What is Jones Water Campground?
Northeast of Globe, US 60 climbs out of the copper country through rolling juniper hills toward the lip of the Salt River Canyon, and about 17 miles out it passes a shallow drainage lined with Emory oaks. That is Jones Water, named for a spring that does not reliably deliver any. The Forest Service has kept a small primitive campground here at 4,500 feet: a vault toilet, picnic tables, fire rings and a scatter of pullouts under the trees, roughly a dozen of them, with no water, no trash service and no fee. The highway is close enough to read the truck logos.
It is honest roadside camping. The oaks give real shade, the drainage runs a trickle in a wet spring, and the sky is dark once the trucks thin out. Nobody drives from Scottsdale to camp at Jones Water for its own sake; people stop here because it is free, it is on the way to the Salt River Canyon, the White Mountains or the San Carlos lakes, and it is two hours from home. For that job it has been exactly right.
The caveat is new. In August 2025 the Globe Ranger District signed a decision to decommission the campground and remove its deteriorating infrastructure, with the work estimated for that October. A year later the forest’s recreation page still read Site Open, and nothing on it mentioned the decision. So what you get depends on whether a crew has been through: either the old arrangement of toilet, tables and rings, or a bare oak flat beside the highway on national forest land. What you do not get, in either case, is water, trash service, a fee station or certainty. Call Globe at (928) 402-6200 first.
How to use Jones Water right
Check that it exists. Before any trip built around a night here, call the Globe Ranger District or look at the forest’s alerts. The decommissioning decision was signed on August 29, 2025; the recreation page was still listing the site open in October 2026. If the toilet and tables are gone, the ground is still Tonto National Forest, and the forest’s general dispersed camping rules apply, but a bare pullout beside US 60 is a poorer bed than Timber Camp ten miles on.
Pay nothing, reserve nothing. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit, no pass. Quiet hours and no generators 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east. Stay on US 60 through Superior, Miami and Globe, where the highway swings north, and continue 17 miles past Globe. The campground entrance is on the highway and signed. Total time from Old Town is about two hours and five minutes, all of it paved. The last gas and water are in Globe.
Bring everything. No water and no trash. Carry a gallon per person per day and a bag for every scrap. The spring that named the place is not something you drink from.
Rigs. Trailers under 20 feet; the pullouts are short and the entrance is tight. A truck camper or a small trailer fits, a fifth wheel does not.
Pick the season. Open year round. At 4,500 feet it is cooler than the Valley but still warm in July and August; October through April is pleasant, and spring is the best of it, when the wash runs and the oaks are green. Campfires are allowed in the rings unless the Tonto is under fire restrictions, which it often is in May and June.
Take a back site. It is beside US 60, and the highway does not sleep. The pullouts back in the oaks along the drainage are the quiet ones.
Dogs. On leash. Watch for javelina and skunks in the oaks after dark.
Skip it if you want a destination. Timber Camp is bigger, higher and farther from the road. Pioneer Pass in the Pinals is cooler. Schoolhouse on Roosevelt Lake has water. Oak Flat near Superior is the other free oak-grove camp on US 60 and an hour closer to Scottsdale. The Salt River Canyon overlook, 20 minutes on, is a far better morning stop than anything in camp; see the Salt River entry for what you are looking at.
A roadside camp the Forest Service decided to retire
The country Jones Water sits in has always been a between-place. The hills northeast of Globe are Western Apache range, and the San Carlos Apache Reservation still begins a few miles east of this drainage; below them on Pinal Creek, Salado farmers lived at Besh-Ba-Gowah from about 1225 to 1400 before leaving the valley to the Apache. Globe itself began with a silver strike on the reservation’s edge in 1875, was the Gila County seat by 1881, and turned into a copper town whose Old Dominion mine ran until 1931. The land between the town and the Salt River became Forest Service range when the Tonto Forest Reserve was proclaimed on October 3, 1905.
The highway made the campground possible. There was no through road from Globe to Show Low across the Salt River Canyon until the state built one in the Depression: by August 1935 the Globe-to-Show Low alignment was more than half finished and still unoiled, and it was open to traffic by May 1937. The new US 60 climbed out of Globe through the oak and juniper hills and dropped into the canyon on hairpins that are still there, and it passed within a few yards of a spring the ranchers knew as Jones Water. The Forest Service put a small primitive campground in the oaks beside it sometime in the middle of the century, a vault toilet, tables and rock rings, no water, no fee, no published site count. We could not find a record of the year, and the forest’s own page does not give one; it is the kind of camp that was built by a district crew and never written up.
For decades that was enough. Jones Water was the free bed for people driving to the White Mountains, the San Carlos lakes or the canyon, and for the odd hunter in the fall. What changed was money. In July 2024 the Globe Ranger District opened scoping on a project to decommission the campground, reasoning that removing its deteriorating infrastructure would reduce the district’s maintenance backlog. The analysis went through as a decision memo under a categorical exclusion, with no public comment period required, and the decision was signed on August 29, 2025, with implementation estimated for October of that year. The forest marked the project completed.
What is odd is what happened next, which is nothing visible. As of October 2026 the Tonto’s recreation page for Jones Water still showed the site open, year round, no fee, vault toilets and tables, with no closure notice. Either the removal has not yet happened, or the page has not caught up with it. Both are common on a forest with 3 million acres and a thin staff. For a traveler the difference matters, and the only way to settle it is to call Globe or drive by.
The larger pattern is worth knowing. The Tonto has been quietly shedding small, free, unstaffed camps for years, because a vault toilet nobody pays for still has to be pumped and a table nobody books still has to be replaced. The free oak-grove camps along US 60, here and at Oak Flat, are survivors of an older Forest Service that built things first and asked how to pay for them later. Jones Water appears to be the next one to go.
Why it matters
Jones Water is a lesson in how public land actually works: a campground can be decided out of existence in a project file months before anyone takes down a sign. It is also a reminder of what the Depression-era highway through the Salt River Canyon did, which was to put a 4,500-foot oak grove two hours from Phoenix and make a free night under it an ordinary thing. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is conditional. If the toilet and tables are still there, it remains the easiest free overnight on the road to the White Mountains, best in spring, worst beside the highway. If they are gone, drive on to Timber Camp, and spend the morning at the canyon overlook either way.