What is Miller Peak Wilderness backcountry camping?
The Huachuca Mountains are a sky island in the strict sense: a 9,000-foot ridge of pine, fir and aspen standing over desert grassland, close enough to Mexico that the Arizona Trail begins at the border fence on their southern toe. The Miller Peak Wilderness, 20,190 acres designated in 1984, is the southern half of the range. Fires have turned much of it to oak and grass, but the high canyons still hold conifers, more than 170 bird species including 14 hummingbirds, black bears, coatis and the occasional jaguar sighting. The Crest Trail #103 runs 11 miles along the top from Montezuma Pass to the Fort Huachuca boundary and is, the Forest Service says with reason, one of the most scenic stretches of the whole Arizona Trail.
There is no campground in the wilderness. What the owner’s map pin calls the “Miller backcountry campsite” is the cluster of dispersed flats where the Miller Canyon Trail meets the Crest Trail at Bathtub Spring, a seep that fills an old iron bathtub and is the only dependable water on this passage. From the trailhead at about 5,750 feet the canyon trail climbs about 3.4 miles and 2,800 feet, shaded and steady at first, steep in its last two miles. From the junction the Crest Trail runs nearly level for a mile to the signed spur, and the spur climbs a rough half mile to Miller Peak, 9,466 feet, the highest point in the Huachucas, with a view that takes in every range in southeastern Arizona and a long reach of Sonora.
What you get is a free, permitless night on a 9,000-foot ridge with one of the great summit views in the state. What you do not get is a site, a toilet above the trailhead, a second water source or any guarantee the people you meet on the trail are hikers.
How to camp it right
No permit, but know the rules. Wilderness camping is free on the Coronado; 14 days maximum. Standard dispersed rules: no camping within 200 feet of water, no new fire rings, pack everything out, and Arizona statute bars camping within a quarter mile of any spring or stock tank, so camp back from Bathtub Spring. The best tent spot is a few minutes along the Crest Trail from the junction, which also keeps you out of the way of every Arizona Trail hiker filling bottles. The etiquette entry covers the rest.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east past Tucson to SR 90 at Benson, south through Sierra Vista, then SR 92 south about 9 miles to Miller Canyon Road. Turn west; the pavement ends in less than a mile and the dirt road climbs a couple of miles through a neighborhood and past Beatty’s guest ranch to the Forest Service lot at the end, fine for a sedan driven carefully. About 205 minutes from Old Town. The lot has a pit toilet and no water. Leave Scottsdale early enough to be walking by ten.
Pick the season. April through June and September through November. Lightning on the crest most afternoons in July and August; snow and ice from December into March on the north-facing switchbacks and the summit ridge. The monsoon field manual explains the afternoon pattern. Set a turn-around time and keep it.
Water. Bathtub Spring, filtered. Nothing else you should count on; Bond Spring has shifted and the lower canyon trickles dry up. Carry at least three liters per person for the climb and fill bottles in Sierra Vista.
The climb and the summit. The canyon trail is steady for its first mile and a half and steep for its last two. Summit at dawn, when you can see the Chiricahuas, the Catalinas, Mount Graham and deep into Sonora, and be off the top before the cloud builds. The summit spur is rough and the top is small.
Border. Four miles from Mexico in an acknowledged smuggling corridor. Travel in company, lock the car with nothing in it, do not leave gear at the trailhead overnight, and report rather than confront.
Dogs. Allowed on National Forest trails, on leash near others. Not allowed on the Coronado National Memorial trails at Montezuma Pass.
Skip it if you want a drive-in night in the same range: Reef Townsite and Ramsey Vista are up Carr Canyon, a few miles north. Parker Canyon Lake on the west side of the range has a campground with water, and Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoons is the other Apache mountain camp in this corner of the state.
A sky island on a border
The Huachucas were named for the people who lived below them. A Piman village stood on the north side of the range, and Spanish captain Juan Mateo Manje wrote “Sierra de Huachuca” in his expedition journal in the late 1600s; by then the Chiricahua Apache held the high country and used it as a base for raids into Sonora. The one earlier date everyone cites is 1540, when Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition came north out of Mexico looking for cities of gold, by tradition through Montezuma Pass at the southern toe of the range. The pass is now inside Coronado National Memorial, authorized in 1941 as an international memorial that Mexico never matched and established by Harry Truman on November 5, 1952, and it is where the Arizona Trail begins.
The Army came for the Apache. On March 3, 1877, Captain Samuel Whitside’s two companies of the 6th Cavalry set up Camp Huachuca at the north end of the range to fight the Chiricahua and watch the border; it became a fort in 1882 and General Nelson Miles ran the 1886 campaign from it that ended with Geronimo’s surrender. The post stayed for the border. From 1913 to 1933 it was home to the 10th Cavalry, the Black regiment known as the Buffalo Soldiers; it closed in 1947, was handed briefly to Arizona Game and Fish, and was reactivated in 1954 as the Army’s electronic-warfare school, which is why the Crest Trail’s north end stops at a military fence.
Miners came between the soldiers and the hikers. Gold, silver and tungsten camps went up in the canyons on both sides of the crest from the 1880s into the 1910s, and every one of them went bust; the Forest Service notes their tailings, shafts and cabins as the chief human mark on the wilderness, and the campground at Reef Townsite up Carr Canyon sits on one of them. Who Miller was, the peak’s namesake, the Forest Service does not say and this guide could not pin down. In 1984 Congress put the southern half of the range into the Miller Peak Wilderness, 20,190 acres, in the Arizona Wilderness Act, and in 1985 a Flagstaff schoolteacher named Dale Shewalter proposed a trail the length of the state that would begin at the border fence below Montezuma Pass. The Arizona Trail became a National Scenic Trail on March 30, 2009 and was completed on December 16, 2011; its first passage climbs the Huachuca crest past Bathtub Spring, which is why the tub is never empty of hikers in March.
The fire is the last chapter and the one you can see. The Monument Fire burned across the southern Huachucas in June 2011, and most of the pine and fir in the old photographs of Miller Peak is gone; oak and grass are taking the slopes, and the crest is more open, hotter and more exposed to lightning than it was. The border is the other thing that has changed. The Forest Service, the BLM and the Border Patrol all describe the range as a crossing and smuggling corridor, and in December 2020 bulldozers and explosives cut a path along the memorial’s boundary for a taller fence. Most hikers see none of it. All of them are told to be aware.
Why it matters
Miller Peak is where Arizona starts, literally for the trail and in a sense for the state: Coronado’s entry, the Army’s first border post, a wilderness line drawn in 1984 and a fence being rebuilt in 2020 are all within sight of the summit. It is also the best free high camp in southern Arizona, a 9,000-foot ridge with water, no permit and nobody checking. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: it is a long drive and a hard climb for one night, worth it in October with a partner and three liters each, and the view from the top at dawn will reorganize your map of the state.