What is Gilbert Ray Campground?
Gilbert Ray is Pima County’s campground inside Tucson Mountain Park, a 20,000-acre county preserve that shares a boundary with the west district of Saguaro National Park. The national park has no campground; this is where its visitors sleep. 138 sites are laid out in loops A, B, C and H on a gentle slope of saguaro, palo verde and cholla, nearly all of them with 20-, 30- and 50-amp electric, each with a table and a gravel pad, at $35 a night. Eight tent-only sites have no utilities and cost $10. Each loop has a flush restroom with sinks and an outdoor potable spigot, and there is one dump station where RVs fill and empty. There are no showers and no sewer or water hookups at the sites.
The point of staying here is location. The Red Hills Visitor Center and the Bajada Loop Drive are about two miles north on Kinney Road, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is between you and them, and Old Tucson is around the corner. You can do the national park at sunrise and sunset, which is when it is worth seeing, and spend the middle of the day at the museum. The campground itself is quiet, dark enough for stars and full of cactus wrens.
What you get is a saguaro forest as good as the national park’s, with electricity, for one of the best prices in Arizona camping. What you do not get is a shower, a summer season, a walk-up site or a trail you can take the dog on. It closes from May through August and it books a year out.
How to camp Gilbert Ray right
Reserve the day it opens. Gilbert Ray is reservation-only through Pima County’s online system, up to a year ahead. There are no first-come sites and no cash or checks at the gate, and staff cannot take payment on site; a loop that looks empty is spoken for or blocked. $35 for electric sites whether or not you plug in, $10 for tent-only, no senior, pass or multi-night discounts, and Arizona State Parks and federal passes are not honored. If you want a January or February weekend, book the day the window opens; snowbirds plan a year out. A Tuesday in November is easy.
Know the limits. Seven nights, then a week out before you can rebook. Six people and two vehicles per site, 40 feet maximum total rig length including racks and trailers. Check-in is noon, check-out 11 a.m., quiet hours 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Loop H and the outer edge of loop B have the most space and the best saguaros around the site.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east, about 100 miles to exit 242, Avra Valley Road, then west and south on Avra Valley, Sandario and Kinney Road past the national park entrance and the Desert Museum to McCain Loop Road. About two hours from Old Town, all paved. The scenic alternative is to stay on I-10 into Tucson, take Speedway Boulevard west and cross Gates Pass; it is spectacular and a few minutes shorter, but the pass is steep and narrow and the county tells RVs and trailers to use Kinney Road instead; do not take anything over 25 feet over it. Anything towing must unhook in the main lot before entering a loop.
Pick the season. September 1 to April 30. The county closes it from May through August, and the booking system will not let you try.
Water and waste. Potable water at spigots behind each restroom and at the dump station; fill RV tanks only at the dump station. No showers, so bring your own plan; the restrooms are clean but basic.
Dogs. Leashed in the campground, never left alone, and not allowed on any Tucson Mountain Park trail. Saguaro National Park allows them only on roads and a few short paved walks. If the dog is the point of the trip, this is not the place.
Time the museum. The Desert Museum opens at 7:30 in the cool months, and the first hour, before the tour buses, is the best hour of the trip.
Skip it if you cannot plan ahead or need a shower. Catalina State Park on the north side of Tucson has showers and its own booking window, Picacho Peak is a good one-night stop on the way down, and closer to home, Usery Mountain and McDowell Mountain give you the same kind of electric desert campground without the two-hour drive.
The county park that beat the national park to the saguaros
The Tucson Mountains were Tohono O’odham country, and before that home to the Hohokam, whose petroglyphs still cover the boulders of Signal Hill a few miles north of the campground. By the 1920s the range west of Tucson was a patchwork of mining claims, homesteads and grazing leases, and the saguaro forest on its western slopes, as dense as any in Arizona, looked like it would go the way of the rest of the open desert around a growing city.
Pima County moved first. In April 1929 it created Tucson Mountain Park, with a county parks commission chaired by C. B. Brown, to protect the cactus forest from mining. Four years later, in March 1933, President Hoover proclaimed Saguaro National Monument on the other side of Tucson, in the Rincon foothills; the Tucson Mountains were the county’s job. The labor to make the park usable came from the New Deal. In December 1933 the Civilian Conservation Corps set up Camp Pima at what is now the northwest corner of the national park, and through the 1930s its crews built Gates Pass Road and the other park roads, picnic areas, trails, check dams, cattle guards and fences, filled old mining scars and reseeded grass.
The park drew other tenants. Columbia Pictures built the Old Tucson set in 1939 for the film Arizona, and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum opened in 1952 in buildings the CCC had left behind. After the war the county hired its first parks and recreation director, Gilbert Ray, who held the job from 1947 to 1972. The campground on McCain Loop was first called Palo Verde Campground and was later renamed for him; the county’s own records do not say exactly when it was built, so the safest statement is that it dates from Ray’s tenure or soon after.
In 1961 the federal government took the northern half of the county park into Saguaro National Monument as its Tucson Mountain unit, and in 1994 the monument became a national park. The Park Service never built a campground in either district. That left Gilbert Ray, on the county side of the line, as the developed campground for the park’s west district, which is why a county site with a modest price and electric hookups books out a year ahead every winter.
Why it matters
Gilbert Ray is a reminder that Arizona’s desert was saved in pieces, and not always by the federal government. Pima County protected the Tucson Mountains four years before Saguaro was a monument, the CCC built the roads that made both usable, and the national park that took half the county’s land never built a place to sleep in it. For a Scottsdale camper the lesson is practical: the best campsite for Saguaro National Park is a county one, it is open only in the cool months, and you need to book it before the snowbirds do. Plan a year out for a winter weekend, take any weekday you can get, and stay at least two nights.