What is Honeymoon Campground?
Eagle Creek runs south out of the Blue Range through a long canyon between the Coronado Trail and the San Carlos Apache Reservation, and for 22 miles a dirt road follows it up from the Morenci side. Honeymoon Campground is where the road quits: a small Forest Service camp at 5,440 feet on the creek bank under big sycamores and cottonwoods, with pinyon and juniper on the slopes above. The Forest Service lists four tables, two grills and a vault toilet. No water, no fee, no trash service, no signal. The name, by local account, is for an early ranger who brought his bride to the ranger station that once stood here; nobody has written down which ranger or which year.
It is a different kind of place from the high Coronado Trail campgrounds 3,000 feet above it: warmer, drier, lower, and reachable in winter when they are under snow. The creek runs most of the year and holds fish. The canyon on the way in holds cliff dwellings, working ranches and the pipeline that carries Eagle Creek water to the Morenci mine.
What you get is a free creek camp with real shade, water you can filter, and almost nobody else from November to March. What you do not get is a table for everyone, drinking water, a toilet with a door that fits, a phone, or any guarantee the fords will let you in or out. The road is the price of admission and the reason the place is still empty.
How to camp Honeymoon right
Pay nothing, reserve nothing. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit. Four tables means four parties, and on a winter weekend that is usually one more than are there. Pack in, pack out.
Get there. US 60 east to Globe, US 70 to Safford, US 191 north through Clifton and Morenci and past the open pit, about 4 hours 15 minutes to the Forest Road 217 turnoff at roughly milepost 188, signed Upper Eagle Creek Road. Then 22 miles of dirt and gravel down into the canyon and up it, past a bridge that has been out for years and across a series of creek fords, to the campground at the end. Allow an hour on the dirt and 5 hours 20 minutes in all. High clearance is required; four-wheel drive is a comfort when the crossings are running. The Forest Service’s “50 miles from Clifton” is the whole way including the highway. Clifton is the last fuel and groceries.
Treat the drive as the day’s activity. FR 217 winds down past ranch gates and the big Freeport pipeline, with a dozen dry washes and creek fords. Go slow, count the crossings on the way in so you know what the return looks like, and never cross flowing water you have not walked first. Watch for cattle on the road. If the first ford is running hard when you arrive, turn around.
Water. None. Filter the creek or carry it from Clifton. Fill every container; there is no sign of civilization except the pipeline, and no signal to call for help. Tell someone where you are.
Pick the season. Year-round; October through April is the sensible window. Summer is hot at 5,440 feet in a canyon, and monsoon storms upstream turn the fords into something that keeps you in camp or out of it. Flash floods are real on Eagle Creek, and spring snowmelt from the Blue Range can raise it for days.
Fish the creek. Arizona license required; trout in the cooler upper reaches, warm-water fish lower down. Javelina work the camp at night, so food goes in the vehicle.
Dogs. Allowed; under control around the cattle and the creek.
Skip it if the fords are flowing or you want more than four tables. Granville, back on US 191 north of Clifton, is the free fallback with oak shade and no fords; the BLM’s Riverview in the Gila Box south of Clifton is the warm, gravel-road alternative; and Owl Creek up the Coronado Trail is the pine-country option when the high road is open.
A ranger station at the end of the mine’s water line
Eagle Creek is the eastern edge of Western Apache country. The bands whose descendants make up the San Carlos Apache Tribe hunted and farmed the canyons between the Black River and the Blue, and the San Carlos reservation boundary still runs along the west side of Eagle Creek below the campground; the cliff dwellings tucked into the canyon walls on the way in belong to the farmers who were here before the Apache. For most of the nineteenth century the canyon was a corridor between the reservation and the mines, and a place to run cattle, and it has not changed much.
The mines are what changed the creek. Copper was found at Clifton and Morenci in the 1870s, and in 1881 Phelps Dodge bought into the camps the Detroit Copper Mining Company had founded. The Morenci side of the mountains is dry, and as the camps grew they ran out of water; the answer was Eagle Creek. By 1915 the Morenci Water Company was running a pumping plant on the creek about six miles southwest of town, supplying drinking water to Morenci and both of its mining companies. Within a decade a metal pipeline ran down the canyon from the pumping station to the Morenci smelter, and the road to Honeymoon, which follows the ranchers’ track up the creek past that pipeline, has been the mine’s service road ever since. When Freeport-McMoRan bought Phelps Dodge in 2007 it bought the pumps too, and the water you camp beside is still spoken for before it reaches the Gila.
The Forest Service came to the canyon’s top in the same years. The upper creek was a ranger station in 1914 and 1915, when a ranger named Charles Collingwood worked out of it, and the station is the origin of the campground and, by local account, of its name: an early ranger brought his bride up here, and the place became Honeymoon. The Forest Service’s own page says nothing about the story or the date, and the Arizona Highways writers who repeated it did not say which ranger. We have not found a construction year for the campground either; it is a converted station site of the kind the Forest Service turned into primitive camps across Arizona between the 1930s and the 1950s, and the four tables and two grills suggest it has never been more than that.
What the canyon has instead of a built history is a geography that keeps undoing the road. Eagle Creek drains the Blue Range and part of the White Mountains, and a monsoon cell or a warm March on the snowpack will put the fords under a foot of fast water for days. A bridge went out years ago and has not been replaced; the Forest Service describes the campground as 50 miles from Clifton and warns of high clearance and crossings, and that is the whole management plan. Compared with the Coronado Trail campgrounds 3,000 feet above, which get a paved highway and a season, Honeymoon has simply been left alone.
Why it matters
Honeymoon is a reminder that most of Arizona’s public land is not managed so much as owned. A ranger station became a campground, a mine took the creek, and the Forest Service has kept four tables and a toilet at the end of a road it does not maintain, for anyone willing to ford a creek a dozen times to sit under a sycamore. It also puts the copper country in order: the Morenci pit you drive past is the largest in North America, and its water comes from this quiet canyon. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is plain. It is a five-hour drive and an hour of fords for a free table, which is a bad trade in July and a good one in January, if you have the truck, the water and the sense to turn around when the creek says so.