What is Lees Ferry Campground?
Lees Ferry is the one place in 300 miles of Colorado River canyon where a road reaches the water. John D. Lee ran a ferry here from 1873 until the ferryboat sank in 1928 and Navajo Bridge made it obsolete the next year; today the gravel ramp below the old site is where every Grand Canyon raft trip starts and every Paria Canyon backpacker finishes. The river comes out of Glen Canyon Dam 15 miles upstream at about 48 degrees, clear and green, which is why the stretch is a famous trout fishery and why nobody swims.
The campground sits on a bench above the ramp: 54 sites with tables and grills, a modern restroom with flush toilets and potable water, and a seasonal dump station at the entrance, all at about 3,200 feet in red rock with almost no shade. There are no hookups. In 2026 the Park Service has the upper loop closed for renovation, so you are competing for roughly half the sites. Nights here are quiet except for the river crews rigging at dawn; the Vermilion Cliffs turn red at sunrise behind you, and the condors that roost on Navajo Bridge drift over most mornings.
What you get is the Colorado River at your feet, a flush toilet, water and a dump station, 160 years of history within a mile’s walk and the best trout water in the state. What you do not get is shade, trees, a reservation, a hookup, cool air in summer or, this year, the full campground. For trees and cool air, Jacob Lake is 40 miles up the Kaibab.
How to camp Lees Ferry right
Pay like this. $26 a night, first come, first served, paid at the campground once you have picked a site; paying online at Pay.gov does not hold one. The $30 per-vehicle Glen Canyon entrance fee, good for seven days, is separate and collected at the card-only machine at the entrance station. The park is cashless. Fourteen nights maximum.
Get there. I-17 north to Flagstaff, US 89 north through Cameron to Bitter Springs, then US 89A across Navajo Bridge to Marble Canyon. About 4 hours 30 minutes and 275 miles with no stops, all paved. Just past the Marble Canyon lodge and gas station, turn right onto Lees Ferry Road; the entrance station is half a mile in, and the campground is on the hill about 5 miles farther, before the road drops to the ramp. Marble Canyon has gas, a store and a post office; the next fuel is Jacob Lake or Page.
Pick the season. Open all year. October through April is the season; June through September the canyon floor runs 100 to 110 degrees with no shade. Winter nights drop below freezing but the days are mild and the campground is nearly empty. March, April and October weekends are the busy ones, with anglers and river crews.
Water and fires. Potable water and flush toilets are in the campground, and the dump station at the entrance runs seasonally; top off on the way in. Fires are limited to the grills; no open wood fires.
Choose outer or inner. The sites on the outer edge of the loop have the river view and the wind; the inner ones have a little more shelter and no view. Arrive before 2 p.m. on a spring or fall Friday while the upper loop is shut.
Do the river. Fish the cold clear water upstream toward the dam for rainbows, wading from the Paria Riffle or by boat; a state license is required. With a kayak, the backhaul boats at the ramp will run you upriver so you can float 15 miles back through Glen Canyon on flat water; book ahead. Walk the Lonely Dell Ranch orchard and the ferry site and the stone fort in the morning before it gets hot, and the Spencer Trail, 1,500 feet to the rim from the ferry site, never in summer heat. Cathedral Wash, off Lees Ferry Road, is the other walk to the river.
Dogs. Leashed, in the campground and on the trails. Keep them out of the river where algae scum is present.
Skip it if you need trees. Half the campground is shut for 2026, and the other half is popular with anglers and river crews; a weekend in spring or fall means arriving early or having a plan B at Lone Rock Beach or Jacob Lake. For hookups and a town, the Page campground is 40 minutes away. If you want the Colorado River at your feet and the Vermilion Cliffs at your back, nothing else on this list comes close.
The crossing that divided a river
For most of the Colorado’s length through the plateau the canyon walls go straight down, and for 300 miles there is one place where they do not: the mouth of the Paria, where the Echo and Vermilion Cliffs step back and leave a bench of red rock at the water. Southern Paiute people used it from the north bank and, from the 1600s, Navajo from the south. The first Europeans to record it were the Franciscans Domínguez and Escalante in October 1776, who found the river too deep and cold to cross and went 40 miles upstream to ford at what became the Crossing of the Fathers, now under Lake Powell. Jacob Hamblin, the Mormon scout, crossed here in 1864, and the church that wanted a road from Utah to its Arizona settlements understood what the place was worth.
It sent a man it wanted out of sight. John D. Lee had led the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, and in 1870, with federal prosecutors closing in, Brigham Young’s church posted him to the Paria mouth to run a ferry. His wife Emma looked at the spot and called it a lonely dell; the ranch still carries the name. The ferry opened formally in January 1873 with a boat called the Colorado. Lee was arrested in 1874 and shot at Mountain Meadows on March 28, 1877; Emma ran the crossing alone until the church bought her out in 1879 and installed Warren Johnson’s family, who ran it for a generation. A gold rush followed Cass Hite’s 1883 strike upstream in Glen Canyon, and in 1910 the promoter Charles H. Spencer arrived with a scheme to wash gold from the Chinle shale using a coal-fired steam plant and a 92-foot steamboat to haul coal down from Warm Creek. There was gold in the shale, but not enough to pay for the coal; Spencer left broke in 1912, and the steamboat sank at its mooring in 1921. Its boiler still sits in the shallows.
The same year, August 1921, the U.S. Geological Survey opened a stream gage here, and in 1922 the seven states of the Colorado River Compact chose Lees Ferry as the point that divides the Upper Basin from the Lower, the line along which the whole river’s water is still accounted. It remains the most consequential gage in the West. The ferry itself died badly: on a June day in 1928 the boat capsized with a Model T aboard and drowned three men, and the church never replaced it. The first Navajo Bridge opened four miles downstream in 1929, 467 feet above the water, and the crossing’s 56-year career was over. Ranching went on at Lonely Dell into the 1930s; the orchard the Park Service still prunes is theirs.
Glen Canyon Dam changed the river in 1963. The silty, warm Colorado that had run 100,000 cubic feet a second in spring became a cold, clear, regulated stream, and in 1964 the state began stocking rainbow trout that grew fat in it; Lees Ferry became a blue-ribbon fishery within a decade. Congress created Glen Canyon National Recreation Area on October 27, 1972, and the Park Service built the launch ramp, the ranger station and this campground on the bench above the old ferry site. Lonely Dell Ranch went on the National Register in 1978, the listing expanded to the ferry in 1997, and a second Navajo Bridge for traffic opened in 1995 beside the old one, which became a footbridge where condors now roost. Grand Canyon river trips, allocated by lottery, all begin at the ramp; the Paria Canyon backpack ends at it. The campground’s 2026 upper-loop renovation is the first big change to the place since the Park Service built it.
Why it matters
Lees Ferry is where the Colorado River stops being geography and becomes law. The gage below the campground is the point at which Arizona, California and Nevada measure what the upper states owe them, and the drought arguments that fill the news every spring are arguments about the number read here. It is also, more simply, the only place between Page and the Grand Canyon where you can drive to the river, and the campground above it is the best seat for both stories. For a Scottsdale visitor it is a four-and-a-half-hour drive to a cold green river in red rock, best in March, April or October, with the upper loop shut this year; arrive by early afternoon, bring a card, and walk the bridge at sunset.