What is Kellner Canyon Campground?
Kellner Canyon comes down off the north face of the Pinal Mountains into the edge of Globe, and in its bottom, where oaks and sycamores line a small stream that runs most of the year, the Civilian Conservation Corps built a picnic ground in the 1940s. Its rock walls and steps are still there. The Tonto National Forest now runs the spot as the Kellner Group Site: one reservable camp for up to 25 people, with five picnic units with tables and grills, a group fire ring and a vault toilet, at 4,400 feet.
That is the whole place. There is no water, no trash service, no hookups and no individual sites, and the road in is gated. It exists for a troop, a church group or a big family that wants a private canyon camp with shade and a creek, two hours from the Valley, and for that use it is close to ideal: the gate keeps strangers out, the canyon walls keep the wind down, and the stream gives children something to do. The Pinal trail system starts a few miles east at the Icehouse CCC trailhead, and the summit road to Pinal Peak climbs out of the same drainage.
What you get is privacy, shade, old stonework and a creek. What you do not get is anything you did not bring, a road a sedan should drive, or a place to pitch a tent on a whim. For a couple with a tent, the free campgrounds up the mountain are the answer; this is not a walk-up campground, whatever the map pin says.
How to camp it right
Reserve, then plan around the code. The site is $75 a night for the whole group, 1 to 25 people, by advance reservation on recreation.gov only. The gate combination arrives with the confirmation, so print it; there is no signal at the gate. Events over 75 people or anything charging money need a separate permit from the Globe Ranger District. Walk-ups are turned around by a locked gate, not a host.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east through Superior to Globe, about an hour and forty minutes. In Globe, take Jess Hayes Road southeast to the junction of Icehouse Canyon Road and Six Shooter Canyon Road, continue on Icehouse Canyon Road for 3 miles to the junction of FR 55 and FR 112, take the right fork onto FR 55 and follow it another 3 miles to the gate. The site is at the end of a three-quarter-mile gated road the Forest Service describes as in poor condition and not recommended for passenger cars. Figure about two hours and five minutes from Old Town, and bring high clearance for the last stretch.
Bring the gear in the right vehicles. Five vehicles under 20 feet, no room to turn a trailer around. The practical version is two pickups with everyone’s gear and the sedans left in Globe or at the gate, which is what the scout troops do.
Pick the season. Open all year, but March through May and October through November are the point: the stream runs, the oaks and sycamores are green or turning, nights are cool. Summer runs 85 to 105 degrees in the canyon bottom, and the Forest Service warns of flash flooding during July and August thunderstorms. Camp above the streambed in any month; in monsoon season, watch the sky over the peaks.
Water and trash. None of either. Treat the creek water if you must use it; better to haul from Globe, where the last groceries and ice are 20 minutes away. Pack everything out, including what the group’s youngest members leave in the bushes.
Dogs and bears. Dogs on leash. Black bears come down the canyon at night; store food in cars, not tents or coolers on the table.
Hike from camp. The Icehouse CCC trailhead for the Pinal Mountain trail system is a few miles east on FR 112, and the Icehouse Canyon and Sixshooter trails climb to the ridge at 7,000 feet and more; they are long, steep, cool-season days, not evening strolls.
Skip it if you are fewer than eight or want to decide on Friday. Pioneer Pass is up the same road with free first-come sites, Sulphide del Rey and Pinal Campground are higher and cooler, and Timber Camp north of Globe has a reservable group area with far easier road access.
A picnic ground the CCC left behind
The Pinals were lived in long before anyone picnicked in them. Salado farmers occupied the Globe basin from the 13th to the 15th century, and their pueblo at Besh-Ba-Gowah still stands a mile from downtown. When they moved on, the range became Western Apache and Kwevkepaya Yavapai country; the Apache name for it, Dził Nnilchí’ Diyiléé, was what Spanish explorers translated as Pinal in the 17th century, and the Battle of the Pinal Mountains between Spanish troops and Apache warriors is one of the few recorded events of the range before the Americans came.
The Americans came for silver. Globe was founded in 1876, copper followed, and mining claims covered the Pinals from 1875 into the early 1900s. The canyon trails out of town, Sixshooter among them, were cut to reach claims in the 1870s; the Gibson mine on the range’s west end produced 99 percent of its copper and silver between 1906 and 1918. Kellner Canyon almost certainly takes its name from a local family of that era, and a pioneering Globe merchant named Ernest Frederick Kellner, whose business and mining papers run from 1854 to 1917, is the obvious candidate, but we found no source that makes the connection and will not claim it.
The federal government arrived in 1905, when the Pinal Mountains Forest Reserve was set aside on March 20, 45,760 acres of the range south of Globe. It became a national forest in 1907 and was folded into the Tonto in January 1908. For much of the middle of the century the Globe country was administered from Safford as part of the Crook National Forest, until that forest was dissolved in 1953 and the Pinals went back to the Tonto, where they remain as the Globe Ranger District.
Recreation came with the New Deal. In the 1940s, Civilian Conservation Corps crews built a picnic ground in the bottom of Kellner Canyon, under the sycamores where the stream runs, with the rock retaining walls and stone steps that still hold the terraces in place. For decades it was a day-use spot for Globe families, the kind of place a town five miles away drives to on a Sunday in April. The modern Forest Service, which cannot staff such places, found a use that pays for itself: it gated the last three-quarters of a mile of road, put the site on recreation.gov as a single group camp for 25, and set the fee at $75. We could not find the year of that conversion; the recreation.gov listing simply exists. The stonework was never replaced; the tables, grills and vault toilet were set among it.
The Pinals have burned around the site twice in recent years, in the Pinal Fire of 2017 and the Telegraph Fire of 2021, and the canyon bottom floods in big monsoon storms off the scarred slopes, which is why the Forest Service repeats its warning on every page about Kellner. Nothing about the place is likely to change soon. It is a 1940s picnic ground that found a second life as a group camp, and it will stay one as long as groups keep booking it.
Why it matters
Kellner is a small example of how the Forest Service keeps old places alive: a CCC picnic ground too remote to staff and too good to abandon becomes a reservable group site, and the gate does the ranger’s job. It also shows how the Pinals work for the Valley. The range is the nearest real mountain forest southeast of Phoenix, two hours by pavement, with a summit road to 7,800 feet and a trail system most Scottsdale hikers have never heard of. For a group of 10 to 25 that wants a private creek camp at a reasonable elevation in April or October, this is the easiest booking in the Tonto. For anyone else, drive past it to the free sites up the mountain.