What is Indian Point?
Indian Point is the low, brushy peninsula where Tonto Creek empties into the northwest arm of Roosevelt Lake, about 13 miles northwest of the dam. The Forest Service runs it as a shoreline day-use and dispersed camping area rather than a numbered campground: there are vault toilets, a few picnic tables, a paved boat launch and a scatter of pull-in clearings among the mesquite, and that is all. There is no water, no trash service, no fee machine and no host. It costs nothing, and trailers must be under 16 feet.
That combination is why it is the quietest place to sleep on the lake. Cholla and Windy Hill are the developed campgrounds with showers and ramadas; Indian Point is for people who have their own water, want the lake to themselves on a January weeknight and do not need anything from the Forest Service but a toilet and a ramp. The shore is gentler here than below the big campgrounds, and the Tonto Creek inlet is one of the better fishing and birding spots on the lake.
What you get is free lakefront camping two hours from Scottsdale with a ramp at your door. What you do not get is any service at all, or any certainty of getting in: the only road crosses Tonto Creek, and when the creek runs, the point is out of reach.
How to camp Indian Point right
Look at the creek before anything else. The first three-quarters of a mile of Forest Road 60 drops into and across Tonto Creek. The Forest Service says in capital letters not to cross when it is flowing, and it means it. Most of the year it is a wide gravel wash; after a storm or during a wet spring it is a river with a current, and Tonto Creek crossings elsewhere in the basin have killed people. If there is water moving, camp at Cholla and come back another time. The flash flood rules apply every month of the year.
Pay nothing. No camping fee, no Tonto Pass, no reservations; sites are first come, first served with a 14-day limit and quiet hours from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. That makes it unlike the shoreline areas at Bermuda Flat, Cholla Bay and Grapevine, which all need the pass.
Get there. Take Shea Boulevard to SR 87, the Beeline, and go north about 60 miles to the SR 188 junction. Turn right and follow SR 188 southeast for 23 miles, through Tonto Basin, to Forest Road 60, signed as A-Cross Road. Turn left, cross the creek, and continue about 2 miles on FR 60, then Forest Road 661 about a mile out onto the point. The Forest Service describes the route as paved except the creek crossing. Figure about one hour and fifty-five minutes from Old Town when the creek is dry.
Pick the season. Open year round. October through April is comfortable; summer is over 100 degrees most days and there is no shade beyond the mesquite. Some coves on the lake close for nesting bald eagles from December 1 to June 30, so check the closures before you boat.
Water and trash. No potable water and no dumpsters. Bring every drop you will drink and pack out every bag. The Roosevelt Lake Visitor Center on SR 188 has water.
The sites and the ramp. The sites along the point itself have the best water access on the lake, because the shore here is gentler than the steep bathtub ring below Cholla and Windy Hill. The ramp is paved but, like every ramp on Roosevelt, it depends on the lake level; when the lake is low it may not reach the water. Check the elevation before you tow.
Rigs and dogs. Trailers under 16 feet; the roads and turnarounds are tight and will not take more. Dogs on leash; keep them off the waterline at dusk, when javelina and coyotes come down to drink.
Skip it if you need water, a shower or certainty. Cholla is the big developed campground on pavement, Schoolhouse is the quieter fee campground at the other end of the lake, and for free river camping in the same spirit, Childs on the Verde is another long dirt road away.
The creek that fills the lake and cuts off the point
Long before there was a lake, Tonto Creek and the Salt met in a broad, irrigable valley, and from roughly the 1100s to the 1400s the Salado people filled it with villages, platform mounds and canal-fed fields. Their cliff dwellings survive at Tonto National Monument on the hillside across the water. After them the basin was Tonto Apache and Yavapai country, until the Army’s campaigns of the 1870s forced both peoples onto reservations and ranchers moved in behind them.
The lake came from the Valley’s thirst. In 1889 surveyors chose Box Canyon, just below the meeting of Tonto Creek and the Salt, as the site for a storage dam, and after the Reclamation Act of 1902 gave the federal government the money and the authority, the Reclamation Service built it between 1903 and 1911. Theodore Roosevelt opened the dam on March 18, 1911. The reservoir behind it, at roughly 1.6 million acre-feet, was for a time the largest artificial lake in the world, and it backed up both rivers: the Salt arm to the east and the Tonto Creek arm that ends here at Indian Point.
The lake grew again in the 1990s. Between 1989 and 1996 the dam was rebuilt in concrete and raised 77 feet, to 357 feet, adding about a fifth more storage and a large flood-control pool. Before the higher water could reach them, archaeologists from Arizona State University spent the better part of a decade on the Roosevelt Platform Mound Study, excavating dozens of Salado sites around the Tonto Creek and Salt arms for the Bureau of Reclamation. Much of what is known about the Salado comes from digs on ground that now goes underwater in a wet year.
Tonto Creek itself has stayed wild. It is undammed above the lake and drains a long stretch of the Mogollon Rim and the Sierra Ancha, so a storm far upstream can put a fast, brown river across a dry ford in an hour. On November 29, 2019, three young children drowned when their family’s vehicle was swept away at the Bar X crossing upstream near the town of Tonto Basin. The deaths pushed Gila County to build a $21 million bridge there, which opened in 2024. The FR 60 crossing to Indian Point is still a ford, and the Forest Service’s all-capitals warning is the reason this guide begins with the creek.
The Forest Service has not published when it opened Indian Point as a recreation site or how the point got its name; it has been the free, unhosted end of the lake for as long as current guides describe it.
Why it matters
Indian Point sits where the two things that make central Arizona work, a federal reservoir and a flash-flooding desert creek, run into each other. The lake behind Roosevelt Dam is the reason Phoenix and Scottsdale exist at their present size; the creek that fills it is a reminder that the water arrives on its own schedule, sometimes all at once. The point also holds the Tonto Basin’s long human story in miniature, from Salado fields to Apache country to cattle ranch to a free campsite. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is simple: when Tonto Creek is dry, it is the best free lake camping within two hours, and when it is running, it does not exist. For the wider picture of the Salt River system it belongs to, start with the lexicon.