What is McHood Park Campground?
South of Winslow, Clear Creek has cut a canyon into the pale Coconino sandstone on its way to the Little Colorado, and Winslow dammed it decades ago for a water supply. The result is Clear Creek Reservoir, a long, narrow lake that is open and reedy at its east end and then squeezes into a slot between sheer sandstone walls that you can paddle up for a couple of miles. McHood Park is the city park on its rim: a day-use area with ramadas, a swim beach and a small boat ramp, and above it a loop of about 22 unmarked campsites with picnic tables and grills, a restroom building and a dumpster. It is $15 a night, first come, no hookups, and a 14-day limit, at about 4,900 feet.
Winslow is a railroad and Route 66 town of 9,000 that has had thin budgets for a long time, and the park shows it: the showers have been out of order for years, the drinking water has been off, and the restrooms get mixed reviews. What it has instead is a canyon lake five minutes from an interstate, canoe rentals in summer, catfish and largemouth bass, petroglyphs on the walls, and the kind of quiet midweek emptiness that the Flagstaff lakes lost a decade ago.
What you get is a paddle into a slot canyon and a cheap flat spot to sleep on the way to somewhere else. What you do not get is reliable plumbing or anyone checking on you. For anyone heading to Canyon de Chelly, Hopi or Petrified Forest, it is the sensible overnight.
How to camp it right
Pay the kiosk and confirm the rest by phone. $15 per night at the kiosk (cards reported to work), 14-day limit, no more than two weeks a month, first come. A $7 per-vehicle day pass is reported for 2026. Ramadas are reservable through the city; call the Visitor Center at 928-289-2434 to confirm anything, because the city’s website lists activities, not prices.
Get there. About 3 hours 20 minutes from Old Town, and the pretty way is the direct way: Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, through Payson, Pine and Strawberry, over the Rim past Clints Well, and all the way north across the grassland to Winslow, where SR 87 meets I-40. I-17 to Flagstaff and I-40 east takes about the same time. In Winslow, follow SR 87 and the signs south onto SR 99 (Williamson Avenue becomes it) for 5 miles to the park entrance on the right. Everything is paved, the loop road is narrow for big rigs, and the last gas and groceries are in town. The day-use lot fills on summer weekends; the campground rarely does.
Pick the season. Open all year. Spring and fall are ideal; summer is hot but it is the only time the swim beach and rentals make sense; winter nights drop into the teens and the lake can skin with ice.
Water. Do not count on any. Bring drinking water, and a solar shower if you want one. The restroom building exists; the plumbing in it is a gamble.
Pick the site and paddle early. Take a site on the west end of the loop, farthest from the day-use lot, which fills with Winslow families and music on summer weekends; weekdays the place is nearly empty. Launch a kayak at first light from the day-use ramp and paddle east into the canyon: the walls close in to a few boat-widths, the water goes glassy and the swallows come out, and you are back before the wind rises at ten. After storms the creek can run hard into the lake; see the note on flash floods.
Swim with your eyes open. The upstream ledges are where locals jump; depth changes with the reservoir level, and the city posts no lifeguard, so look before anyone leaps and keep kids in the open east end.
Dogs. Allowed; keep them leashed around the day-use crowd and out of the swim area.
Skip it if broken showers and a hit-or-miss restroom will ruin the trip; stay at a Winslow motel or La Posada and use the park for the paddle. For something wilder nearby, Jacks Canyon is 20 minutes south, and Grand Falls on the Little Colorado is the other local spectacle when the river runs. Walnut Canyon outside Flagstaff is the Sinagua stop on the I-40 route home.
The railroad town’s reservoir
Clear Creek meets the Little Colorado a few miles from the pueblos of Homol’ovi, seven villages that ancestors of the Hopi built on the river’s floodplain between about 1260 and 1400 and then left for the mesas to the north. The Hopi still consider the sites theirs and return to them. The creek’s canyon, with its Coconino sandstone walls, was a corridor between that farmland and the forested Rim to the south, and the petroglyphs on the reservoir’s walls are the record of who passed through.
Winslow itself is a railroad town. The railroad came through the Little Colorado valley in the 1880s and made the place a division point; the name honors either Edward F. Winslow, a railroad president, or Tom Winslow, a local prospector, and the town has never settled which. It counted 363 people in 1890, incorporated in 1900, and grew with the Santa Fe Railway to nearly 4,000 by 1930, the year the railway opened La Posada, Mary Colter’s Harvey House hotel, a block from the tracks.
The dam that made McHood Park belongs to that era. The National Inventory of Dams lists a masonry dam on Clear Creek completed in 1929, owned by the City of Winslow, with irrigation as its primary purpose; Wikipedia rounds it to “the 1930s.” It backed the creek nearly two miles into its canyon and gave a dry railroad town a lake, which the town has used for swimming, fishing and picnics for what the city’s own page calls more than a century. Who McHood was, the city does not say on any page we could find, and this guide will not guess; the name is on the gate and nowhere else.
The town’s fortunes turned with the road. Route 66 ran straight through Winslow, and La Posada closed in 1957 as rail travel died; the Santa Fe gutted it for offices in the 1960s, abandoned it in 1994, and planned to demolish it until Allan Affeldt bought and restored it as a hotel. The contract to build I-40 around the north side of town was let at the end of 1977, and the bypass turned McHood from a traveler’s stop into a local one. Homolovi became a state park in 1986, closed from February 2010 to March 2011 in the state’s budget crisis, and reopened under its present name.
McHood’s own recent history is one of thin money. The park was free to camp in until June 2020, when the city put in the $15 kiosk. The showers have been out of order for years and the water has been off; the reviews say so, and so does the Visitor Center if you ask. What the city has kept up is the thing that matters, the lake itself, with canoe rentals in summer, an annual trout stocking by Game and Fish, and a canyon that climbers now use for deep-water soloing off the sandstone walls.
Why it matters
McHood is what a small Arizona town can do with one dam and no budget: a reservoir built for irrigation in 1929 that became the town pool, the fishing hole and, lately, a slot-canyon paddle that outdoor magazines have started to notice. It also shows the cost of the interstate and the end of the railroad, which took the money out of Winslow and left the park to make do. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: it is not a destination, but as the overnight on the way to Canyon de Chelly or Petrified Forest it is $15 well spent, provided you bring every drop of water and launch the kayak before the wind.