What is Kehl Springs Campground?
Kehl Springs is what a Forest Service campground used to be: a short loop of sites under big ponderosa at 7,441 feet, a vault toilet, tables, fire rings, a fee tube asking $8, and nothing else. What makes it worth the drive is where the loop sits, on the very edge of the Mogollon Rim, where the forest floor simply ends and the view falls 2,000 feet to the Mazatzals, the Sierra Ancha and Four Peaks. The General Crook Trail No. 130, the hiking route along the 1870s Army wagon road, passes right by the campground.
The Forest Service does not publish a site count; it is a small loop of roughly eight sites, up to eight people per site, no group camping, first come, first served. It sits 6 miles of graded gravel east of SR 87 on the Rim Road and 9 miles southwest of Clints Well, close enough to the highway that you can leave Scottsdale after work on a Friday in June and be in a site before dark.
The history is thick along this stretch of the Rim Road. A few miles east, FR 705 drops to the General Springs cabin, a 1915 fire guard station the Forest Service restored in 1989, and a marker there tells the story of the Battle of Big Dry Wash, fought seven miles north in July 1882. The springs themselves were a known water stop on Crook’s road; the campground’s spring is not drinkable today. What you get is a cheap, quiet edge-of-the-world campsite. What you do not get is water, trash service, a reservation or any certainty of a site on a holiday weekend.
How to camp Kehl Springs right
Pay at the tube, arrive early. $8 per night for a single site in the fee season, roughly early May to late October, cash at the tube; no fee the rest of the year. First come, first served, 14-day limit. On a holiday weekend the eight sites are gone by Friday afternoon, sometimes by noon, so arrive Thursday or have a backup.
Get there. Take SR 87, the Beeline, all the way: through Payson, past Pine and Strawberry, and up the long grade onto the Rim. About 29 miles north of Payson, a few miles short of Clints Well, turn right (east) onto Forest Road 300, the Rim Road, signed for the General Crook Trail, and drive 6 miles of graded gravel to the campground on the right. On the way you pass the spur to Baker Butte Lookout, the highest point on the Rim. Figure about 2 hours 25 minutes from Old Town with no traffic; the gravel is good enough for any car when dry. Pine and Strawberry are the last stops for water, food and gas, and there is no cell service to speak of at the campground.
Bring every drop of water. There is none, despite the name, and no trash service. Bring drinking water and water to drown the fire, and pack everything out.
Pick the season. The Rim Road is not plowed and closes with snow, usually November into April. June is cool and green; July and August bring afternoon monsoon storms. October is the sweet spot: cold nights, empty sites, oaks turning along the Rim.
Camp by the rules. Rings only for fires, and only when the Coconino is not under restrictions; hotline 928-226-4607. Dead and down wood only, no cutting. Quiet hours 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., no generators. Small trailers and truck campers fit; the sites and spurs are short and shaded by big trees, and this is not a motorhome campground. No horses or pack animals in the campground.
Walk the edge. Walk the General Crook Trail west from the campground at sunset, when the Rim edge lights up and the Beeline is a thread of headlights two thousand feet below. Then drive east to FR 705 and the General Springs cabin, open to look into but not to use, and continue to Knoll Lake for trout.
Dogs. Leashed or restrained.
Skip it if you need water or a guaranteed site. The fallback is good: free dispersed sites line the Rim Road in both directions, several of them with the same view, and Clints Well, another $8 first-come loop, is just up the highway with a gas station across the road.
The springs on Crook’s road
For centuries the pine country along this edge belonged to the Tonto Apache and the Yavapai, who hunted on top of the Rim in summer and wintered in the canyons below it. Springs like this one, seeping out just under the lip of the escarpment, were the reason a trail followed the edge at all: on top of the Rim the water runs away north into dry canyons, but along the brink it surfaces where you can reach it.
The Army found the same thing. In 1871 General George Crook laid out a supply route from Fort Apache to Fort Verde and Fort Whipple and learned that the only practical line hugged the edge. Crews built it from 1872, pack trains used it by 1873, and the first wagon train crossed in September 1874, with each mile marked by a chiseled stone or a blaze on a tree. General Springs, a few miles east of Kehl, became a regular water stop. The road ran past the campground’s spring, and the hiking trail that carries Crook’s name today follows what is left of it.
It also brought the last big fight of the Apache wars in Arizona to this ridge. In July 1882 Na-tio-tish led a band of about 60 men off the San Carlos reservation, raided through Pleasant Valley and the Tonto Basin, and climbed the Rim to General Springs with cavalry behind them. On July 17 they set an ambush at a canyon called Big Dry Wash, about seven miles north, but Al Sieber’s Apache scouts spotted it; the soldiers flanked the position, and by nightfall Na-tio-tish and many of his men were dead. The Battle of Big Dry Wash is generally counted as the last major engagement between the Army and the Apache in the territory.
Afterward the Rim was grazed by sheep and cattle, and in 1908 it became part of the new Coconino National Forest. The Forest Service built the General Springs cabin in 1915 as a fire guard station on the Crook road, and in 1928 it built the Rim Road, FR 300, which ended the old wagon road’s working life after 46 years. The campground at Kehl Springs is a product of that road. No published record gives the year the Forest Service laid out the loop or explains whose name Kehl is; Kehl Ridge, a forest road off the Rim Road nearby, carries the same name. The safest statement is that the campground came after the Rim Road and has changed little since.
The 1989 restoration of the General Springs cabin is the most recent piece of history here, and the most visible: a small log building with the Big Dry Wash marker beside it, a few miles from a campground that still charges eight dollars and still has no water.
Why it matters
Kehl Springs sits on the line that organized the whole Rim: water just under the edge, a road built to reach it, and a war fought along it. The Army road became the Forest Service road, the fire guard station became a historic site, and the campground is what the Rim looks like when nobody has improved it. That makes it one of the best introductions to the Rim country for a Scottsdale visitor: two and a half hours of driving, six of them on gravel, and you are sleeping at the brink of a 2,000-foot drop for the price of a sandwich. Bring water, come early, and walk the old road at sunset.