What is Granville Campground?
North of Clifton, US 191 climbs through the middle of the Morenci copper mine and then, abruptly, into forest. Granville is the first campground past the pit: a small Forest Service camp at 6,604 feet, 16 miles north of Clifton and about 3,000 feet above it, in a side canyon of Arizona cypress, Gambel oak and quaking aspen. The Forest Service lists 15 tables, 10 grills, a vault toilet, trash cans and horse corrals at the north end. It does not count sites; most guides say about 12, all tent-sized. Six privately owned summer cabins stand in the same canyon under Forest Service special-use permits.
It is free, and better than free usually is: real shade, a creek bed that runs in spring, oaks turning in October, and a canyon wall between you and most of the highway. The Coronado Trail begins its serious climbing just north of here, roughly 100 miles of switchbacks to Springerville, famous for its 460 curves, with almost nothing in between, and Granville is the natural first or last night of that drive.
What you get is a quiet, shaded tent camp with a toilet and corrals. What you do not get is drinking water, a site big enough for a trailer, or distance from the highway, which carries mine-shift traffic and motorcycles a hundred yards away. It is a long way from Scottsdale, about 4 hours 5 minutes, and it only makes sense as part of a bigger trip into the eastern mountains.
How to camp Granville right
Pay nothing, arrive early. It is free, first come, first served, with the forest’s 14-day limit. There are no reservations, and on a summer weekend the cabin owners and the Coronado Trail traffic are both in residence, so a Friday afternoon arrival is safer than Friday night.
Get there. US 60 east to Globe, US 70 through the San Carlos Apache Reservation to Safford (about 2 hours 50 minutes), then US 191 north 35 miles to Clifton and up through Morenci and the mine. The campground is 16 miles north of Clifton on the left, paved to the entrance. Figure 4 hours 5 minutes in all. Stop at the Morenci mine overlook on the way up: the Freeport pit is one of the largest copper mines on earth, and the road crosses right through its works, among haul trucks and hillsides painted blue and rust.
Water. None on site; the Forest Service says potable water is not available and to ask the ranger office. Clifton has gas, a grocery and the last water. Carry all you need.
Pick the season. Open year-round, with trash and toilet service from April 1 to November 30. Spring is the season: the aspens leaf out in late April and the canyon is 20 degrees cooler than Safford. September through November is nearly as good, with the oaks turning. July and August monsoon storms roll in most afternoons, and winter brings snow at 6,600 feet.
Pick the site. Take one deep in the canyon, away from the highway and the summer cabins, where the oaks are thickest. Slide-in truck campers and small vans fit; the pull-ins are short, there are no hookups, and larger rigs should use Clifton’s RV park or the BLM campgrounds in the Gila Box.
Ride. The corrals at the north end make Granville a decent base for riders. Trails in the Clifton Ranger District are rough and lightly maintained; ask the district office in Duncan or Clifton for current conditions.
Dogs. Allowed; keep them leashed near the cabins and corrals.
Skip it if you want a river, warmth or no highway. For a lower, warmer camp by the Gila with a $5 fee, the BLM’s Owl Creek is about 25 miles back south, and Riverview near Safford has water. For remote and free with a creek, Honeymoon is 22 miles of dirt up Eagle Creek. For high meadows, keep driving north to Hannagan Meadow on the Mogollon Rim.
The road that climbed out of the copper pit
The country around Clifton was farmed long before it was mined. Mogollon villages lined the upper Gila and its side streams, and by the time Europeans arrived the mountains north of the river were Apache country, home to Western Apache and Chiricahua bands who held them through most of the nineteenth century. In 1540 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition crossed eastern Arizona on its way to the Zuni pueblos, and the modern highway past Granville is named for the route it roughly followed, though nobody can say exactly where his column walked.
Copper changed everything. Ore was found near Clifton at the end of the 1860s, and by 1871 the claims were staked and the Longfellow Mine was working underground. Camps grew up in every canyon above town; the King mine at Metcalf, up Chase Creek, was one of them, and Metcalf no longer stands. By 1918 the Arizona Copper Company had absorbed most of the early mines, and Phelps Dodge later bought it. In 1937 Phelps Dodge began converting Morenci to an open pit, which grew for the rest of the century until it swallowed the old town of Morenci and put the highway through the middle of the works. Freeport-McMoRan runs it today.
The road north was the Forest Service’s project. In May 1909, Forest Supervisor John D. Guthrie, District Engineer Jones and Ranger David Rudd rode out of Clifton “up Chase Creek to Metcalf” looking for a feasible route over the Blue Range and the White Mountains to Springerville, which Guthrie later called “the very beginning of the Clifton-Springerville Road.” It took 17 years to build. When it was dedicated in 1926 as the Coronado Trail, it was the first motor road through the mountains north of the mines, and it put cool forest within an hour of a hot mining town.
That is the context Granville sits in. The campground and the six summer cabins beside it are the kind of thing the Forest Service built along new mountain roads, with cabin lots under special-use permits for people from the towns below. Where the name Granville comes from, and the year the campground and the cabin tract were laid out, are not in any source this guide could find; the Clifton Ranger District would know. The highway itself was numbered US 666 in 1938, earned the nickname the Devil’s Highway, and was renumbered US 191 on September 18, 1992, partly because of the number’s biblical association and partly because people kept stealing the signs.
Little has changed at the campground since. The mine below keeps growing and its trucks keep rumbling past, and the drive north is still roughly 100 miles of curves with almost nothing in between. Granville remains what it was built to be: the first patch of shade above the pit.
Why it matters
Granville sits on the border between the two things that made eastern Arizona: copper and forest. Below it is one of the largest copper pits in the world, a company landscape a century and a half in the making; above it is the national forest and the road the Forest Service spent 17 years pushing through to Springerville. The campground is where those two worlds meet: a free camp in the trees, 16 miles and 3,000 feet above the mine towns. For a Scottsdale visitor it only makes sense as part of a Coronado Trail trip, ideally in spring or fall: fill up with water in Clifton, look into the pit, and spend the night in the cypress before the 460 curves.