What is General Hitchcock Campground?
Around mile 12 of the Catalina Highway, past the saguaros and the grassland and into the first real oaks and pines, the road dips through Bear Canyon and a small campground sits in the trees on the right. General Hitchcock is the mountain’s modest middle option: about a dozen sites at roughly 6,000 feet, each with a table and fire ring, a couple of vault toilets, and nothing else. There is no water, there are no hookups, and the Forest Service says plainly it is not recommended for trailers or RVs.
The sites are close together under Arizona white oak, alligator juniper and ponderosa, set among boulders, and the creek bed through the middle of camp carries water only after a storm or spring snowmelt. Summer afternoons here run 20 degrees cooler than Tucson. The Green Mountain Trail leaves from across the highway and climbs 4.2 miles to San Pedro Vista; the Bug Spring and Incinerator Ridge trailheads are minutes away by car.
It is a tent campground for people who want the forest without the Rose Canyon scene a few miles up. What you get is shade, a trailhead and $20 camping. What you do not get is water, space, a reservation or quiet from the highway.
How to camp General Hitchcock right
Pay like this. $20 a night single, $40 double, first come, first served, cash or check at the fee tube. Two vehicles and ten people per site, 14-day limit, quiet hours 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east into Tucson, then east on Grant or Tanque Verde Road to the Catalina Highway. From Tanque Verde it is 4.2 miles to the forest boundary, then about 12 miles of continuous paved switchbacks to the campground, on the right just after the road drops into Bear Canyon. About 145 minutes from Old Town. The entrance is easy to miss coming uphill; if you reach the Palisades area you have gone past it. There is almost no overflow parking, so a full campground means driving on to Rose Canyon. Expect it to be full on summer weekends by Friday afternoon.
Pick the season. Roughly May through December 15. The Forest Service lists May as the opening month, though it has opened earlier in warm years; the mid-December close is firm because the campground is above the snow line in a normal winter and the highway can close above it. June is the reason to come: Tucson at 105, Bear Canyon in the 80s.
Water. None. Bring everything from Tucson. Spencer Canyon, ten miles higher, has water only while it is operating.
Camp by the rules, and like a tent camper. Treat it as tent-only even though nobody will stop a small van: the pull-ins are short and the loop is tight. The sites at the back, away from the highway, are the quiet ones; the ones along the creek bed are the shady ones. After a wet week do not pitch in the creek bed itself. Bear Creek does run, and the Forest Service warns of flash floods and of falling trees left from old fires.
The hike. The Green Mountain Trail #21 climbs from across the highway 4.2 miles to the Green Mountain saddle and San Pedro Vista, the best half-day hike from any campground on the mountain. Bug Spring and Incinerator Ridge are a few minutes down and up the road. On the way down, Sabino Canyon and its shuttle are the low-elevation counterpart.
Dogs. On leash. No horses or pack stock in camp.
Skip it if you need water, space or a reservation: go to Rose Canyon, or higher to Spencer Canyon. For winter camping on the same highway, Molino Basin sits lower and opens when this one closes. The catch here is the highway itself, with cyclists climbing past at dawn and motorcycles until dusk.
The highway a Postmaster General built with prisoners
The campground is named for a road, and the road for a man who was never a soldier. The Santa Catalinas were Babad Do’ag, Frog Mountain, to the Tohono O’odham long before Father Kino gave them a saint’s name in 1697, and the high country stayed hard to reach for two more centuries. In 1881 the botanist Sara Plummer Lemmon went up with her husband and a rancher named E. O. Stratton, by horse and on foot, and the summit took her name. Summerhaven grew into a summer cabin town near the top.
Frank Harris Hitchcock changed that. He had been Postmaster General of the United States under Taft, which gave him the honorific title, and later published the Tucson Citizen. In 1933 he persuaded the federal government to put a minimum-security prison camp at the foot of the mountain and use its inmates to build a road, which was the only way the county could afford one. The prisoners, mostly men convicted of tax evasion and immigration violations, started in tents; in February 1939 they moved to Federal Prison Camp No. 10 at Vail Corral. During the Second World War the camp held Japanese American men who had refused the draft in protest of their families’ internment, Gordon Hirabayashi among them, and they worked the road too. The camp closed in the spring of 1951, when the General Hitchcock Highway was finished. The campground’s history is thinner: the Forest Service put it in Bear Canyon along the new road, but it publishes no founding date, and none turned up in the records searched for this guide. The site of the old prison camp, a few miles below, has been the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Area since 1999.
Fire has shaped the mountain since. The Aspen Fire, starting June 17, 2003, burned 84,750 acres over a month and destroyed 340 homes and businesses in Summerhaven; it did not spare the picnic areas and campgrounds, and the signs at General Hitchcock warning of dead trees, loose rock and flash floods date from that burn. In 2020 the lightning-caused Bighorn Fire burned nearly 120,000 acres across the range. The highway reopened ahead of schedule that summer, but General Hitchcock, Rose Canyon and Spencer Canyon stayed closed while crews dealt with burn scars and the runoff that follows them.
Why it matters
General Hitchcock is a small campground with a large story behind its name: a mountain road that existed because a Washington figure turned newspaperman could get federal prisoners assigned to it, and that Japanese American draft resisters helped build while their families were behind barbed wire. Every sky island in southern Arizona has a version of this history, a road that made the cool country reachable and the fires that came after. For a Scottsdale camper the practical case is narrow but real: a shaded, cheap tent site at 6,000 feet, two and a half hours away, with a good trail out the door. Bring all your water, arrive by Friday noon, and keep out of the creek bed.