What is Gunsight Wash?
Why, Arizona, is a gas station and a Y-shaped junction where SR 86 from Tucson meets SR 85 from Ajo, and a mile south of it the BLM has set aside a square of flat creosote desert as Gunsight Wash, an official dispersed camping area. It is the cheapest and nearest place to sleep outside Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, whose Twin Peaks Campground is 20 miles down the same highway, and that is its whole reason for being on anyone’s list. It is free, the limit is 14 days in any 28, and the BLM’s own page lists the facilities honestly: no toilets, no drinking water.
What you get is space. The ground is hard and level, the Ajo Range stands up to the east, and the sky at night is as dark as anywhere you can drive to in southern Arizona. From November to March a few dozen RVs are usually spread across it, many of them parked for the full two weeks. The Tohono O’odham Nation begins across the highway; Why itself sits on the edge of the reservation, and the Nation’s land is not open to camping.
What you do not get is anything at all: no shade, no toilet, no water, no trash can, no host, no sign on the highway. It is a parking place in a very good location, and the people who like it understand that going in.
How to camp it right
Pay nothing, count the days. Free, 14 days in 28, no permit. Camp on existing disturbed ground along the existing tracks, nothing new. Groups and commercial use need a BLM permit.
Get there. Loop 101 or Loop 202 to I-10 west, then SR 85 south through Gila Bend and across the long empty stretch to Ajo, 10 miles more to Why, and 1.2 miles south of the junction to the gate on the right, just past the bridge over the wash. About 2 hours 40 minutes from Old Town, all paved to the gate. Arrive in daylight and count the mileage, because the gate is unsigned from the highway and it is after the bridge, not before it; close it behind you if you found it closed. Fuel and a store in Why; groceries, a clinic and a dump station in Ajo. Beyond the gate a network of two-tracks spreads west across the flat; the ones nearest the gate are smooth, the farther spurs rougher. Rigs of 40 feet are common, but walk a spur before you commit a trailer to it.
Pick the season. November through March. Even January afternoons are warm in the sun, and from May to October this is a place to drive past; see the heat warning entry for what 105 means on open ground.
Water and waste. None provided. A gallon a day per person and more for dishes; a portable toilet is the considerate choice on ground this hard and this shared. Trash goes to Ajo.
Shade. There is none. A rig with an awning or a tarp is the difference between a good camp and a miserable one by noon.
Fire. BLM Arizona bans exploding targets and fireworks year-round, and seasonal fire restrictions usually start in May. Existing rings only.
Border. Border Patrol trucks, drones and the occasional helicopter are normal here by design, and agents will sometimes stop to say hello. Carry ID, lock up, stay near camp after dark.
Pick your spot. The flats nearest the gate are the social ones; drive west a few hundred yards along the existing tracks for space and a view of the Ajo Range. The dark sky is the bonus; the stargazing guide explains why this corner of the state is as good as it gets.
Dogs. Fine; watch for cholla and, from March, snakes. The wildlife guide covers what else is out there.
Skip it if you want a toilet and a tap. Twin Peaks Campground has water, restrooms and the Ajo Mountain Drive at its door for a fee; Gunsight Wash is the free alternative when it is full or when you simply would rather not pay. Saddle Mountain near Tonopah is the same kind of free flat 90 minutes from Scottsdale, without the monument next door.
A silver claim, a copper pit and a monument on the border
The desert around Why is Tohono O’odham country first, and the Nation still begins across the highway from the campground. Its people hold sites inside what is now the monument sacred, including Quitobaquito, the spring near the border that is the destination of an annual salt pilgrimage, and Monument Hill, a ceremonial ground and burial place. The Anglo names arrived with prospectors. On November 25, 1878, a man named Myers and three partners staked the Gunsight silver mine in the hills west of here; the camp that grew up around it was called Gunsight, and the wash that drains past it, and in time the BLM camping area on the wash, carried the name forward long after the silver was gone.
Copper made the real town. John Greenway bought the New Cornelia claims at Ajo in 1911 and opened what is usually called Arizona’s first open-pit mine; Phelps Dodge took it over in 1921 and built Ajo into a company town with a Spanish-colonial plaza, 10 miles up the road. Why existed as the junction where the Tucson road met the Ajo road, a Y in the pavement that gave the place its name when, as the story goes, state law required at least three letters.
The land south of the junction went the other way. On April 13, 1937, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was proclaimed over 330,000 acres of the Sonoran Desert along the border, the only place in the country where the organ pipe cactus grows in numbers, and SR 85 through Why became the road to it. UNESCO named the monument a Biosphere Reserve in 1976, and in 1977 Congress made 95 percent of it wilderness. The campground inside, Twin Peaks, was the place to stay, and the BLM flat at Gunsight Wash was where you went when it was full.
Then the copper left and the border arrived. After a strike that began in 1983, the New Cornelia pit closed in 1985, and Ajo shrank from a mining town to a retirement and winter-visitor town; the free desert around Why filled with the snowbirds who still make up most of Gunsight Wash’s population from November to March. On August 9, 2002, Ranger Kris Eggle was shot and killed in the monument while pursuing smugglers during a Border Patrol operation; the visitor center was renamed for him in 2003, and that year most of Organ Pipe was closed to the public because of cross-border traffic. The backcountry did not reopen until 2014, after vehicle barriers, pedestrian fencing and surveillance towers went in. The constant Border Patrol presence on this corridor, the trucks and drones that are part of the scenery at Gunsight Wash, dates from those years. ADOT eventually rebuilt the dangerous Y at Why as an ordinary intersection just south of the original; the name stayed, and the 2020 census counted 122 people.
Why it matters
Gunsight Wash is a square of nothing in a place where everything around it has a history: a silver camp that gave it a name, a copper town that gave it neighbors, a monument that gave it a reason, and a border that gave it a soundtrack of helicopters. It is also the purest example of what BLM dispersed camping is in Arizona, a flat you may use for two weeks at no charge with no services, next to a national monument that charges and provides. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is this: as a free base for Organ Pipe in winter it is unbeatable, provided you bring your own shade, your own water and your own toilet, and provided you understand that the Border Patrol is the only host you will meet.