What is Hazlett Hollow Campground?
Horsethief Basin is a high, pine-filled pocket at the south end of the Bradshaw Mountains, about 5,950 feet up and named, the Forest Service says plainly, for the rustlers who hid stolen horses there in the late 1800s. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the recreation area in the 1930s, and Hazlett Hollow is their work: 15 sites with stone walls and walks, and at every site a three-sided wooden shelter on a concrete floor, which is unusual in Arizona and very welcome when a monsoon cell parks overhead. There are two vault toilets, one accessible, no trash service and no water at the sites; campers fill jugs at the hydrant outside Horsethief Cabin, the 1939 Forest Service quarters now rented as a cabin.
Below the campground is Horsethief Basin Lake, a small reservoir behind a CCC arch dam with bluegill and bass, and around it a web of trails: the Algonquin Trail and others into the Castle Creek Wilderness, plus OHV routes that bring the weekend crowd. Six miles back toward the highway is Crown King, an 1890s gold camp that kept a general store, a saloon and a few dozen residents after the mines closed.
What you get is a Depression-era mountain campground with real shelter, a lake, pines and a long dirt road that keeps the numbers down. What you do not get is water at the site, a reliable fee, a reservation, or a quick trip: it is 2 hours 35 minutes and 26 miles of dirt from Old Town, which makes it the closest real mountain campground to Scottsdale by air and one of the slowest by road.
How to camp Hazlett Hollow right
Carry a ten. First come, first served. The Forest Service page says the campground is free and also lists $10 per night; use the tube if there is one. Each site is built for 5 people, a maximum of 10 for one family, with one towed camper plus one extra vehicle parked in the site, not on the road. Quiet hours 10 to 6.
Get there, slowly. Two hours and 35 minutes, and most of the second half is dirt. Take Loop 101 to I-17 north about 50 miles to exit 259 (Bloody Basin Road), go west 3.4 miles to the stop sign at Cordes, turn south on County Road 179, stay right at the Y, and turn west on County Road 59, which runs 17 miles through the near-ghost town of Cleator and up the old Bradshaw Mountain Railroad grade to Crown King. The alternative is exit 248 (Bumble Bee Road), which joins the same road at Cleator and is rougher. Either way, figure about 26 miles of graded dirt and, per the Forest Service, about 90 minutes from the interstate to the basin. Air down a little, carry a real spare, and do not attempt it in a low sedan or right after a storm.
Then the last six miles. At Crown King the road becomes Forest Road 259; go about 0.6 mile to a junction, stay left on Forest Road 52, and drive 6 miles of unimproved dirt to the campground just past the lake. High clearance is recommended for all of Horsethief Basin. Stop in Crown King for ice and a burger first; it is the last of anything.
Water. None at the sites; fill at the Horsethief Cabin hydrant, a short drive away, and bring extra in case it is off. Do not drink the lake.
Pick the season. May 1 to October 31, opening late or closing early with snow. Day-use sites and trails stay open all year, but the road is unmaintained in winter. Fire restrictions are common in May and June; check before you plan on a campfire. Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends fill with Crown King’s ATV crowd; a June or September weekday is the time, and the shelters make it the best shoulder-season camp in the Bradshaws, because they shed the rain and wind that would flatten a tent at Lynx Lake.
The lake. Not stocked. Bluegill, bass and catfish with an Arizona license, and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality has a mercury advisory on largemouth bass from Horsethief Basin Lake, so fish it catch and release. Non-motorized boats only.
Dogs. On leash in the campground and fine on the trails; the Algonquin Trail into the Castle Creek Wilderness is the walk, and horses are allowed on it.
Skip it if the road sounds like too much. Badger Springs is a paved-road hike off the same stretch of I-17; Lower Wolf Creek above Prescott is the paved-approach pine campground in the same range; and the Black Canyon Trail runs along the Bradshaws’ foot for anyone who wants the country without the washboard.
The basin that rustlers, a railroad and the CCC built
The Bradshaws were Yavapai country, the range of the Kwevkepaya bands between the Agua Fria and the Hassayampa, before the gold rushes of the 1860s brought the Army and the miners who pushed them out. The high, grassy pocket at the south end of the range, with a spring and a meadow and a single hard way in, then found a use the Forest Service still names it for: in the late 1800s horse thieves drove stolen stock up here to rest, regraze and rebrand it before selling it on, and the basin became Horsethief Basin on every map since.
Gold made the town. The first recorded claim in the Crown King district, the Buckeye, was filed by Rod McKinnon on July 1, 1875, and the Crowned King mine’s camp shortened its name to Crown King and got a post office on July 29, 1888. By 1897 it had electricity and one telephone. The thing that made it more than a camp was the Bradshaw Mountain Railroad, incorporated in 1901 and built from the Prescott and Eastern connection at Mayer: track reached Turkey Creek in November 1902, and on May 4, 1904 the Crown King branch was finished, a line so steep that it climbed the last miles in switchbacks. It was leased to the Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix the same year and merged into a Santa Fe subsidiary in 1912. The dirt road you drive from Cleator to Crown King, with its tight curves and even grade, is that railbed.
The railroad left as the ore ran out. The line from Middleton to Crown King was abandoned in 1926 and the branches formally given up in 1939; the mines themselves closed in the 1950s, and the post office shut on May 15, 1954, reopening later inside the general store. Crown King might have become another Cleator, a few houses and a bar on a railbed, except that the Depression sent the government up the hill.
The Civilian Conservation Corps arrived in the 1930s and built Horsethief Basin as a recreation area for Phoenix, then a small desert city with nowhere cool to go. The CCC built the road into the basin, an arch dam across the creek that made Horsethief Basin Lake, Horsethief Lookout on the promontory at the end of the road in 1934, and the campgrounds, including the stone walls, steps and three-sided shelters at Hazlett Hollow that are the reason to come. A private resort with cabins, a general store and a dance pavilion opened in 1937, and the Forest Service built Horsethief Cabin, now the rental where you fill your jugs, in 1939. For two decades the basin was a summer retreat; then air conditioning and paved roads to the Rim made a 26-mile dirt drive look like what it was, interest waned through the 1950s, and in the 1960s the resort land was sold back to the Forest Service. Who Hazlett was, we have not found; the name is on the Forest Service’s maps and nowhere in its histories.
The last act was conservation. The Arizona Wilderness Act of 1984 designated the Castle Creek Wilderness, 25,517 acres falling from the basin’s rim at 7,000 feet to the desert at 2,800, and the Algonquin Trail from the campground became one of its doors. The lake, meanwhile, picked up a mercury advisory on its bass, a legacy of the mining country around it, and Crown King reinvented itself as a destination for the ATV crowd that now fills the basin on holiday weekends. The CCC shelters have outlasted all of it.
Why it matters
Horsethief Basin is the whole Bradshaw story in one pocket: Yavapai range, rustlers’ hideout, a gold town kept alive by a switchback railroad, and then a Depression-era public works project that gave Phoenix its first mountain campground. It also explains why the road is the way it is. You are driving a 1904 railbed to a 1930s campground, and nobody has had a reason to pave either. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is clear: the shelters are worth the washboard on a June or September weekday if you have the vehicle and the patience, and not worth it on Memorial Day or in a sedan. Carry a ten, fill up at the cabin, and eat in Crown King on the way out.