What is Herb Martyr Campground?
Cave Creek Canyon’s pavement runs about five miles above Portal, and then Forest Road 42 turns up toward Onion Saddle while Forest Road 42A keeps following the creek for two dirt miles to a dead end. There, at 5,800 feet, is Herb Martyr Campground, the smallest and highest of the canyon’s four camps. In 1935 a small dam was built here, and a worker named Herb was killed during the job; the dam was named for him and so was the campground. The dam has long since filled with sediment and boulders from a series of flash floods, which tells you something about the creek.
The sites, a handful of them, sit in two clusters off a loop that drops from the parking lot toward the water, under oaks and sycamores. They are tent only. There is a vault toilet, tables and fire rings, and no water. What there is instead is a trailhead: the Herb Martyr Trail #247 and Ash Spring Trail #247A start at the upper lot and, with the Greenhouse Trail, make a loop through the kind of pine-oak forest the Chiricahuas are known for, and the longer routes climb into the wilderness. The birding is as good as anywhere in the canyon, with magnificent and blue-throated hummingbirds, Montezuma quail, coatis and Apache fox squirrels, and from the road you can see Winn Falls, 365 feet off Sanders Peak, on the days it runs.
What you get is the quietest camp in the most famous canyon in southeastern Arizona, with a trail at the tent flap. What you do not get is water, a numbered site, room for anything but a tent, or a short drive.
How to camp it right
Pay at the board. $15 single, $30 double, cash or check on site, first come, first served, 14 days. Day use, including trailhead parking, $8 per vehicle or $10 per week; passes accepted for the holder’s own site only.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east through Tucson and Willcox into New Mexico, US 80 south 28 miles past Rodeo, Portal Road west 7 miles to Portal, then 5 miles up FR 42 and left onto FR 42A for 2 miles of dirt, where the Forest Service recommends high clearance. About 285 minutes from Old Town. Portal has a cafe and store, Rodeo and Animas have fuel, and Sunny Flat on the way up has the last water. The 42A dirt is fine for a careful car when dry.
Pick the season. Open year-round. Spring and fall are best. Nights are cold at 5,800 feet from November through March, and FR 42A can wash out in storms; the dam’s history is a reminder that this creek floods.
Water. None. Bring all of it from Portal, and a stove in case of fire restrictions, which are common in May and June.
Vehicles. Tents only; no trailers or RVs, no pack or saddle stock.
Bears. Common. Lock up everything scented; the Chiricahuas’ bears are habituated to campgrounds.
Pick your cluster. The two groups of sites are far enough apart that you may not see your neighbors; take the one nearer the creek for the sound and the farther one for the quiet. If both are taken, dispersed camping is allowed along FR 42 above the developed sites under the usual rules.
Walk the loop. The Ash Spring loop in the morning: back down FR 42A a third of a mile to the Greenhouse Trail, up past the spring, and back on the Herb Martyr Trail to camp, a couple of hours of real Chiricahua forest. Look up-canyon from the road as you drive in after rain; Winn Falls is one of the tallest in Arizona and most people never see it running.
Dogs. On leash in the developed area.
Skip it if you need water and room: Sunny Flat is four miles back with both, Stewart is the small one between, and Pinery Canyon is the free one over the pass. Bonita Canyon at the national monument and Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoons are the other Apache-country campgrounds on the way home.
A dam named for the man it killed
Cave Creek Canyon is the east door of the Chiricahuas, the range that was the Chiricahua Apache’s stronghold and the mountains of Cochise and Geronimo; the Army’s campaigns against them ended in forced removal in the late 1880s, and the canyon’s volcanic tuff cliffs, fused ash from the eruptions that built the range, have been quiet since. Portal grew up at the canyon’s mouth and stayed small. What changed the upper canyon was the Depression.
Federal crews came to Cave Creek in the 1930s, and the recreation sites at the head of the canyon, Herb Martyr and John Hands on FR 42A, date from the Civilian Conservation Corps era. In 1935 a small dam was built on the creek where Cima Creek comes in, just above where the campground loop now drops toward the water. A worker named Herb was killed during the construction. The Forest Service’s own account gives nothing more than that, a first name and a year, and says that the dam was named Herb Martyr for him and the campground after the dam. The dam itself did not last as a reservoir. A series of flash floods filled it with sediment and boulders, and what remains is a wall of stone across a creek bed full of rock, which is the honest monument to a canyon that floods hard and fast.
The science arrived next. The American Museum of Natural History opened its Southwestern Research Station a few miles down the canyon in the 1950s, and Cave Creek became one of the most studied pieces of forest in the country, which is a large part of why the birders followed; the canyon’s species list, with its trogons and a dozen hummingbirds, was built by people who were already there to count ants. The Wilderness Act of 1964 put the Chiricahua crest above the campground into the national wilderness system, about 87,700 acres of the range in all, and the Herb Martyr and Ash Spring trails became the way in from this side. In 2008 the Forest Service pulled the tables and toilet from John Hands, the other CCC-era site on the road, leaving Herb Martyr as the last camp at the head of the canyon.
Then the mountains burned. The Horseshoe Two Fire started in Horseshoe Canyon on May 8, 2011, from human activity, and by its containment on June 25 it had burned 222,954 acres, most of the Chiricahuas, and destroyed 23 structures. The high country above Herb Martyr is still recovering, and the fire’s second effect is the one campers meet: with the slopes bare, every monsoon season since has sent floods down the side canyons, reworking the trails and the creek bed and occasionally the road. The Forest Service’s trail notes for the range warn that conditions change quickly for exactly that reason. The dam that filled with boulders in the decades after 1935 was an early version of the same story.
Why it matters
Herb Martyr is a small place that explains the Chiricahuas in miniature: Apache stronghold, Depression dam, research station, wilderness, fire, flood. The name is the most honest thing about it, a reminder that the federal recreation infrastructure most Arizonans take for granted was built by young men with hand tools in dangerous canyons, and that one of them died here. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is this: it is a very long drive for a handful of tent sites with no water, and it is also the quietest night in the best canyon in the southeastern corner of the state, with a loop trail from the tent and a 365-foot waterfall on the drive in if you time the rain.