What is Double Springs Campground?
The Forest Service built Double Springs in the 1930s around two springs on the forested west side of Mormon Lake, and it still describes it, accurately, as an “old fashion” campground. There are 15 sites on a single gravel loop under ponderosa at 7,171 feet, each with a table and grill, with potable water and vault toilets, and that is the list. No host programs, no amphitheater, no boat ramp. A mile up the road, Dairy Springs has twice the sites and the activity; Double Springs has the quiet. It is for tent campers and small trailers, for people who want to reserve a site and know it is there, and for anyone who finds the big loops on Lake Mary Road too busy.
What it also has is the trailhead of the Lake View Trail, 2 miles one way, which leaves from beside the campground and climbs through the pines to overlooks of the Mormon Lake basin, the forest rolling away toward the Rim, and the extinct cinder cones that dot Anderson Mesa. Mormon Lake itself is shallow and often dry, so the view is of a vast meadow more often than of water; the elk prefer it that way. Mormon Lake village, with a store, gas, cabins and the lodge steakhouse, is a mile or so farther down the road.
What you get is the smallest, oldest and quietest developed campground on this side of Flagstaff, every site reservable, at $27 a night. What you do not get is a shower, a hookup, a dump station, a boat, or any promise that the lake will be wet.
How to camp Double Springs right
Reserve, because you have to. All 15 sites are reservation-only on recreation.gov, up to six months ahead; there is no first-come loop. A site is $27 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people, $10 for a second vehicle, with Senior and Access passes taking half off a single site. Day use is $12 per vehicle from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Check-in is 2 p.m., check-out 11 a.m. Book the sites at the back of the loop, nearest the trailhead, where the only sound after ten is wind in the pines.
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 4.6 miles, past the Dairy Springs turn, to Double Springs Road on the right. Everything is paved to the gate; the campground loop and spurs are gravel. About 2 hours 40 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. Last supplies are in Flagstaff or at the village store a mile past the campground.
Pick the season. Early May to mid-October. Late May through June and September are the best weeks: dry days, cold nights, few people. Nights at 7,100 feet are in the 30s and 40s in June and September, so bring more warm clothing than seems reasonable. July and August afternoons bring thunderstorms, and the Lake View overlook is not where to be when one builds. Fire restrictions are common in late spring; ask the host at Dairy Springs or call the Coconino hotline before lighting a fire.
Water and toilets. Potable water from spigots in season, vault toilets, no showers, no dump station. Pine Grove on Lake Mary Road has both for a fee, so plan to stop there on the way home. The two springs the campground is named for are a trickle in most years and dry in drought; do not count on them for anything.
RVs. The spurs were laid out for 1930s cars. The Forest Service publishes no length limit; small and mid-size trailers manage, large motorhomes should not try. No hookups.
The trail. Walk the Lake View Trail in the last hour before sunset. It climbs two miles through ponderosa to an overlook that faces east over the lake bed, the elk are moving, and the volcanic cones of Anderson Mesa go copper. Two hours round trip with time at the top. The same dark plateau makes this a good spot for the stargazing you cannot do in the Valley.
Dogs. On leash at all times. Horses and pack animals are not allowed in the campground.
Skip it if you have not reserved. Fifteen sites is fifteen sites, and driving up hoping is how people end up at the lodge’s RV park. Dairy Springs, where half the loop is first come, is the gamble; Ashurst Lake is the lakeside option with actual water; and Kehl Springs on the Rim is the free, primitive version of the same pines.
The dairy that named a lake that keeps disappearing
Mormon Lake is a natural accident. A shallow basin on Anderson Mesa with no outlet, it fills from snowmelt and summer rain, averages about 10 feet deep when full, and in a wet decade spreads across as much as 12 square miles, which makes it, on paper, the largest natural lake in Arizona. In a dry decade it shrinks to a marsh and then to a grass meadow where elk graze a mile from where the shore used to be. The basin was a hunting ground long before it had a name; Sinagua farmers worked the plateau around it before 1400, and Yavapai and Apache bands moved through afterward.
The name came with the Mormons. In the 1870s colonists from the Latter-day Saint settlements on the Little Colorado River looked north to the pine country for the things the river bottoms could not supply. They built a sawmill in 1876 a few miles south of the marsh at a site that became known as Millville, a dairy in 1878 on the lake’s west shore, and a tannery in 1879. The dairy was a cooperative operation that ran cattle on the lake meadows and shipped butter and cheese to the colonies, and it gave the lake the name it still carries and the springs beside it the name Dairy Springs. All three enterprises were abandoned within a few years when the Little Colorado colonies were disbanded and the families recalled; Coconino National Forest archaeologists recorded the sawmill site in 1978 and found a foundation and rock piles.
The Forest Service arrived in 1908, the year the Coconino National Forest was created, and it arrived here first: the Mormon Lake Guard Station, built that year on the west side of the lake, was the forest’s first ranger station. By 1915 it had a telephone line, a well and a fenced pasture, and rangers ran the district’s timber sales, grazing allotments and homestead permits from it, planned fire suppression, and lent it out as a polling place. Summer-home tracts followed on the bluffs above the lake, more than eighty private recreation residences under Forest Service permit, in clusters still named Rockledge, Pilgrim Playground, Dairy Springs, Montezuma Lodge and Double Springs.
Double Springs the campground belongs to the 1930s, the decade when the Civilian Conservation Corps and New Deal money built most of the Southwest’s early auto campgrounds. The Forest Service laid out a single small loop around two springs in the pines a mile south of the dairy site, with spurs sized for the cars of the day, and it has kept that layout since; the agency’s own description of the place as old-fashioned is a statement of fact. We could not find a Forest Service record naming the crew or the year, so the decade is what we will stand behind. The guard station, meanwhile, became the seasonal home of the Mormon Lake Hotshots, lost its district work to a new ranger station nearer Flagstaff in the 1970s, served as a helitack base, fell into disrepair, and was restored by volunteers and the nonprofit Historicorps as a rental cabin.
The recent history is the lake’s absence. Since the 2000s Mormon Lake has been dry or nearly dry for long stretches, the village and the Lakeview tract now sit well back from the average shoreline, and the fishery is occasional at best. The campgrounds have gone to a concessionaire, Double Springs has gone fully reservable, and the Lake View Trail still climbs to an overlook named for something that is usually a meadow. The elk, the ponderosa and the dark sky have not changed.
Why it matters
Double Springs is the plateau’s history in miniature: a Mormon dairy that lasted four years and named a lake, the first ranger station on one of the biggest national forests in the country, a Depression campground still laid out for 1930s cars, and a natural lake that illustrates the Southwest’s water better than any reservoir does, by disappearing. For a Scottsdale camper the lesson is practical. It is the one small, quiet, fully reservable campground within three hours of the Valley, the trail starts at your tent, and the lake is optional.