What is Knoll Lake Campground?
Knoll Lake is the Rim lake you have to earn. It is a Game and Fish reservoir like the others along the Mogollon Rim, about 75 acres and 50 feet deep, ringed by ponderosa and named for the rocky knoll that stands up out of the middle of it, and it sits far enough along the gravel Rim Road that the pavement is an hour away in every direction. The campground is a few hundred yards from the shore at 7,493 feet: a loop of single and double sites in the pines with potable water, vault toilets, tables and fire rings, run first come, first served and cash only, with a fee tube and a sign reminding you the nearest ATM is more than an hour off. The Forest Service does not publish a site count; figure on roughly 30.
The lake takes electric motors only, has a small ramp a mile past the campground, and is stocked with rainbow trout. The water is clear and cold, the eastern shore drops steeply into the deep part, and on a weekday you may count the other boats on one hand. Bald eagles work the lake in the shoulder months. It is the quietest developed campground on the Rim, and the short season, mid-May to early September, and the drive are the reasons.
What you get is a proper Forest Service campground, with the water tap and the toilet that the free Rim Road pullouts lack, beside a lake that most Valley campers never reach. What you do not get is a reservation, a credit card reader, a store, cell service, an October season or a lake you can put a gas motor on. If any of those matter, Woods Canyon Lake at the paved end of the Rim Road is the trade.
How to camp Knoll Lake right
Pay like this. $20 per night for a single site, up to eight people and two vehicles; $40 for a double. Cash in the tube, exact, because it does not make change. Senior and Access passes take half off single sites. No reservations, no card, no host most days. Check-in is 2 p.m., check-out 11 a.m.
Get there. The practical route is through Payson. Take SR 87, the Beeline, to Payson, then SR 260 east about 30 miles to the Rim Visitor Information Station at the top. Turn onto the gravel Rim Road (FR 300) directly across the highway and drive west about 17 miles, past the Woods Canyon and Bear Canyon Lake turnoffs, to FR 295E; turn north and follow it about 4 miles to the campground, with the ramp a mile beyond. The Forest Service describes a route from the SR 87 side via FR 95, 96 and 321 that is similar in distance and dirt. Either way, expect about an hour of gravel, washboarded but graded, and about 3 hours total from Old Town with no traffic. There is no gas, food or cell service at the lake; Forest Lakes on SR 260 is the last stop.
Pick the season. Mid-May to early or mid-September, and the Forest Service closes the campground promptly. Nights are cold all season. Afternoon monsoon storms are routine in July and August, and the dirt roads are slow for hours afterward. June and the first half of September are the sweet spot; the three summer holiday weekends are the only times it fills. Do not plan an October aspen trip here; the gate will be shut.
Water and toilets. Potable water and vault toilets at the campground; vault toilets only at the lake. No showers, no hookups, no trash service: pack it out.
Fire. Rings only, and only when the Coconino is not under restrictions, which it usually is by June. Hotline 928-226-4607.
The lake. Electric motors only, one per boat, from the small ramp at the end of FR 295E. Kayaks and canoes rule here. The lake is cold and deep and fishes best along the steep eastern shore in the first two hours after sunrise; the afternoon wind pushes paddlers back toward the ramp.
Dogs. On a leash. Horses are not allowed in the campground.
Skip it if three hours each way and an hour of dirt is too much for a campground that may be full if you picked the Fourth of July. On any other weekend it is the best developed campground on the Rim, and if it is full, the Rim Road sites you just passed are free, and Bear Canyon Lake on the way in has walk-in camping of its own.
A lake built for trout at the end of a general’s road
Nothing about Knoll Lake is old except the ground. The Rim country above Leonard Canyon was summer range for Western Apache and Yavapai bands, hunted when the snow left and abandoned when it came back, and no one lived at this spot year-round because at 7,500 feet no one could. The first road came with the Army. In the 1870s, during the Apache campaigns, General George Crook had a supply road cut along the Rim edge from Fort Whipple to Fort Apache, and the Rim Road you drive in on, FR 300, follows the Crook Trail closely enough that the Forest Service still marks the old alignment with chevrons on the trees.
After the Apache wars the Rim became a working forest. The land went into the national forest system and in 1908 became part of the Coconino National Forest; for the next fifty years Leonard Canyon was grazing allotments and timber sales, with a few stock tanks and no lake at all. The Rim’s lakes are a single generation’s idea. In the 1960s the Arizona Game and Fish Department, flush with sportsmen’s license money and federal fish-restoration funds, built a chain of small earthen dams in the canyon heads along the Rim, purely to make trout water within a day’s drive of Phoenix: Woods Canyon, Willow Springs, Bear Canyon, and in 1963 Knoll Lake, where a 58-foot dam across East Leonard Canyon backed up about 1,774 acre-feet of snowmelt. The high ground where two forks of the canyon met became an island, the knoll, and the name followed; early maps had it as Knolls Lake until the agencies settled the spelling in 1973. (The 1963 date and the dam figures come from a single secondary source, a hiking-site history, and not from Game and Fish directly.)
The division of labor set then still holds. Game and Fish owns the dam and stocks the rainbows; the Forest Service runs the campground, the ramp and the roads. The electric-motor rule, the cash tube and the mid-September closing are all Forest Service choices for a lake too far from pavement to staff. The Rim’s fires have mostly spared it. The Dude Fire of June 1990 burned more than 30,000 acres below the Rim to the west and killed six firefighters; the Rodeo-Chediski Fire of 2002 burned 470,000 acres on the eastern Rim. Knoll Lake sits between them in forest that has not burned at scale, which is why its ponderosa are big and its ground is deep in needles, and also why the fire restrictions arrive early most Junes.
What has changed lately is the traffic on everything else. Woods Canyon Lake got a paved road and a store and now fills every summer weekend; the Rim Road pullouts nearest SR 260 are a tent city by Friday night. Knoll Lake’s hour of gravel has kept it the campground it was in 1970, and the Forest Service has shown no interest in paving FR 295E. The one thing to watch is the lake level: in dry winters the reservoir drops enough that the ramp is out of the water by late summer, which for a lake that only allows electric motors mostly means a longer carry for your kayak.
Why it matters
Knoll Lake explains the Rim lakes as a class: none of them is natural, all of them were built in one decade by a state wildlife agency to put trout within reach of a city that was about to triple in size, and the ones that got pavement became something else. This one did not. For a Scottsdale visitor it is the honest end of the Rim Road, a cold trout lake with a real campground, water and a toilet, three hours and an hour of dirt from Old Town, that fills three weekends a year. Bring cash, come on a weekday in June or early September, and you will have the quietest developed campground in the high country.