What is KP Cienega Campground?
A cienega is a wet mountain meadow, and KP Cienega is one at about 9,000 feet on the rim of the Blue Range, where KP Creek gathers itself and drops east into the canyons. The Forest Service put five sites in the spruce and fir at its edge, each with a table and a fire ring with a grill, with a vault toilet and no water, and never charged for them. The KP Trailhead is right there: Trail #70 descends KP Creek into the Blue Range Primitive Area, the only remaining primitive area in the national forest system, roughly 175,000 roadless acres running to the New Mexico line, where the Mexican wolf was reintroduced in 1998 and still lives.
The Wallow Fire of 2011 burned across this country unevenly. The meadow edge is a mix of green timber and black snags; the canyon below holds big old Douglas fir the fire missed. The campground is the quietest on the Coronado Trail because it is a mile off it, behind a meadow, at the end of a dirt road most drivers do not take.
What you get is one of the highest car campgrounds in Arizona, free, silent, with a wilderness-grade trail from the tent door and nights in the 30s in July. What you do not get is water, a signal, a site for anything longer than 16 feet, a maintained trail below the first mile, or any help if something goes wrong.
How to camp KP Cienega right
Pay nothing, claim a site. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit, five sites. Rarely full outside Labor Day weekend. It is where to go when the eight sites at Hannagan Meadow are gone.
Get there. US 60 east through Globe, Show Low and Springerville, US 180/191 to Alpine (about 4 hours 45 minutes), then US 191 south 27 miles past Hannagan Meadow Lodge to the signed KP Cienega turnoff on the east (left). The access road is 1.3 miles of dirt to the campground, fine for a car when dry and mud for an hour after every storm. Figure 5 hours 30 minutes. Alpine has the last gas; the lodge has the last meal. The Coronado Trail south of Alpine is a two-lane with no shoulders and hairpins along steep mountainsides; it is slow with a trailer and the Forest Service lists a 16-foot limit at the sites.
Pick the season. Not posted; practically late May to October, with June and September the best of it. Snow closes the road from roughly November to May. Nights are in the 30s in July. Afternoon monsoon lightning on the open meadow is the summer hazard; be in the trees by two.
Water. None. Treat the creek, which runs below the camp through cow country, or fill up at the lodge or in Alpine.
Walk the first mile before dinner. The KP Trail drops through the burn into a canyon of big Douglas fir that the Wallow Fire skipped, and the creek runs all summer. Backpackers should take the loop down KP and back up the Steeple or Bear Wallow trails only with a current map, because trail work in the Blue has been slow since 2011 and the Forest Service posts hazard warnings on most of them.
Wildlife. Bears, elk and Mexican wolves all use this country. Food in the vehicle, dog on a leash and close at night.
Dogs. Leashed or restrained, and inside the tent or car after dark.
Skip it if you want a lodge and a highway within sight; Hannagan is 5 miles north. If you want corrals and a lower, warmer camp on the same road, Strayhorse is a few miles south, and Honeymoon on Eagle Creek is the warm-weather alternative at the bottom. For a lake and a store, Big Lake is an hour north; for the closest thing to this with a shorter drive, Alpine Divide is just outside town.
The last primitive area, and the road the Devil lost his number on
The Blue Range is the eastern edge of Apache country and was the last of it to be mapped. Mogollon farmers lived along the Blue and San Francisco rivers below the rim until about 1400; the Western Apache held the high country after them, and the Blue stayed Apache ground through the wars of the 1870s and 1880s, which is why no road crossed it until the twentieth century. Cattle came first. A Nevada miner and rancher named Robert Hannagan gave his name to the big meadow 5 miles north of KP in the 1870s, by one story because his son’s $1,200 debt was paid off there and by another on a coin flip with rancher Toles Cosper, and the outfits summered their herds in the wet meadows of the rim, which is why KP’s cienega is still grazed. In 1909 a forester named John Guthrie, surveying for a road, found “neither fence nor cabin at Hannagan Meadow.”
The road was the Coronado Trail, built through the 1920s between the copper town of Clifton and Springerville and opened in 1926, named for the 1540 expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, which came up roughly this way looking for cities of gold. Toles Cosper’s son DeWitt built the Hannagan Meadow Lodge the same year to serve its travelers, and it is still the nearest meal to KP. The road was numbered US 666 in 1938, became the Devil’s Highway in popular usage, and lost that number on September 18, 1992, when years of sign theft and complaints about the number got it redesignated US 191. It remains what the Forest Service calls it, a dangerous road with no shoulders and many hairpin turns along steep mountainsides, and the longest numbered highway in the state.
The country east of the road was set aside before the road was finished. In 1933 the Secretary of Agriculture designated the Blue Range Primitive Area, the roadless canyons that KP Creek and the Blue River drain, under the Forest Service’s pre-Wilderness Act rules. When the Wilderness Act passed in 1964 every other primitive area in the country was studied and either made wilderness or released. The Blue was recommended for wilderness in 1971; in 1980 Congress acted only on the New Mexico side, creating the 29,304-acre Blue Range Wilderness in the Gila National Forest, and left Arizona’s roughly 175,000 acres in limbo, where they remain, the last primitive area in the national forest system. KP Cienega’s five sites and the trailhead beside them are the Forest Service’s front door to that unfinished business; the agency does not record when the campground was built, and the KP of the name, like most of the Blue’s creek names, has no written origin.
Two things happened to the Blue in this century. In 1998 the first captive-bred Mexican wolves, 11 animals, were released into the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area in the Apache National Forest, the first wolves in Arizona in decades; poaching killed half of those that died in the first twenty years, but by March 2026 at least 319 lived wild in Arizona and New Mexico, and KP Creek is inside their range. And on May 29, 2011 an abandoned campfire in the Bear Wallow Wilderness started the Wallow Fire, which passed the Rodeo-Chediski Fire on June 14 to become the largest fire in Arizona’s history, 538,049 acres, before it was contained on July 8. Alpine was evacuated; the two campers paid $3.7 million in restitution. The fire ran over the Blue Range and the KP Cienega country unevenly, which is why the meadow edge is half green and half snags and why the trails below have been slow to recover.
Why it matters
KP Cienega is where the Forest Service’s two unfinished projects meet: a primitive area that Congress never decided on and a wolf recovery that is still being argued about in every ranch kitchen in Greenlee County. It is also where the Wallow Fire showed what a century of fire suppression does to a spruce-fir forest. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is honest: five and a half hours is the longest drive in this collection for five free sites with no water, and the reward is the quietest high camp in Arizona, a trail into the last primitive area in the national forest system, and the chance of hearing a wolf. Go in June or September, fill the jugs in Alpine and do not count on anyone else being there.