What is Horse Springs Campground?
Of the six Forest Service campgrounds strung along the East Fork of the Black River west of Alpine, Horse Springs is the one with the infrastructure: 27 sites in two loops named Porcupine and Polecat at 7,610 feet, with tables, rock fire rings, three new vault toilets, water spigots in season, a group ramada, a picnic area and hosts. The Forest Service calls most of it relatively accessible, which in practice means flat, graveled, and a few paved aprons. The sites sit on a bench above the meadow under ponderosa pines rather than on the riverbank, which is why they are dry and level and why the river is a walk rather than a step away.
The East Fork runs through the valley below, a clear trout stream bordered by alders and streamside hardwoods, stocked with rainbows and holding wild browns and native Apache trout. Elk cross the meadow at dusk, and in September the aspens on the ridge turn. The other East Fork campgrounds, Buffalo Crossing and Diamond Rock among them, are smaller, older and closer to the water; their Forest Service pages send you here for drinking water. The valley is big enough for all of them, and on a July weekend it needs to be.
What you get is the most comfortable camp on the East Fork: water, a tap, new toilets, a ramada that can hold a family reunion, firewood from the hosts and a concessionaire who keeps it clean. What you do not get is a reservation, a hookup, a riverside site, or water after mid-October.
How to camp Horse Springs right
Pay the hosts, reserve nothing. $16 per vehicle per night, $8 with a Senior or Access pass, $16 for a second unit, paid at the campground. No reservations. 14-day limit. In July arrive by Friday noon; if the loops are full, Buffalo Crossing is two miles on and there are six campgrounds’ worth of options along FR 276.
Get there. US 60 east through Globe and Show Low to Springerville, US 180/191 to Alpine (about 4 hours 45 minutes), then 2 miles north on US 191 to Forest Road 249, west 5 miles of wide gravel to Forest Road 276, and south about 6 miles to the campground, the first of the valley’s campgrounds you reach. Figure 5 hours 10 minutes. From the Beeline and SR 260, come in through Big Lake and FR 249 east; it is about the same time and better gravel for a trailer.
Pick the loop. Polecat is the quieter one; Porcupine gets the ramada traffic and the day-use picnickers.
Pick the season. About May 1 to October 31. June is dry and warm, July and August bring monsoon storms most afternoons, and September is the best month, with the aspens turning and the elk bugling across the meadow at night. Frost arrives by late September.
Water. Spigots in season; removed in mid-October whatever the weather, so bring jugs for a fall trip. No hookups. Two pull-throughs, mixed paved and gravel aprons about 16 by 52 feet. The nearest dump stations are at Big Lake and the Alpine RV park.
Firewood. Buy it from the hosts. Do not haul wood from the Valley; the Forest Service is serious about bark beetles.
Bears. Active in the valley. Hard-sided storage, nothing in the tent.
Fish the river. The East Fork below the loops is stocked with rainbows and holds wild browns; the Black River’s two forks carry Apache trout, the native fish recovered from near extinction. An Arizona license covers the forest side; the lower river on the reservations needs tribal permits.
Dogs. Leashed or restrained.
Skip it if you want the river beside your tent or nobody around. Buffalo Crossing puts the water a step away; Diamond Rock has the CCC shelters; the free West Fork over the ridge has silence. For a cabin-and-lake version of the White Mountains, Hoyer at Greer is an hour north.
The river that paid for a Verde dam
The Black River begins in the meadows around Alpine and runs 114 miles to the Salt, and its upper forks were White Mountain Apache country long before anyone drew a line through them; the river still forms the northern boundary of the Fort Apache reservation a few miles below the campground, and the Apache trout, the only trout native to these streams, evolved here and nowhere else. The trapper James Ohio Pattie named the river in 1826 while working the White Mountains for beaver. The Army came with Fort Apache in 1870; Anderson Bush built a log trading post he called Fort Bush in 1876, and in 1879 sold out to William Maxwell and Fred Hamblin, Mormon settlers who founded Alpine, named for its elevation, and ran cattle and sheep on the East Fork meadows every summer.
Recreation came with the Depression. Civilian Conservation Corps crews built the first camps on the East Fork in the 1930s: the river-bend sites at Buffalo Crossing, which the Forest Service still calls the oldest in the valley, and the three Adirondack-style shelters at Diamond Rock, built, as the forest’s page notes, before large car-drawn campers existed. Horse Springs, on its bench above the meadow, is the later, plainer work of a Forest Service that wanted flat sites, a water system and room for trailers, and it has been rebuilt since; the three vault toilets are new, the aprons part paved, and a concessionaire runs it.
The river’s strangest chapter happened 200 miles away. During the Second World War, Phelps Dodge needed water for its copper mines at Morenci and could not get it from the Gila. So between 1944 and 1946 the company paid for Horseshoe Dam on the Verde River above Phoenix, with Defense Plant Corporation money, and in exchange won the right to pump an equal amount of water out of the Black River to the mines. The Salt River Valley got a free reservoir; the East Fork’s water became part of the arithmetic that fills Scottsdale’s canals; and the Black River pump station still sits downstream on the reservation line.
Then the fish and the fire. By the late 1960s the Apache trout survived in only about 30 miles of stream, and went onto the first federal endangered species list in 1967, downlisted to threatened in 1975 as the White Mountain Apache Tribe, the hatcheries and barrier dams brought it back; it became Arizona’s state fish in 1986. On May 29, 2011 two campers left a fire unattended in the Bear Wallow Wilderness southwest of Alpine, and the Wallow Fire burned 538,049 acres, the largest wildfire in Arizona’s history, evacuating Alpine, Greer, Nutrioso and Springerville and closing the forest; the East Fork campgrounds survived, but the ridges above them carry the scars and the trails were never fully reassessed for hazard trees. In 2024 the Forest Service replaced the East Fork bridge on FR 276, closing Buffalo Crossing into the summer, and the same year the Apache trout came off the endangered species list, the first sport fish ever delisted for recovery.
Why it matters
The East Fork explains two things about Arizona that are easy to miss from Scottsdale. One is that the Valley’s water comes from everywhere, including a trout stream five hours away whose flow was traded for a Verde dam in 1946. The other is that a single ignored campfire can burn half a million acres and change a valley for a century. Horse Springs is the comfortable way into that country: the only tap on the river, new toilets, a ramada, and a meadow with elk in it. The practical verdict is to go in June or September, arrive Friday by noon, buy the hosts’ firewood, and walk down to the river in the evening to see what a recovered fish looks like.