What is Fourmile Canyon Campground?
Klondyke is a ranger station, a cemetery and a handful of houses at the dead end of a long dirt road in the Aravaipa Valley, and the BLM’s Fourmile Canyon Campground is three quarters of a mile past it. Ten sites sit in the shade of old mesquites and desert grass at 3,500 feet, each with a concrete picnic table and a fire ring; there is a vault toilet, trash service and an information kiosk, and since 2001 a volunteer host has staffed the place part of the year. There is no water. The BLM manages it from Safford as part of the 75,000-acre Aravaipa Canyon Special Recreation Management Area at the north end of the Galiuro Mountains.
The reason it exists is Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness, whose east trailhead is a few miles up the valley. Aravaipa is the eleven-mile perennial-creek canyon that every Arizona hiker eventually does, and it is permit-only year-round: $5 per person per day on recreation.gov, ten people per party, three days and two nights maximum, no dogs. Permit holders camp here the night before so they can start early.
In between, the campground serves javelina and deer hunters in fall and the occasional person who just wants a cheap mesquite flat with nobody around, which it also is. What you get is a quiet, shaded, nearly free base at the back door of the best canyon walk in southern Arizona. What you do not get is water, a store, cell signal or a short drive.
How to camp Fourmile Canyon right
Book the permit first. The Aravaipa permit is the hard part: recreation.gov only, $5 per person per day, available up to 13 weeks ahead, and the spring dates go fast. The campground only matters once you have it.
Pay at the site. $5 a night for a site with two vehicles, $2 per extra vehicle, first come, first served, 14-day limit. Interagency Senior and Access passes take half off. The BLM’s 2024 Safford business plan proposed raising the fee to $15; the page still said $5 when checked, but carry enough cash for either.
Get there. Take US 60 east to Globe, then US 70 east toward Safford. About 13 miles short of Safford, between Fort Thomas and Pima, turn south on Aravaipa-Klondyke Road and follow it about 32 miles to Klondyke; the pavement gives out and the rest is graded dirt and washboard. Turn right at Klondyke onto Fourmile Canyon Road and the campground is 0.75 mile down on the left. Figure about 215 minutes from Old Town. You can also come from Willcox up US 191 and west on Klondyke Road, which is about the same and no smoother. Fill the tank in Globe; Globe or Safford is the last gas and grocery.
Bring all the water. The BLM says no water is available, whatever older listings claim. Bring everything you will drink, cook with and carry into the canyon.
Pick the season. Open all year. October through April is the window, and February to April is when permits and campsites both get scarce: the ten sites can be full on a Friday with permit holders, and the host, when there is one, knows where the overflow goes. Fall brings deer and javelina hunters. Summer is a hot desert valley and empty for a reason.
Do the canyon from the kiosk. The east trailhead road crosses Aravaipa Creek with no bridge, needs high clearance and is often impassable after rain; this is flash flood country. The BLM recommends parking at the information kiosk and walking 1.5 miles across The Nature Conservancy’s land to Turkey Creek and the wilderness boundary. Stop at the Klondyke ranger station for a creek-crossing report before you try anything else. Bighorn sheep, coatis and a long list of birds use the canyon; the wildlife field guide covers what you are likely to see.
Trailers and dogs. Small trailers are fine on the level mesquite flats, and the road handles one when dry; nobody drags a big fifth wheel 30 miles down Klondyke Road for a $5 site. Dogs are fine in the campground on a leash and prohibited in the wilderness.
Skip it if you do not have an Aravaipa permit. Riverview in the Gila Box has water and a river for the same $5, Hot Well Dunes has a hot tub in the sand, and Arcadia on Mount Graham is cool when the valley is not. If your permit is for the west end, the free Gila River sites near Winkelman are on SR 77 on the way.
A Yukon name on an Apache creek
Aravaipa Creek runs year-round, which in southern Arizona means people have always lived beside it. It was home to the Aravaipa band of Western Apache, the people of the leader Eskiminzin, who farmed and gathered along the water. In early 1871 Eskiminzin’s people settled under Army protection near Camp Grant, at the creek’s west end where it meets the San Pedro. At dawn on April 30, 1871, a party of 6 Anglo Americans, 48 Mexican Americans and 92 Tohono O’odham from Tucson attacked the camp and killed about 144 Aravaipa and Pinal Apaches, nearly all of them women and children. A Tucson grand jury indicted 100 of the attackers that October; at trial in December the jury acquitted them in 19 minutes. Within a few years the survivors were moved onto the San Carlos reservation, and the creek they had farmed became ranch country.
The east end of the valley filled with prospectors once the Army’s campaigns closed. The district was first prospected in the 1870s, but serious work waited until the 1890s. Around 1900 a group of miners just back from the Yukon staked claims here and, hoping for the same luck, named them Klondyke. They found silver and lead rather than gold. The Grand Reef mine up Laurel Canyon got a mill after 1915, the post office opened in 1907, and at its peak the town had a store, a church, a school and about 500 people. The post office closed in 1955, and today Klondyke is a dozen residents and a BLM ranger station.
Klondyke’s most famous day happened somewhere else. On February 9, 1918, Graham County Sheriff Frank McBride, two deputies and a U.S. marshal left Klondyke to arrest Tom and John Power on draft charges, and their father Jeff and hired hand Tom Sisson for perjury, at the family’s mine cabin in Keilberg Canyon in the Galiuros. The shootout at dawn the next day killed McBride, both deputies and Jeff Power. The marshal rode back to Klondyke, and the survivors fled toward Mexico in what was then the largest manhunt in Arizona history. The brothers served 42 years and were paroled in 1960; who fired first is still argued. The cabin was listed on the National Register in 1975.
Protection came to the canyon in stages. The BLM set aside a roughly 5,000-acre Aravaipa Canyon Primitive Area in 1969, The Nature Conservancy bought its first ranch land there at the start of the 1970s, and on August 28, 1984, Congress designated the 19,410-acre Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness with Barry Goldwater pushing it through. The campground has no published construction date; the BLM built it as the east-end staging area, and its volunteer host program began in 2001. The pending question is the fee: the BLM’s 2024 business plan proposed tripling it to $15, still cheap, and a sign that more people are making the drive.
Why it matters
Fourmile Canyon is a $5 campground at the end of a dirt road, but the valley around it holds three of the defining stories of territorial Arizona: an Apache homeland emptied by a massacre the courts refused to punish, a mining boom that named itself after somewhere else, and a gunfight over the draft that the state still argues about. It also shows how Arizona’s best wild places got protected, piece by piece, by an agency, a land trust and a senator. For a Scottsdale visitor the practical verdict is narrow: come here because you have an Aravaipa permit, sleep under the mesquites the night before, bring every drop of water, and start walking at first light.