What is Hoyer Campground?
Greer is the little end-of-the-road village in the headwaters of the Little Colorado, and the Rolfe C. Hoyer Campground is its front porch: close to 100 sites spread through ponderosa pine and aspen on a bench at about 8,300 feet, two miles north of town. Across the highway are the three Greer Lakes, River, Tunnel and Bunch reservoirs, stocked with trout and walkable from camp, and the Little Colorado itself runs through the meadows below. The campground is well run: gravel roads, parking pads, tables and fire grills at every site, trash service, a shower house, a dump station, campground hosts who sell firewood and ice, and an amphitheater with ranger programs on summer Saturday nights.
What it does not have is hookups. Some listings still say it does; the Forest Service says no utility hookups, and recreation.gov lists all 90 reservable sites as standard non-electric. Summer days in the 70s make the lack of air conditioning irrelevant. Nights in the 40s make the lack of an electric blanket noticeable.
What you get is the biggest, best-run and most convenient Forest Service campground in the White Mountains, with a shower, trout across the road and dinner two miles away. What you do not get is power at the site, a reliable tap, quiet on a July weekend, or a sure answer from the agency about its own water.
How to camp it right
Reserve, and pick the edge. $24 a night for a single site, $12 with an Interagency Senior or Access pass, $24 for an additional camp unit, paid to the host. Reserve on recreation.gov (campground 232197); a handful of sites are first come, first served, extra vehicles are sorted out with the host on arrival, and late arrivals are held 24 hours past check-in before a site is released. The outer edge of the upper loops has the quietest, most shaded sites; the interior sites near the shower house are convenient and loud. Check-in 2 p.m., check-out 1 p.m.
Get there. Take Shea Boulevard to SR 87 and the Beeline north to Payson, then SR 260 east over the Rim through Heber-Overgaard, Show Low and Pinetop-Lakeside. About 42 miles past Show Low, past Hon-Dah and the Sunrise turnoff, turn south on SR 373 toward Greer; the campground is on the right in about 3 miles, just before the lakes and the village. Figure 4 hours from Old Town. It is paved to the gate, and the gravel loops take any rig.
Water. The Forest Service page says none is available; recreation.gov lists spigots. Fill your tanks and jugs in Show Low or Eagar and treat any tap you find as a bonus, or call the Springerville Ranger District at (928) 333-6200 the week before.
Pick the month. May through October, weather permitting. June and September are the sweet spots. July and August bring monsoon thunderstorms nearly every afternoon with heavy rain and hail; mornings are for fishing and hiking, afternoons for the tarp. Late September has aspens on the drive and a half-empty campground. Bring a real sleeping bag in any month; it has snowed here in June.
Fish across the road at dawn. River Reservoir, Tunnel and Bunch hold rainbows, browns, brookies and cutthroat; River is the biggest and deepest at 50 acres, with browns that come up from the Little Colorado diversion each winter and are never stocked. The Little Colorado below Greer is fishable from the road. An Arizona license is required.
Wildlife. Elk and mule deer wander the loops at night; black bears visit when campers are careless. Food and coolers go in the vehicle. The desert wildlife guide is written for lower country, but the rule about coolers is the same.
Use the village. Greer has gas, groceries and three or four places to eat two miles south, which is unusual for a Forest Service campground this size. Sunrise Park and the Mount Baldy trails are about 30 minutes away.
Dogs. On leash in camp, welcome on the lakeshores and trails.
Skip it if you want solitude or power. For a smaller, higher, wilder lake campground, Big Lake is 45 minutes over the mountain; for hookups and a town, it is Fool Hollow or Show Low Lake back in Show Low; for a Rim campground on the way, Aspen at Woods Canyon Lake is the comparison.
The Mormon valley that dammed a river for its neighbors
The headwaters of the Little Colorado were Western Apache summer range, hunting ground for the bands whose descendants are the White Mountain Apache, and the reservation boundary still runs a few miles west of the campground along the shoulder of Mount Baldy. The settlers who took the valley came from the north. In 1879 a party of Latter-day Saints led by Willard Lee came down from Utah and farmed the meadows as Lee Valley; when a post office was granted, the residents asked for a shorter name and chose Greer, after Americus Vespucius Greer, a town planner who had recently moved to the area. A one-room schoolhouse followed in 1897.
The lakes across the road from the campground were built for farms the campers never see. River Reservoir, the largest and deepest of the three, was dammed on the Little Colorado in 1896 to store irrigation water for the fields downstream around Eagar and Springerville, and Tunnel and Bunch reservoirs beside it completed the trio; the dates of those two the sources this guide could reach do not give. River is 50 acres, 45 feet deep at most, and is refilled each winter by a diversion from the Little Colorado that brings brown trout up with the water, which is why the browns in it are never stocked and the rainbows are. It was drained for dam safety work in 2004 and its dam repaired in 2005.
The forest around Greer was logged. The Apache Railway reached into the timber west of town in 1918, and after the sawmills slowed the line carried tourists as the White Mountain Scenic Railroad from 1964 until it quit in 1976; the track between Maverick and McNary was pulled in 1982. The campground belongs to the recreation era that followed the logging, built by the Forest Service on a bench above the lakes and named for Rolfe C. Hoyer. The Forest Service’s own page does not say who he was, and this guide could find no source that does; the name is likely a Forest Service officer’s, and the honest answer is that nobody has written it down where a visitor can find it.
The valley’s defining recent event was the Wallow Fire. Started on May 29, 2011, by an abandoned campfire near Alpine, it reached Greer on June 8 and destroyed buildings in town; by the time it was declared contained on July 8 it had burned 538,049 acres in Arizona and New Mexico and 72 structures, the largest fire in Arizona’s history, passing the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire on June 14. The campground survived. The forest between Greer and Big Lake carries the scar, and the aspens that have come up through it are the reason late September here is as good as it is.
What is coming is a reservation-system campground that fills earlier every year and a water question the agency has not resolved on its own pages.
Why it matters
Hoyer is the White Mountains in one campground: a Mormon farm valley, a river dammed for fields forty miles away, a logging railroad turned tourist train, a Forest Service loop named for a man nobody remembers, and a fire that came within two miles. It is also simply the easiest way for a Scottsdale family to spend a week at 8,300 feet with a shower, trout across the road and a restaurant in walking distance of a car. The verdict: reserve the outer loop for June or late September, bring your own water and a real bag, walk across SR 373 at dawn with a rod, and do not believe any listing that promises you an outlet.