What is Gardner Canyon Road dispersed camping?
The west side of the Santa Rita Mountains is Madera Canyon, with its fee lots, lodges and birders. The east side is Gardner Canyon Road, Forest Road 92, which leaves SR 83 a few miles north of Sonoita and runs 8.7 miles of dirt west into the range toward Mount Wrightson, 9,453 feet. For its first stretch the road crosses open oak-and-mesquite grassland at about 5,000 feet, and the Forest Service has signed a string of numbered dispersed campsites there, roughly five to ten depending on how you count, with many more informal pullouts beyond. There is nothing at any of them but a fire ring and a view, and nothing is charged. This is the Coronado’s standard free dispersed camping: 14 days, 300 feet from the road, 200 feet from water, pack it out.
Two things make it more than a pullout. A quarter mile in, Forest Road 163 turns off and climbs 5 miles to Kentucky Camp, five adobe buildings put up in 1902 to 1906 by a company that meant to pipe water across the hills and hydraulic-mine the Greaterville gold placers, which failed within a few years, became a ranch and was acquired by the Forest Service in 1989. The headquarters is open with exhibits, a caretaker when one is in residence, drinking water at hose bibs and a vault toilet, and the restored cabin rents for $75 a night. The Arizona Trail runs through its yard: Passage 5 covers 16.9 miles from the Gardner Canyon trailhead, farther up FR 92, north past Kentucky Camp to Oak Tree Canyon. From the end of FR 92 the Gardner Canyon and Cave Canyon trails climb toward the Super Trail and Wrightson’s summit, a serious day.
What you get is a free, quiet oak-grassland camp with a ghost camp, a long trail and a big mountain within reach. What you do not get is a toilet, a tap, a reliably quiet weekend, or a road to the trailheads that a sedan should try.
How to camp it right
Pay nothing, follow the rules. No fee, no permit. 14 days in 60, vehicles within 300 feet of the centerline, 200 feet from water or a stock tank, existing fire rings only, no camping inside Kentucky Camp’s boundary or within a mile of it unless posted. Group events may need a special-use permit from the Nogales district. The etiquette entry covers the rest.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east past Tucson to exit 281, SR 83 south about 21 miles, then right onto Gardner Canyon Road. The first miles are graded, washboarded dirt that a sedan can manage slowly; the upper road has creek crossings and the Forest Service calls it high-clearance to the trailheads. About 175 minutes from Old Town to the first sites. Sonoita, 10 minutes south on SR 83, has gas and groceries. Signal is spotty near the highway and gone past the first mile; download maps in Sonoita.
Camp on forest land. Not every parcel between SR 83 and the forest boundary is federal. Camp where the Motor Vehicle Use Map shows National Forest.
Pick your site by your rig. Take a site in the first two miles if you have a trailer; keep driving if you have clearance and want quiet. The numbered sites near the highway fill on winter weekends with Tucson overlanders and side-by-sides, and weekend OHV traffic is heavy and dusty.
Pick the season. October through April for cool nights and dry roads, May and June for the mountain. Nights freeze from November to March. Crossings on FR 92 flood in monsoon season and after winter rain; do not try them during or after a storm.
Water. None at the sites. Fill at Kentucky Camp’s four hose bibs rather than hauling it from town; the camp also has the only vault toilet for miles.
Walk the trail, visit the camp. Walk the Arizona Trail north from the Gardner Canyon trailhead in the morning for the grassland views back to the Whetstones, and give Kentucky Camp an hour. The Kelvin trailhead guide explains how the trail’s passages fit together.
Climb Wrightson if you have two nights. From the end of FR 92 the Gardner Canyon and Cave Canyon trails reach the Super Trail and the summit. It is a long, steep day from this side; most people start at dawn from camp and make it the point of the trip.
Dogs. Allowed; leash near others and at Kentucky Camp.
Skip it if no toilet, dust and weekend engines are deal-breakers. Bog Springs, on the other side of the mountain, is the oak campground with a vault toilet in the same range; Cieneguita at Las Cienegas is the free grassland camp with a toilet to the east; Parker Canyon Lake has water and fish an hour south.
The gold company that built a pipeline and died in a hotel window
The Santa Ritas were O’odham mountains, and O’odham artifacts turn up throughout the range; Mount Wrightson is Ce:wi Duag in their language. By the 1800s the east slope was Apache country, and dangerous: William Wrightson, the mining man and newspaper publisher whose name replaced Old Baldy on the summit, was killed by Apaches in 1865. What brought Anglos up Gardner Canyon anyway was gold. It was found in the range in 1874, and the Greaterville placers a few miles north drew a rush of miners who worked the gravels with pans and rockers until the easy gold was gone, by about 1886.
Kentucky Camp was the attempt to get the rest with engineering. On October 3, 1902, the Santa Rita Water and Mining Company incorporated in Tucson, backed by financier George McAneny and engineer James Stetson, with a plan to hydraulic-mine the Greaterville placers: blast the gold-bearing gravel loose with high-pressure water, the way California’s miners had done forty years earlier. The problem was water, which the placers did not have. So from 1903 to 1904 the company built an 8.5-mile system of pipeline and ditch that collected water from Gardner and Big Casa Blanca canyons and carried it across the hills, and it built a headquarters of five adobe buildings it called Kentucky Camp. The camp’s best years were 1904 to 1906. In 1905 Stetson died after falling from a window of the Santa Rita Hotel in Tucson, the partners wound the venture up the following year, and the pipeline never delivered enough water to make the placers pay; a water cannon from the system is still on display at the camp. In 1905, as the company was failing, the Santa Rita Mountains came into the new national forest system, and the ground under today’s campsites has been Forest Service land ever since.
The adobes outlived the company by a century. Kentucky Camp became a cattle ranch headquarters and stayed one for decades, then stood empty from 1967, when the last occupants left, and was looted of most of its artifacts over the next twenty years. The Forest Service acquired the property in 1989 and, with the volunteer Friends of Kentucky Camp, began stabilizing and restoring the buildings, one of which became the rental cabin.
The trail arrived last. In 1985 a Flagstaff schoolteacher named Dale Shewalter proposed a footpath from Mexico to Utah; the route he and the Arizona Trail Association worked out passes directly through Kentucky Camp’s yard, and the Gardner Canyon trailhead up FR 92 became the start of Passage 5. The Arizona Trail was named a National Scenic Trail on March 30, 2009, and declared complete on December 16, 2011, 800 miles end to end. The dispersed sites along the lower road grew up around all this without anyone planning them, which is how dispersed camping usually works: a trailhead, a historic site, a free water tap, and a stretch of flat ground beside a dirt road.
Why it matters
Gardner Canyon is the back door to a famous range, and it explains the Santa Ritas better than the front does: the placer rush that built Greaterville, the Progressive-era engineering that tried to finish the job and ended in a hotel window, the century of cattle, and the national forest and national trail that inherited the lot. It is also an honest sample of what free camping on the Coronado is, numbered pullouts with a fire ring and the standard rules and nothing else. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is simple: two nights, a Thursday arrival in winter, water from Kentucky Camp’s hose bibs, a morning on the Arizona Trail and, if you have the legs, Wrightson from the quiet side.