What is Diamond Rock Campground?
The Civilian Conservation Corps built most of what is old and good in the White Mountains, and at Diamond Rock it built three Adirondack-style shelters, three-sided log lean-tos open to the fire, that still stand at three of the campground’s 12 sites. The campground sits at 7,890 feet, the highest of the East Fork group, on the Black River where it is still small and quick, with tables, rock fire rings, a vault toilet and a seasonal spigot in the first cluster. The sites are a few steps from the water, set back just enough to protect the bank. Spruce and fir close in overhead, and the valley opens into meadow downstream toward Horse Springs and Buffalo Crossing.
It is a tent campground that tolerates small trailers. A concessionaire runs it for the Forest Service, collects $14 a night at the campground, and takes no reservations. The turnaround in the first cluster is tight, and sites 7 and 8, the quietest, have none at all. The shelters are what make it: on a July afternoon when the storm arrives at two and leaves at four, a roof over the table is worth the fee by itself. Elk walk the meadow at dusk, bears work the valley at night, and the river fishes well at first light.
What you get is one of the oldest, smallest and highest developed camps in the state, on a trout stream, for less than a tank of gas. What you do not get is a hookup, a shower, reliable water outside midsummer, cell signal, or any guarantee of a site on a holiday weekend. It is five and a quarter hours from Scottsdale, and it feels every mile of it, which is the point.
How to camp Diamond Rock right
Pay like this. $14 per camp unit per night, $7 with an Interagency Senior or Access pass, $14 for a second unit, paid at the campground envelope station. No reservations anywhere on the East Fork; it is first come, first served with a 14-day limit. The three shelter sites go first, so arrive Thursday for a holiday weekend.
Get there. US 60 east through Globe and Show Low to Springerville, then US 180/191 south to Alpine, about 4 hours 45 minutes. From Alpine go 2 miles north on US 191 to Forest Road 249, west 5 miles of gravel to Forest Road 276, and south into the East Fork developed camping area, following the signs for Diamond Rock; allow 30 minutes on the gravel and 5 hours 15 minutes in all. From the west, the Beeline, SR 260 and SR 273 to Big Lake, then FR 249 east, takes about the same. Aprons are gravel, about 13 by 54 feet.
Pick the season. Open about May 1 to October 31, weather permitting. June is dry and warm by day; September is cold at night and nearly empty. July and August bring a monsoon storm most afternoons, which is when the shelters earn their keep. Frost comes by late September and the water is shut off and drained in mid-October.
Water. In season only, from a spigot in the first cluster near site 4; the Forest Service removes it in mid-October and does not turn it back on until late spring. Horse Springs, two minutes away, has more spigots. Bring jugs for May and October regardless.
Camp by the rules. Sites 1 to 6 are the cluster with the spigot and the toilet; 7 and 8 are quieter and have no turnaround, so back a trailer in or leave it at Horse Springs. Firewood comes from the hosts at Horse Springs, not from home; moving firewood moves bark beetles. Bears are a fact here: hard-sided storage for everything with a smell, and the cooler sleeps in the vehicle. Nights are cold at 7,900 feet in any month.
The river. The East Fork is a few steps away and fishes best at dawn with small spinners or a dry-dropper; stocked rainbows hold in the obvious pools, browns in the undercuts, and Apache trout in the headwaters above. A license is required from age 10, and Apache trout regulations change, so check them.
Dogs. Leashed or otherwise restrained in camp, and kept out of the river where people are fishing.
Skip it if you need a sure site or a roof you did not bring. Horse Springs has 27 sites two minutes away and almost always has room. If you want free and nobody, the West Fork is over the ridge on FR 68. If you want a store, showers and a reservation, Big Lake is 20 minutes west, and Alpine Divide is the quick stop on the highway.
Three lean-tos the Corps left on the river
The Black River begins in the meadows and spruce around Big Lake and runs 114 miles to meet the White River above Fort Apache, where the two become the Salt. Its headwaters are White Mountain Apache country, and the river’s lower reach still divides the Fort Apache reservation on the north bank from San Carlos on the south. The trapper James Ohio Pattie put the name Black River on it in 1826 while hunting beaver through the White Mountains, and for the next half century the East Fork valley was Apache hunting ground crossed by the occasional soldier or surveyor. Mormon families settled Bush Valley, the future Alpine, in the late 1870s, and when the federal government carved the Apache National Forest out of the Black Mesa Forest Reserve in 1908, Alpine became its ranger town.
Recreation came with the Depression. Through the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps crews working out of camps around Alpine and Springerville built the roads, bridges and first developed campgrounds along the East Fork, and at Diamond Rock they put up three Adirondack-style shelters: three-sided log lean-tos with a roof over a table and a fire ring open to the river, built for an era when campers arrived by car with a canvas tent and no trailer. The same program left the oversized sites at Buffalo Crossing downstream. The shelters have been re-roofed and re-chinked over ninety years, but they are the originals in form and in place, which makes them among the oldest camping structures still in use in Arizona’s national forests. We could not find the Forest Service’s record of which CCC company built them or in which year, so the decade is as precise as we will be.
The river itself got entangled in the Valley’s plumbing in the 1940s, through one of the stranger deals in Arizona water history. Phelps Dodge needed water for its copper operations at Morenci, on the far side of the mountains. Rather than build a reservoir there, the company paid for Horseshoe Dam on the Verde River, finished in 1946, and in exchange received the right to pump an equal amount of water out of the Black River and pipe it over the divide to the mine. The pumping station is on the mainstem well below the campgrounds, but it means the water sliding past Diamond Rock is counted against a dam north of Scottsdale.
The fish were the next chapter. The Apache trout, Arizona’s native trout, had occupied about 600 miles of White Mountain streams a century earlier; by the late 1960s, after decades of stocking non-native rainbows and browns that outcompeted and hybridized with it, it was down to about 30 miles. In 1967 it was among the first species listed under the new federal Endangered Species Act, and the East Fork became recovery water, with barriers, removals and the tribe’s own closures on reservation streams. The Apache and Sitgreaves forests were merged under one supervisor in 1974, and the East Fork Recreation Area has been managed from Springerville since.
Fire wrote the latest entry. On May 29, 2011, two cousins left a campfire burning in the Bear Wallow Wilderness a few miles south of here. The Wallow Fire that followed burned 538,049 acres in Arizona and New Mexico, the largest in the state’s history, forced Alpine, Greer, Nutrioso and Springerville to evacuate, and destroyed the stream barriers that had been protecting Apache trout populations. The East Fork valley’s slopes carry the scars; the campground, its spruce and its three shelters came through. The concessionaire era, the $14 fee and the mid-October water shutoff are the modern layer on top of all that.
Why it matters
Diamond Rock is a small place that carries a lot of Arizona’s story: Apache water, a trapper’s name, a New Deal work crew, a copper company’s dam swap, the near-loss and slow recovery of a native fish, and the largest wildfire the state has seen. For a camper, it reduces to something simpler. Three roofs the CCC built still keep the rain off a table beside a trout stream at 7,900 feet, and nobody has thought to charge more than $14 for them. Get there on a Thursday, take a shelter if one is open, and put the cooler in the truck.