What is the Gila River Recreation Area?
Below Coolidge Dam the Gila River runs northwest through a Sonoran desert canyon of saguaro and mesquite toward its meeting with the San Pedro at Winkelman, and for about five river miles along SR 77 the land is BLM. The Tucson Field Office has put two small camps on it. Shores, at milepost 141.4 about 3.5 miles above town, has roughly 18 sites on a pair of gravel connectors, two vault toilets and trash cans. Christmas, at milepost 144.6 and named for the old copper camp on the hill, has 13 sites on a flat gravel loop in the cottonwoods with a double vault toilet. The Google Maps pin is at Christmas. Each site is a parking spur and a fire ring with a grill; a few have tables. Both are free, first come, first served.
The river is the point. It is warm-water fishing, channel and flathead catfish, carp and bass, and in summer, when Coolidge Dam releases for the farms around Coolidge, it is a float: inflatable kayaks and tubes from Shores down to the Town of Winkelman’s river park, which also has the only RV hookups and showers in the area. In winter the flow drops to a clear trickle and the canyon goes quiet, and the cottonwoods along the loop at Christmas turn yellow in November.
What you get is a free night beside a real desert river two and a half hours from Scottsdale, with a toilet, a fire ring and shade. What you do not get is water, trash service, a site that fits a big motorhome, or a river that behaves on its own schedule; the flow is whatever the dam is sending to the farms that week.
How to camp it right
Pay nothing, claim a spur. Free, no permit for private use, first come, first served. There is no host; pick an open spur and set up. Commercial trips and large organized groups need a BLM Special Recreation Permit.
Get there. US 60 east through Superior to the SR 177 junction, then SR 177 south about 35 miles through the copper country around Ray and Kearny to Winkelman. Turn left on SR 77 toward Globe; Shores is about 3.5 miles up on the right and Christmas another 3.5 miles. About 2 hours 25 minutes from Old Town, all paved; the entrance roads are short, steep gravel pitches off the highway and the signs are small, so arrive in daylight the first time. The BLM says plainly that the sites are not for large motorhomes or trailers; the clearances are tight and the turning space is not there.
Pick the season. Camping season is October through April; summer is 105-plus and the shade is thin at midday. Floating is the reverse, May through October on dam releases, so a late-April or early-October trip is the only time you get both a tolerable camp and water worth paddling.
Water. None provided. Carry all of it, and bring a filter if you intend to use river water, which runs silty whenever the dam is releasing. Winkelman and Kearny have stores.
Camp by the rules. No target shooting, no fireworks, vehicles on roads and parking areas only. The river crosses private and State Trust land between the two sites; stay on the BLM ground. Shores has trash cans; Christmas does not, so haul it out.
Float with the dam. Check the Coolidge Dam release before you leave Scottsdale. Put in at Shores for the easiest run to the Winkelman park, which is the take-out. At 600 cfs or more the BLM calls the river fast and hazardous. Do not float Christmas to Shores; there are fences and downed trees across the channel.
Fish at dusk. The catfishing is best at dusk from the gravel bars below Christmas. Anyone 10 or older needs an Arizona license.
Heat, snakes and dogs. The sites are natural habitat and rattlesnakes are part of it from March on. Dogs are fine on leash.
Skip it if you want pines or a hookup. The Pinal Mountains above Globe are the cool-weather pairing an hour north, Round Mountain Park in Globe is the leg-stretch on the way, and for the Gila with cliffs and a longer float the Gila Box near Safford is the upgrade.
Christmas morning, 1902
The copper on the hill above the Christmas loop was found in 1880, and two claims were staked on it, Bill Tweed and Dennis O’Brien’s in 1878 and Dr. James Douglas’s in 1882. Both were thrown out in 1884 for a reason that had nothing to do with geology: the ground lay inside the San Carlos Apache Reservation, drawn in 1872, and the law did not allow mining claims there. A prospector named George Chittenden spent years petitioning Congress to move the line. On December 22, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order redrawing the reservation boundary to leave the old claims outside it. Relay riders carried the news from the telegraph office at Casa Grande to Chittenden’s camp on Christmas Eve, and in the early hours of December 25 he and his partner N. H. Mellor staked the claim. “We filled our stockings,” Chittenden said later, “and named the place Christmas in honor of the day.”
The camp that grew up around the mine was a hard place to make work. Mining began in August 1905, the same summer the post office opened on June 17, but the roads were poor and the smelter could not get reliable coke. A rail spur in 1911 and ASARCO’s new smelter at Hayden fixed the logistics, and production began in earnest in 1916. Christmas went through receivership in 1921, a reopening in 1925, and a peak of roughly 1,000 people in the early 1930s, with a school, a church, two clubhouses and no saloon; its post office was known across the country for the Christmas postmark it stamped on holiday mail. Falling copper prices cut the town to about 100 people by the end of 1931, and the post office closed for good on March 30, 1935, though holiday letters kept arriving for two decades and were forwarded to Winkelman. The underground mine was abandoned for an open pit in 1966, when the old workings became unsafe, and mining was suspended in January 1982. Over 76 years the mine produced about 363 million pounds of copper, 55,000 ounces of gold and 2.15 million ounces of silver. Freeport-McMoRan owns it now, and the ground is closed.
The river changed in the same years. From 1924 to 1928 the Bureau of Indian Affairs built Coolidge Dam 25 miles upstream, a 249-foot multiple-dome structure that was the centerpiece of the San Carlos Irrigation Project, meant to water about 100,000 acres around Coolidge and Florence. Calvin Coolidge dedicated it on March 4, 1930, standing over a reservoir that had not begun to fill; Will Rogers, looking at the grass in the lakebed, said that if it were his lake he would mow it. The dam turned the Gila at Winkelman into the stream you camp beside today: a trickle in winter, when the water is being stored, and a floatable river from May to October, when it is being released to the farms. Occasionally it does neither. In January 1993 rain on snow forced record releases, the Gila at Winkelman reached about 1,050 cubic meters per second on January 20, and Winkelman Flats, the town park that is now the float take-out, went under.
The BLM’s Tucson Field Office laid out Shores and Christmas as minimal sites on the public land between the mine’s old company town and the river, with gravel spurs and vault toilets and nothing that needs a fee to maintain. Winkelman itself, named for a local cattleman, Peter Winkelman, had 484 people in the 1910 census and 296 in 2020, and the smelter at Hayden next door is the last of the industry that built the canyon’s towns.
Why it matters
This stretch of the Gila explains the plumbing of central Arizona as well as anywhere: a reservation line moved by executive order to free up copper, a town named in the hours after the news arrived, and a river that stopped being a river in 1928 and became a delivery schedule for farms 60 miles downstream. The campgrounds are the public remainder of all that, free because there is nothing to charge for, quiet because the mine closed. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is plain: in October through April, with your own water and a small rig, Christmas is a good free night beside moving water; in summer, check the dam release, put in at Shores and float to the park.