What is Diamond Creek Number Two Campground?
Diamond Creek has camps the way a ranch road has gates: numbered by the people who use them, unmarked for everyone else. Number Two is the second pullout up Indian Route R25 from the junction camp, roughly a mile farther along the creek at about 5,300 to 5,500 feet, where the valley narrows and the pines come down to the bank. The creek is the same water that makes the junction worth the drive, about 11 miles of rainbow, brown and Apache trout between the White River valley and the high meadows under the Little Diamond, and up here it is smaller, brushier and less fished.
The White Mountain Apache Tribe maintains designated campgrounds, with tables, fire rings, toilets and dumpsters, at its lakes and on the North Fork; its recreation map shows none on Diamond Creek. The Dyrt’s sole review, from August 2025, is a visitor who drove R25 with the map open, found no sign at the turn or the destination, and went home. That is the honest state of the place: a creek you may camp beside with the right permit, and a name that lives mostly in apps.
What you get is a trout stream to yourself on a tribal permit, in a valley the tribe has fished and defended for longer than Arizona has existed. What you do not get is a single thing provided: no sign, no table, no toilet, no water, and no road you would take a trailer down.
How to camp it right
Buy both permits first. The tribe’s camping permit, $15 per vehicle per day, up to eight people, or $350 for 30 days; no reservations. Fishing is another $10 per adult per day. Buy them at the Game and Fish office on Fatco Road in Whiteriver or at the Hon-Dah vendors on SR 260; the online permit system was down through 2026. A warden can and will turn you around without them, and the permit is what makes a pullout a campsite.
Get there. US 60 east through Globe and Salt River Canyon, then SR 73 through Carrizo and Fort Apache to Whiteriver, about 3 hours 20 minutes. Go north on SR 73 a few miles, turn east on Route R25, follow the pavement out and the dirt in, pass the junction camp where the road meets the creek, and continue about a mile. Call it 3 hours 40 minutes. The road past the junction is rocky two-track; high clearance is the sensible minimum, and after rain it is not worth trying.
Find the spot. Keep the creek on your right and stop at the next pullout where the meadow opens; that is as official as it gets. Use ground that is already bare, not a new patch of grass.
Pick the season. Year-round at this elevation. Spring runoff and October are best. In monsoon season the afternoons are a daily problem on this road, and the creek can rise fast; if the sky builds, drive down to the pavement before it rains, not after.
Water and sanitation. Creek only; bring your own to drink. There is no toilet, so carry a shovel and bags and pack human waste out, as the tribe asks of primitive campers. Camp 75 feet back from the water.
Fish it small. The creek above the junction narrows and the brush closes in; a short rod and a dry-dropper handle it. The stocked rainbows sit in the obvious pools, the browns do not, and the Apache trout go back.
Dogs. Leashed, 10 feet or less.
Follow the tribe’s rules in full. Established sites only, fires small, no firearms, no fireworks, no alcohol problems, pack out everything. The tribe closes areas that get abused, and it does not owe anyone a creek.
Skip it if you need any infrastructure at all. Lower Log Road on the North Fork has toilets and dumpsters on the same permit, Upper Log above it is shadier still, and Pacheta Lake is the tribe’s remote lake camp if you want still water.
The creek the Apache closed first
The White River valley is the heart of White Mountain Apache country and has been for centuries. A few miles west of Diamond Creek stands Kinishba, a Mogollon pueblo occupied from about 1150 to 1350, and the Apache bands who came after held the streams of the Black and White rivers as their own water, hunting the high meadows and farming the creek bottoms. Diamond Creek, falling from the Little Diamond to the White, was one of those streams.
The Army arrived by invitation. In 1870, at the suggestion of White Mountain Apache leaders who wanted an ally against their enemies, the Army built Camp Apache, later Fort Apache, on the White River below where Diamond Creek joins it. In 1871 General George Crook enrolled 50 White Mountain Apache men as scouts, and the reservation that would become the tribe’s homeland was set aside the same year. The White Mountain people fought on the Army’s side through the Apache Wars; when Geronimo surrendered in 1886, Crook pressed Washington to let the tribe keep a large portion of its homeland as a reservation named for it, and it did. The Army left Fort Apache in 1922, the Bureau of Indian Affairs took the buildings for the Theodore Roosevelt boarding school in 1923, and the post is now Fort Apache Historic Park, a National Historic Landmark since 2012. The tribe adopted a constitution under the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 and elected in 1936 the council that still governs 1.67 million acres.
The fish story runs alongside. The Apache trout, a yellow-gold native found only in the headwaters of the Black, White and Little Colorado rivers, was crowded out by stocked rainbows and browns through the first half of the century. The White Mountain Apache began closing their headwater streams to protect it in the 1940s, a generation before anyone in Phoenix or Washington paid attention; by the late 1960s the species survived in about 30 miles of stream, and in 1967 it went onto the first federal endangered list. The tribe’s hatchery at Williams Creek, its stream closures and its barrier work carried the recovery. In 2024 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the Apache trout, the first sport fish ever removed from the list because it had recovered, and the tribe’s Game and Fish Department, which also sells your $15 permit, was the agency most responsible.
Diamond Creek’s campgrounds grew up inside that system. The tribe built designated campgrounds with tables, toilets and dumpsters at its lakes and on the North Fork, and left Diamond Creek as fishing water with informal camps where the road meets the stream: the junction, then Number Two, then whatever anglers call the next bend. None of it was ever signed, which is why a visitor with a map app in 2025 could not find it. Nothing about the place is planned to change; the tribe stocks the creek, patrols it, and expects you to leave it as you found it.
Why it matters
Diamond Creek Number Two is a lesson in reading tribal land honestly. The campground does not exist in the sense the apps mean, and the creek very much does, as water the White Mountain Apache have managed for 150 years with better results than the state agencies around them. The Apache trout came back because this tribe closed its streams in the 1940s, and the permit in your windshield is part of what keeps that going. For a Scottsdale angler the verdict is narrow: if you already know the junction camp and want a quieter mile of the same creek, drive on with both permits, a shovel and no expectations. If you want a campground, go to the North Fork.