What is Fool Hollow Lake Recreation Area?
In 1994 Arizona State Parks opened a campground on Forest Service land around a reservoir on the north edge of Show Low, and it has been the easy answer to “where do we take the kids in the White Mountains” ever since. Fool Hollow Lake is 150 acres of water at about 6,300 feet, ringed by ponderosa pine and low bluffs, with the campground loops set back in the trees. There are about 100 sites: 20 tent-only sites on concrete pads, 62 RV sites with water and 30-amp electric (some 50-amp, and sewer on two loops) for rigs to 40 feet, and 17 group sites. Every loop has flush restrooms and free hot showers. There is a dump station, a year-round visitor center and park store, a boat concession that rents kayaks and paddleboards in summer, picnic ramadas, an amphitheater and a trail around the lake.
The fishing is real: largemouth and smallmouth bass, walleye, stocked rainbow trout and northern pike, with a 10-horsepower limit on motors. The town is five minutes away, which is either the drawback or the point. The lake is low enough in fall 2026 that both ramps are closed and only hand-launched boats are going in.
What you get is the one White Mountains campground that runs like a state park: hookups, showers, a gate code, a reservation line and a grocery store down the road. What you do not get is cheap, quiet or a site on a summer weekend unless you booked the day the window opened.
How to camp Fool Hollow right
Book the day the window opens. $25 a night non-electric, $50 with hookups, $75 oversized, plus a $3.60 reservation fee and $15 a night for a second vehicle. Day use is $10 per vehicle for one person, $20 for two to four. Reserve at azstateparks.com or 1-877-697-2757; from April 1 to October 30, weekends require two nights including Friday and Saturday, and holiday weekends require three. Check-in is 2 p.m., check-out noon. The electric loops go within days of opening and the tent loop follows; the tent sites on the west bluff have the views and a drop-off to watch with small children.
Get there. Take Shea Boulevard to SR 87 and follow the Beeline north to Payson, about 90 minutes. Turn east on SR 260 and stay on it up over the Rim and through Heber-Overgaard to Show Low, another 90 miles. In Show Low, turn north on Old Linden Road and follow the signs to Fool Hollow Lake Road. Figure 3 hours 5 minutes from Old Town; US 60 through Globe is an alternative of about the same length with more curves. The contact station is at the entrance, and campers arriving after the gate closes at 8 p.m. use the code in their confirmation.
Pick the season. Open all year. May through October is high season and books out; late September and October are the quiet, cold, good weeks, with the aspens turning on the drive from Greer and nights in the 30s. Expect monsoon afternoon storms in July and August and snow some winters; the gate opens at 7 a.m. from November to March and the dump station closes after October 15.
Water and showers. Potable water at every RV site and at spigots in the tent loop. Showers are free to registered campers and clean, which is the reason to pay the premium.
The lake. Low water has closed the launch ramps as of fall 2026; only hand-launched boats are allowed, and rentals run May through August. A fishing license is required for anyone 10 and older. Walk the shore trail at dusk for elk and the osprey working the shallows.
Noise. Expect chainsaws some weekdays while the Forest Service finishes removing hazard trees from the loops, and traffic from town on the road in.
Dogs. On leash, with water, picked up after, never left to bark.
Skip it if price and crowds bother you. A Forest Service campground with vault toilets and no reservation line is an hour on at Hoyer above Greer; the cheapest bed on a lake in Show Low is Show Low Lake ten minutes south; and Scott Reservoir is the small, free one between the two towns.
A fool’s farm under a lake
Show Low Creek runs off the Rim country at the northern edge of White Mountain Apache territory and the southern edge of the old Puebloan farming country along Silver Creek, and the Apache hunted and gathered along it into the 1870s. The Anglo story begins with a card game. In the 1870s Corydon Cooley, a former Army scout, and Marion Clark settled a 100,000-acre ranch on the creek and, by the legend the town has repeated ever since, agreed to divide it over a hand of Seven-Up; Cooley turned up the deuce of clubs, Clark said “show low it is,” and the town that grew around Cooley’s place took the name, with its main street called Deuce of Clubs. The town’s own date for its founding is 1870.
The hollow north of town was harder ground. In 1885 Thomas Jefferson Adair, one of the Mormon settlers filling the Silver Creek country, moved into it to farm. His neighbours said only a fool would try to farm that place, and the name stuck to the hollow and its wash; a small settlement called Adair grew up around his farm anyway. When the Sitgreaves National Forest was created in 1908 the hollow and the creek were inside it, which kept the land federal and kept the town from spreading across it, a fact that would matter a century later.
The lake came from Game and Fish. In 1957 the department, using federal sport-fish restoration money, built a dam at the confluence of Show Low Creek and Fool Hollow Wash, and the water rose over the old community of Adair to make a 150-acre reservoir. For the next 35 years Fool Hollow Lake was a fishing lake with a dirt ramp and informal camping on Forest Service land, stocked with trout and holding bass, walleye and, eventually, northern pike.
The campground was a committee’s work. In the early 1990s Arizona State Parks, the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, Arizona Game and Fish, the City of Show Low and two corporate sponsors, Arizona Public Service and McCarty Construction, agreed to build and run a developed recreation area together on the Forest Service land around the lake, the state operating it under agreement rather than owning it. Fool Hollow Lake Recreation Area opened on May 31, 1994, with hookups, showers and a reservation system that the nearby Forest Service campgrounds have never had, and it has been the most-booked campground in the White Mountains since. The arrangement is still cooperative: four agencies share the lake, which is why the park’s name says “recreation area” and not “state park.”
It survived the fire that defined the region. In June 2002 the Rodeo-Chediski Fire, 470,000 acres, the largest in Arizona’s history at the time, came within half a mile of the Show Low city limits; the town was evacuated and, when the wind turned, spared entirely. The loops reopened within weeks. The lake’s current problem is drier and slower: low water has closed both ramps, and the Forest Service is cutting hazard trees in the loops that the drought has killed.
Why it matters
Fool Hollow is the White Mountains’ answer to a question Scottsdale asks every June: where can a family with an RV and no camping experience go that has showers, power and a lake, and that will not turn them away at the gate. The answer exists because five agencies built it together on land a national forest kept out of a town’s hands, over a farm a man was called a fool for trying. It is also a lesson in what the premium buys: certainty. For a visitor the verdict is to book it the morning the window opens, come in late September when the crowd has gone, and keep the Forest Service campgrounds down the road for the years you do not plan ahead.