What is Lynx Lake Recreation Area?
Lynx Lake is a 55-acre reservoir on Lynx Creek, in the ponderosa pines about seven miles southeast of downtown Prescott and roughly 5,600 feet up. The Forest Service calls it one of the most popular recreation spots in central Arizona and puts the count at more than 90,000 visitors a year, which you will believe on any Saturday from May to September. The attraction is that everything is here: a stocked trout lake with a ramp and a marina that rents boats, a cafe at the North Shore, miles of multi-use trail, and two developed campgrounds with drinking water.
Lynx Campground sits a quarter mile off the lake’s west shore with 35 single and 4 double sites, paved spurs for RVs of 22 to 35 feet, tent pads, flush and vault toilets, and three fully accessible sites. Hilltop Campground, half a mile south of the lake and a little higher, has 38 sites, a host, vault toilets and the roomier spurs, taking rigs up to 40 feet. Neither has hookups, and neither lets you fill an RV tank from the faucets.
The quiet corner is the Lynx Creek Ruin, a hilltop pueblo above the east shore reached by a short hiking-only interpretive trail (#301). What you get overall is the most complete and least intimidating campground setup within two hours of Scottsdale. What you do not get is quiet, space between sites or, since 2025, a full lake.
How to camp Lynx Lake right
Reserve the minute dates open. Camping is $18 a night for a single site, $36 for a double, $5 for each extra vehicle. Lynx Campground is on recreation.gov up to six months out and its lakeside loop goes first; Hilltop has 26 reservable sites and about a dozen first-come, and its host can point you to an open one if you gamble. On a Friday in June do not count on it. Midweek in May or October is a different story.
Day use. $5 per vehicle, free on Wednesdays, or covered by a $20 four-month Prescott National Forest pass, a $40 annual pass or an America the Beautiful pass. Registered campers get a day-use pass from the host. Day-use areas are open 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. in summer, shorter in other seasons.
Get there. Take Loop 101 to I-17 north, exit at Cordes Junction onto SR 69 toward Prescott, and stay on SR 69 about 30 miles through Prescott Valley. Turn south on Walker Road at the Costco, which is the place for ice and firewood; Lynx Campground is on the left about three miles in, Hilltop a half mile farther on the right, and the North Shore day-use area and marina are a left turn in between. Everything is paved. About 1 hour 55 minutes from Old Town without traffic. The North Shore lot fills by late morning on summer weekends; the South Shore is the overflow.
Pick the season. Lynx Campground opens April 1 and Hilltop the last weekend of April; both close October 31, with quiet hours 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. The lake and trails stay open all year. Monsoon thunderstorms arrive from late June to mid-September; mornings are the time to be on the water.
Water and toilets. Drinking water at both campgrounds and seasonally at the North Shore. No showers, no dump station, no hookups.
On the water, check first. Electric motors and gas motors of 10 horsepower or less are allowed, along with anything paddled or sailed, and the Lynx Lake Store and Marina rents boats seasonally. Since the 2025 drawdown the concrete launch has been closed for low water; a hand-carry launch from the shore still works, so bring your own kayak if you have one. A section of lakeshore trail closes each winter and spring for nesting bald eagles. Both are posted on the Prescott National Forest alerts page.
Walk to the ruin early. The Lynx Creek Ruin Trail is a short loop with a view over the whole lake, easy for kids and empty before nine. Dogs are fine on a six-foot leash everywhere, including the trails.
Skip it if you want quiet pines. Yavapai Campground at Granite Basin or Lower Wolf Creek are each twenty minutes away, and for a lake walk without the crowd, the Peavine Trail at Watson Lake is on the other side of town.
The gold creek that became a trout lake
Lynx Creek was farmland before it was a mining district. Between roughly AD 1100 and 1300, people of what archaeologists call the Prescott culture grew corn along the creek and built small stone pueblos on the hilltops above it; the Lynx Creek Ruin is one of them, a cluster of rooms with a view of the whole valley. By the time Anglo prospectors arrived the country was Yavapai land, and it did not stay that way for long.
In 1863 the mountain man Joseph Reddeford Walker led a party of prospectors into the Bradshaw country. They found color on the headwaters of the Hassayampa and then, shortly after, real ore on Lynx Creek. Walker’s party organized a mining district, the Army built Fort Whipple, and in 1864 the territorial governor picked the new town of Prescott as Arizona’s capital. Walker Road, the paved road to the campgrounds, and the old mining camp of Walker upstream both carry his name. For decades the creek bed was worked for placer gold; in 1890 and 1891 Thomas Barlow-Massick built a dam on Lynx Creek to wash the gravels, and it washed out days after completion in a February flood. Recreational panners still work the creek below the lake.
The lake itself is younger than most of the people who camp beside it. The Arizona Game and Fish Department completed the present dam in 1963, about six miles below Walker, to make a trout fishery in the pines, and the Forest Service built the campgrounds and picnic areas around it. It became the default family lake for Prescott and for Phoenix families escaping the heat. The lake was drawn down to its outlet once, in 1974, and then left alone for half a century.
In December 2024 a mechanical failure left the dam’s outlet valve stuck open, and the lake began to drain. Game and Fish lowered it about 30 more feet in early 2025 to expose and fix the valve, spending $87,000 on repairs, and found it could not simply be closed and refilled: there is no way to refill Lynx Lake except rain and snowmelt. In July 2025 the Forest Service and the department said low water could last years. The boat ramp has been closed since January 2025. The campgrounds, the trails and the ruin are unaffected; the shoreline is wider and muddier, and the trout fishing depends on what the stocking truck can reach.
Why it matters
Lynx Lake is the Prescott story in miniature: a farming valley, a gold strike that made a territorial capital, a creek dug up for placer gravel, and then a state agency’s dam that turned it into a family campground. It also shows how fragile the small reservoirs of the Arizona high country are, when a single stuck valve and a dry winter can take a lake down 30 feet for years. For a Scottsdale family it is still the best first camping trip north of the Valley: water taps, a store, a short trail to a real ruin and pines at 5,600 feet, under two hours away. Book early, bring a kayak rather than a boat trailer, and check the level before you promise anyone a swim. The day trips guide has the rest of Prescott.