short trails leave the campground for overlooks of the lake basin and the San Francisco Peaks. It is a 20-minute walk from the village of Mormon Lake, where the lodge has a general store, gas, cabins, a private RV park and a steakhouse with ranch brands burned into its log walls.
What you get is a cool, dark, pine-smelling place to sleep with water at the spigot, a short walk to a view and a shorter drive to a steak, two and a half hours from Scottsdale. What you do not get is a lake you can count on, a shower, a hookup, or a campfire in a dry June. It is not a boating or swimming place; it is forest camping that happens to overlook a basin.
How to camp it right
Reserve half, gamble on half. $30 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people; $10 for a second vehicle. Fifteen sites and the group site ($135, up to 40 people and eight vehicles) are on recreation.gov up to six months out; fifteen sites are first come, first served. Senior and Access passes take half off a single site. Check-in 2 p.m., check-out 11 a.m., 14-day limit. Take an outer-loop site, where the trees thin and you get a slice of the basin and the evening elk.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17, I-17 north to exit 339 (Lake Mary Road), then Lake Mary Road southeast about 18 miles past the exit to Mormon Lake Road on the right. Follow it 3.5 miles to Montezuma Road (not Dairy Springs Road, which is a different turn) and the entrance on the right. All paved; the campground loop and spurs are gravel. About 2 hours 35 minutes from Old Town. The scenic alternative, SR 87 through Payson to Clints Well and north on Lake Mary Road, is 20 minutes longer and much prettier, and passes Clints Well on the way.
Pick the season. Early May to mid-October. Late May through June is dry and warm by day, cold at night. July and August bring a thunderstorm most afternoons. September is the month to come. Fire restrictions often arrive in late May; ask the host before you buy wood.
Water and toilets. Potable water and vault toilets, both in good shape. No showers, no dump station; Pine Grove on Lake Mary Road has both.
RVs. The Forest Service does not publish a length limit here; the spurs are gravel and most fit mid-size trailers and motorhomes. No hookups. Call the Flagstaff Ranger Station if you are over 30 feet.
The walks. Hike the overlook trail before breakfast, when the light is on the lake bed and the Peaks are sharp to the north. The two-mile Lake View Trail starts at Double Springs a mile south, and the Arizona Trail passes close enough for a longer day. The village is a 20-minute walk for ice, a store, gas and the steakhouse. On a clear night the basin is dark enough that the stargazing is the best thing in camp.
Dogs. Leashed, always. No horses in the campground.
Skip it if you came for a lake. Check a recent photo of Mormon Lake before you promise anyone a paddle; for guaranteed water, Ashurst Lake is 20 minutes back up the road. For a plan that pairs the campground with the Flagstaff lakes and the Rim, the day trips guide has the loop.
The dairy that named a lake that comes and goes
The basin is a volcanic depression on the Anderson Mesa plateau, shallow enough that a wet winter makes it the largest natural lake in Arizona and a dry decade makes it a meadow. It was summer country for the Sinagua of the Walnut Canyon and Wupatki pueblos, and later for Yavapai and Apache hunters, and the Hopi and Navajo both know it. The name, though, comes from the briefest residents it ever had. In the 1870s Mormon colonists pushing south from the Little Colorado settlements built a cluster of cottage industries in what they called Pleasant Valley: a sawmill in 1876 a few miles south of the marsh, a dairy in 1878 at the spring on the west shore, and a tannery in 1879. The dairy supplied the colonies, and the spring took its name. When the Little Colorado colonies were disbanded in the 1880s, all of it was abandoned; forest archaeologists did not record the sawmill site, about 5 miles southeast of the lake, until 1978.
The lake itself may be partly their doing. The basin held a marsh when the settlers arrived, and the story told at the lodge is that cattle and sheep trampling the floor sealed it enough for runoff to pool against the natural volcanic dam, making a true lake; that is a manager’s explanation, not a geologist’s, but the pattern since is not in doubt. Full, Mormon Lake covers about 12 square miles at an average 10 feet deep; dry, it is a remnant marsh with a few northern pike and bullheads stranded in the middle and elk grazing the rest. The homes built along the shore in wet years have docks that now look out over grass.
The Forest Service became landlord on July 2, 1908, when Theodore Roosevelt merged the plateau’s forest reserves into the Coconino National Forest, and the lakeshore grew the standard Coconino furniture: recreation-residence tracts leased to summer cabin owners, one of them at Dairy Springs beside today’s campground, and public campgrounds at the springs. Double Springs, a mile south, is a 1930s-era campground; the Forest Service has not published a build date for Dairy Springs, and its layout, with the amphitheater and the gravel loop, reads as a postwar expansion of the same idea. The village got its anchor in 1924, when a Chandler man built Tombler’s Lodge as a dining and dancing place for loggers and ranchers; it became Mormon Lake Lodge, burned nearly to the ground in 1974, and was rebuilt in the same log-and-brand style that makes it the steakhouse down the road today.
Recreation on the plateau changed shape around the lake’s unreliability. The Lake Mary Road corridor filled with campgrounds that had water you could count on, Ashurst and Pine Grove among them, and Mormon Lake’s two camps became the quiet alternative. The Arizona Trail, proposed in 1985, named a National Scenic Trail by Congress on March 30, 2009 and declared complete on December 16, 2011, routes its Mormon Lake passage past Dairy Springs, which put a trickle of thru-hikers into the campground every spring and fall.
What has changed lately is management and water. A concessionaire, Coconino Hospitality, runs both campgrounds and the amphitheater programs for the Forest Service, half the sites moved onto recreation.gov, and the lake has spent most of the last two decades as a meadow, with brief full years after big snow winters that bring kayaks to the village shore and then recede.
Why it matters
Dairy Springs is the Coconino in miniature: a name from a settlement that lasted a decade, a lake that is a lake about one year in three, a Forest Service campground built for water that mostly is not there, and a village that survives on a steakhouse and a store. It explains why the Flagstaff lakes country is so much quieter than its map suggests, and why Arizona’s largest natural lake is a thing most Arizonans have never seen full. For a Scottsdale family the verdict is plain: it is a cool, quiet, well-watered pine campground two and a half hours away with a view and a walk to dinner, and if you go expecting a meadow with elk instead of a lake, you will not be disappointed.