What is Fort Tuthill County Park Campground?
Fort Tuthill was built at the end of the 1920s as the summer camp of the Arizona National Guard, and when the Guard left after 1948 the county took it for a park. Today the site at the south edge of Flagstaff holds the county fairgrounds, the Pepsi Amphitheater, an archery range, a military museum, a model railroad club, the Fort Tuthill Bike Park, the Flagstaff Extreme aerial course strung through the ponderosas, and, back in the trees, the county campground: 101 sites, tent and RV, plus four group areas, at about 7,000 feet.
It is not a Forest Service campground and does not pretend to be. Toilets are portable units, there are no showers, and only eight RV sites have hookups (water and sewer, no electricity anywhere). The loops are flat, the sites are reasonably spaced under big pines, and the freeway is a few hundred yards away through the trees, audible at night and forgotten by morning. A concessionaire runs it, sells firewood and ice at the gate, and keeps the portable toilets serviced.
What you get instead of polish is a campsite in tall pines three miles from downtown Flagstaff and a minute from I-17, with a playground, a bike park and some of the best casual mountain biking in the state out the back of the loop. For a Scottsdale family doing one night on the way to the Grand Canyon, or a Humphreys Peak hiker who wants an alpine start, that is enough. What you do not get is quiet on a fair weekend, a shower, or a cabin; the cabins people mention belong to the military recreation area next door and require a Department of Defense ID.
How to camp Fort Tuthill right
Book three days out, or walk up. The concessionaire does not publish rates on its page; recent seasons have run around $30 per night for a standard site, more for the water-and-sewer sites and the group areas. Book online through the Campspot link on the Go Camp Arizona page at least three days ahead; inside that window it is first come at the gate. Confirm the rate when you book rather than trusting a number here.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17, then I-17 north for about two hours to exit 337 (Fort Tuthill / Airport), the first Flagstaff exit. Turn left, cross under the freeway and follow the signs into the park; the campground entrance is a minute from the ramp. About 2 hours 5 minutes from Old Town with no traffic, every foot of it paved. Coming home, remember that Sunday afternoons on I-17 back up at Cordes Junction and Anthem; leave by noon.
Check the fairgrounds calendar. This is the one piece of homework that matters. The county fair runs over Labor Day weekend and fills the park; amphitheater concerts do the same on scattered summer nights, with bass through the tent walls until eleven. Outside those dates the campground is calm and midweek often half empty.
Pick the season. Roughly May through September. Flagstaff at 7,000 feet is 25 to 30 degrees cooler than the Valley on a July afternoon, which is the whole reason a Scottsdale family comes; nights can still drop into the 40s in June and September, so pack a real bag. Afternoon thunderstorms are routine in July and August and the pines do not keep you dry.
Water and toilets. Water spigots in the camping areas; portable toilets, serviced but still portable. No showers. No tank filling from the spigots. If the toilets are a problem, Canyon Vista on Lake Mary Road has vault toilets and is fifteen minutes away.
Use the park. The bike park’s pump tracks and jump lines are free and a short ride from the loops. The Soldiers Trail circles the park and the Flagstaff Urban Trail System connects to town, so a family can ride to dinner. Flagstaff Extreme’s zipline and obstacle courses run through the same pines for a fee. Hikers headed for Humphreys Peak get a 20-minute head start on the Snowbowl Road from here compared with the Lake Mary campgrounds, and Lava River Cave is 35 minutes north.
Dogs. Leashed and attended, never left at the site.
Skip it if you want forest quiet. It is a fairgrounds campground with portable toilets and a freeway within earshot. Drive fifteen minutes to Canyon Vista or forty to Lakeview on Upper Lake Mary for the Forest Service version; if you want convenience and a bike park, nothing in Flagstaff is easier than this. For how it fits a longer trip north, see the day trips guide.
The Guard camp that became a fairground
The flat, open ponderosa country south of the San Francisco Peaks was Sinagua farmland long before anyone put a fort on it, and it stayed empty pine and sheep range after the railroad made Flagstaff a town three miles north in the 1880s. What brought the state here was the need for a summer camp. Arizona’s National Guard had trained wherever it could since statehood, and in 1928 it began building a permanent camp in the pines south of town, cool enough for August drill. The Phoenix architects Lescher and Mahoney, who designed much of the state’s public architecture between the wars, laid it out as a central quadrangle of permanent buildings with tent rows on the remaining sides. It was named for Brigadier General Alexander M. Tuthill, the Guard’s commander, and by 1929 the name had settled as Fort Tuthill.
The regiment that trained here was the 158th Infantry, Arizona’s Guard regiment, with a lineage that runs back through the 1st Arizona Volunteer Infantry of 1865 and the ten officers and 117 men Arizona sent to the Rough Riders in 1898. It held its annual field training at Fort Tuthill from 1929 to 1937, again in 1939, and for the last time in 1948; summer camps drew as many as 3,000 Guardsmen from around the Southwest. In between, the regiment went to the Panama Canal Zone in January 1942, took the name Bushmasters from the snake in the jungle there, and fought through New Guinea, New Britain, Noemfoor and Luzon before standing down in Japan in January 1946. Many of the men who did that had learned to soldier in these pines.
After 1948 the Guard did not come back, and in 1955 Coconino County took the camp as a park. The fairgrounds and the annual county fair over Labor Day moved in, and the old quadrangle, with its log-and-stone buildings, became the center of a county park rather than a post. The Fort Tuthill Military Museum occupies one of the original buildings; the camp is listed on the National Register of Historic Places; and in 2017 the county renovated the surviving Guard structures to restore their 1930s character. Next door, Luke Air Force Base runs a military recreation area with cabins and an RV park, the one piece of the site that still belongs to the armed forces, and the reason so many reviews of “Fort Tuthill” mention cabins the county campground does not have.
The park’s current shape is recent. Over the past two decades the county and its partners added the Pepsi Amphitheater, the Fort Tuthill Bike Park, an archery range and the Flagstaff Extreme treetop course, and handed the campground to a concessionaire to run with the simple setup it still has: spigots, portable toilets, eight water-and-sewer pads and a fire ring at every site. Flagstaff grew up around it; the freeway exit that makes the campground so easy to reach was once the edge of town.
Why it matters
Fort Tuthill is what happened to a lot of Arizona’s public land between the wars: built for one purpose by one level of government, handed down to another, and slowly filled with whatever the county thought people wanted, a fair, a stage, a bike park, a campground. It is not a wilderness experience, and it does not need to be, because Flagstaff has plenty of those twenty minutes away. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is practical: it is the easiest campground in northern Arizona to reach, the cheapest bed in Flagstaff in July, a fine base for Humphreys or the Canyon, and a bad choice on fair weekend. Check the calendar, bring the bikes, and do not expect a shower.