What is Jacks Canyon Campground?
North of the Rim country’s lakes, the plateau flattens into pinyon and juniper and then, without warning, splits. Jacks Canyon is a water-cut gorge in limestone and sandstone whose walls lean out over a mostly dry creek, and beginning in the 1990s climbers bolted it into the best sport-climbing area in Arizona. Today there are roughly 230 routes across eight sectors, Casino Cliffs, Cracker Jack Cliffs, the Main Wall, the Asylum and the rest, from 5.5 to 5.14, on steep, pocketed rock that stays good through most of the year. Routes run 20 to 70 feet, and the Forest Service notes the fixed anchors as a deliberate choice to protect the rock.
The camping is a service to that crowd. On the rim at about 6,230 feet, beside a gravel lot and a vault toilet, a scatter of cleared sites sits under the junipers, free, unimproved, first come. A trail drops to the walls in ten minutes. There is no water, no trash service, no host and no fee station. Google Maps calls it a campground; the Forest Service calls it a camping and climbing area, and the difference matters: do not expect tables, rings or a pad. Expect quiet, stars, and the sound of quickdraws being racked at six in the morning.
What you get is free camping ten minutes from some of the best limestone in the Southwest, with a toilet, a view into the canyon and neighbors who go to bed early. What you do not get is water, shade in summer, a road you can drive after rain, or much reason to be here if you do not climb and the canyon bottom is dry.
How to camp at Jacks Canyon right
Pay nothing, follow the rules. Free, no reservations, 14-day limit, camp only on the obvious existing bare spots, which the Forest Service asks for and the climbing community polices. Pack everything out, including paper. Recreation.gov lists the area but does not take reservations for it.
Get there. SR 87, the Beeline, through Payson and over the Rim, then north across the plateau toward Winslow for about 60 miles. From Phoenix, pass milepost 313 and go 0.7 mile to a gate on the left; from Winslow, pass milepost 314 and go 0.3 mile to a gate on the right. The only sign is the gate itself, closed with webbing. Close it behind you. Inside, go straight, left at the Y at 0.2 mile, right at 0.4 mile, and arrive at the lot at 1.2 miles; the campsites are on the left by the toilet. About 2 hours 45 minutes from Old Town. The road is passable to most cars when dry and a trap when wet.
Watch the whole plateau’s forecast. Fine powder that becomes quicksand in rain. A storm 20 miles away can leave you camped behind a road you cannot drive for two days. Check the plateau forecast, not just the canyon’s, do not drive it wet, and if it rains while you are in, wait for the surface to dry rather than rutting it.
Pick the season. Spring and fall. Summer walls hit the 90s and monsoon floods have drowned the lower routes; winter nights freeze and snow closes the road, though south-facing rock can be good on a sunny January day.
Water. None. Bring it for camp and for the wall; the canyon floor is usually dry.
Fire. The Coconino’s seasonal restrictions typically ban campfires and charcoal from late spring through the monsoon. A stove is the plan.
The climbing and the walk. Ten minutes from the tent to the walls, everything on fixed anchors, routes from 20 to 70 feet. Non-climbers have the Jacks Canyon Trail No. 55, which descends from the rim, and the canyon bottom is pleasant walking when dry. For how grades on rock differ from grades on a hike, see scramble and class ratings.
Dogs. Allowed; keep them off the belay ledges and out of other people’s camps.
Services. Winslow, 35 minutes north, has everything; Happy Jack and Clints Well to the south have fuel and a cafe. The Mogollon Rim Ranger District, 928-477-2255, is the office.
Skip it if you do not climb and want water and shade. Knoll Lake and the Rim lakes are an hour back south, Moqui is the group option, the Rim Road has the free sites with the view, and McHood Park at Winslow has a lake, showers and a swim.
The crag climbers bolted and the Forest Service adopted
The plateau Jacks Canyon cuts through is old farmland. Between the Rim and the Little Colorado, the Sinagua grew corn in the pinyon country from about 500 until around 1425, when they left along with the rest of the Southwest’s farming peoples, and several Hopi clans trace their ancestry to them; the Homol’ovi villages near Winslow are the best-known of their later towns. After that the canyon country was Apache and Navajo range, then cattle range, and the railroad passed it by: the Atlantic and Pacific laid its line across the plateau to the north in the 1880s, Winslow grew up beside the tracks and incorporated in 1900, and the canyons south of town stayed empty except for stock tanks and the SR 87 grade.
The limestone was noticed late. In 1993 climbers bolted the first sport routes in Jacks Canyon, on pocketed, overhanging rock that had the two things Arizona crags mostly lack, steep stone and a long season. The canyon’s elevation, about 6,200 feet, keeps the walls climbable from March to November, and its position on the dry side of the Rim keeps it out of most of the weather that soaks Flagstaff. Through the 1990s the sectors filled in, Casino Cliffs, Cracker Jack Cliffs, the Main Wall, the Asylum and the rest, and by the end of the decade Jacks was the sport-climbing destination of northern Arizona.
The camping grew the way climbers’ camps do: tents on the rim wherever the junipers allowed, fire rings, cars rutting the two-track in the mud. The Coconino National Forest could have closed it. Instead it graded a gravel lot, put in a vault toilet, drew a line around the cleared rim sites and designated the whole thing a camping and climbing area, free and unimproved, with one request, that people camp only on the bare spots and shut the gate. The agency’s own page endorses the fixed anchors as a way to keep climbers safe and minimize impact to the rock, which is an unusual position for a national forest and a measure of how the relationship was managed. I could not find the year the lot and toilet went in.
In 2009 Deidre Burton, the canyon’s principal developer, published Jacks Canyon Sport Climbing, a guidebook to 300 routes from 5.5 to 5.14; Mountain Project today logs about 234, and the difference is the usual gap between a developer’s count and a crowd-sourced one. Route development has slowed, the hard routes have been repeated, and the canyon has settled into being what it is: a working crag with free camping, a road that eats sedans, and a reputation that brings climbers from Phoenix, Flagstaff and farther.
What is coming is probably nothing. The Forest Service has no fee plans posted, the climbing community maintains the anchors, and the road’s reputation does the crowd control.
Why it matters
Jacks Canyon is the one place in this guide that exists because of a user group rather than an agency: climbers found the rock, bolted it, camped on the rim, and the Forest Service’s contribution was a toilet, a gravel lot and the good sense not to close it. It explains how much of Arizona’s recreation runs on that kind of arrangement, and why a free campground with no tables can be the best-run site on the plateau. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict splits cleanly. If you climb, this is the best three-season sport crag within three hours of Old Town, with free camping ten minutes from the walls, in spring and fall, in dry weather, with a full water jug. If you do not climb, the Rim lakes an hour south are the better night.