What is Lower Log Road Campground?
The North Fork of the White River comes off the north slope of Mount Baldy and runs southwest through the reservation to Whiteriver, and the White Mountain Apache Tribe has two designated campgrounds on it: Lower Log and, a few miles upstream, Upper Log. The names come from the old logging roads that reached the river when McNary was a mill town. Lower Log is the easier one, at about 6,000 feet, a string of riverside sites under ponderosa and cottonwood along Lower Log Road a short distance east of SR 73. Each site has a table and a fire ring, there are vault toilets and trash roll-offs, and the tribe stocks this stretch with trout through the summer.
That is the whole facility, and it is enough. This is tribal land run on tribal rules: a $15-per-vehicle daily camping permit bought ahead, a separate fishing permit, camp 75 feet from the water, no firearms, dogs on a short leash. The reward is a river campground that is rarely full, with elk at dusk and nobody’s generator. The tribe says only July 4 and Memorial Day weekends fill.
What you get is the simplest overnight the White Mountain Apache sell, on a stocked river, for less than a Forest Service site with the same toilets. What you do not get is water, hookups, a signal, or anyone to call if the road has gone to mud.
How to camp Lower Log right
Buy the permits before you turn off the highway. Camping permit $15 per vehicle per day (eight people maximum), $350 for 30 days. Fishing $10 adult daily, $3 youth; Arizona licenses do not count here. No reservations. Buy at the Whiteriver Game and Fish office (100 W. Fatco Road, weekdays), the Hon-Dah stores on SR 260, Sportsman’s Warehouse in Show Low or Western Drug in Springerville; online sales were down through 2026, and the Hon-Dah convenience store is the only vendor open evenings near this road. A tribal warden will ask to see both.
Get there. Two ways, nearly equal. US 60 east through Globe and Salt River Canyon to Carrizo, then SR 73 through Fort Apache and Whiteriver and north about 12 miles to Lower Log Road, about 3 hours 35 minutes. Or Shea to the Beeline, SR 260 over the Rim through Show Low to Hon-Dah, then SR 73 south about 10 miles, closer to 4 hours but past more permit vendors. Lower Log Road is paved at first and then good dirt; a trailer manages it dry.
Pick the season. All year on paper; May through October is the real season. The North Fork is stocked through summer. July and August bring daily monsoon storms, a muddy road and a river that comes up into the lowest sites, which is one more reason for the 75-foot rule.
Water. None. Fill up in Whiteriver or Pinetop.
Camp by the rules. At least 75 feet from the water, in the designated sites. No firearms. Fires in the rings, subject to tribal restrictions, which come early in dry years. Bears visit, so the cooler lives in the truck. Trash in the roll-offs.
Fish the stocked water, then walk. The sites sit on the stocked stretch; the holdovers are upstream. Barbless hooks are not required but the tribe’s limits are, and they are printed on the permit.
Dogs. Leashed, 10 feet maximum, per tribal regulation.
Skip it if you need water or a lake. For a lake on the same permit, Hawley Lake is up the dirt road beyond Upper Log; for a bigger river camp, Diamond Creek Junction is south of Whiteriver; for showers and a town, Hoyer at Greer is an hour east and Show Low Lake is on the way home.
A logging road the tribe kept
The White Mountain Apache, who call themselves Ndee, have held the headwaters of the White and Black rivers for as long as anyone can trace, farming the river bottoms in summer below Dzil Ligai, the white mountain the maps call Baldy. When the Army came in 1870 it came by invitation: White Mountain leaders, hemmed between the Navajo, the Americans and other Apache bands, asked for a post, and Camp Apache, later Fort Apache, went up on the White River a few miles below where the North Fork joins it. In 1871 General George Crook enrolled 50 White Mountain men as scouts, and that alliance is the reason the tribe kept a reservation of roughly 1.67 million acres across its own homeland while most Apache groups were removed to San Carlos. The Army left Fort Apache in 1922; the Bureau of Indian Affairs turned it into a boarding school the next year, and the post is now a National Historic Landmark on the drive in.
The North Fork’s modern geography was drawn by lumber. In 1879 and 1880 Benjamin Cluff, a Mormon bishop from the Show Low settlements, cut hay for Fort Apache in the wet meadow at the head of the fork; the place was Cluff Cienega until 1919, when it was renamed Cooley for Corydon Cooley, the Show Low hotelier and former scout. In 1924 the Cady Lumber Company picked up its entire operation in McNary, Louisiana, mill, workers and families, Black and white, and moved it by rail to Cooley, which it renamed McNary. For the next 55 years the mill, later Southwest Lumber Mills and then Southwest Forest Industries, cut ponderosa off the reservation under lease, and its logging roads ran down the North Fork to the water. Two of them became the tribe’s river access: Lower Log Road and Upper Log Road, named for nothing more romantic than hauling logs. The mill burned and closed in 1979, and McNary emptied.
The tribe had been building its own institutions in the meantime. It adopted a constitution under the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 and elected a tribal council in 1936. In the decades after the war it dammed the headwaters to make trout lakes, Hawley Lake among them in 1957, created a Game and Fish Department, and began selling permits to outsiders for fishing, hunting and camping on tribal land, a business that Hon-Dah’s casino and the Sunrise ski area later joined. Lower Log and Upper Log, with their old roads already reaching the river, were obvious places for designated campgrounds, and the Game and Fish Department put in the tables, toilets and dumpsters and started stocking the water beside them. We could not pin the year the campground was designated from any source.
The fish is the other half of the story. The Apache trout, Arizona’s state fish, is native to these headwaters and nearly disappeared after a century of stocked rainbows and logging silt; by the late 1960s it survived in about 30 miles of stream and was among the first species listed under the Endangered Species Act. The tribe had closed its headwater streams to fishing as early as the 1940s, and its hatchery work, with federal partners, carried the recovery until the fish was taken off the list in 2024, the first sport fish to be delisted. The rainbows stocked at Lower Log are the tourist fish; the natives are above you, in the closed water under Baldy.
Why it matters
Lower Log is the White Mountains without the Forest Service: a river camp on land a tribe never lost, named for the industry that paid its bills for half a century and left when the mill burned. It explains why the east side of the range feels different from the Rim lakes, with wardens instead of hosts, permits instead of recreation.gov, and a trout recovery that the tribe ran itself. For a Scottsdale visitor the practical verdict is short: buy both permits on the way in, camp back from the water under the big pines, and accept that simple here means simple.