What is Mittry Lake Wildlife Area?
Between Laguna Dam (finished in 1909, the first dam on the lower Colorado) and Imperial Dam upstream, the river’s old floodplain holds a shallow lake of about 600 acres fringed with cattail and bulrush and threaded with serpentine channels. The BLM, the Arizona Game and Fish Department and the Bureau of Reclamation manage it and 2,400 acres of surrounding marsh and desert as the Mittry Lake Wildlife Area, which means the priorities are ducks, herons, bass and quail, and people come second. The people who do come are mostly Yuma anglers and winter RVers, because the area allows free camping in the dirt pullouts and lots along its one rough road, with a three-lane boat ramp and a vault toilet as the entire infrastructure.
It is a better place than that sounds. Mornings are still and loud with birds: great blue herons and egrets along the reeds, grebes and coots on the open water, osprey working the channels, and in winter thousands of ducks. The largemouth bass run 3 to 6 pounds in the brush, and crappie and catfish fill out the cooler months. Mule deer, javelina and desert bighorn come down to drink.
What you get, for nothing, is the best free water camp in the far southwest corner of the state, 40 minutes from Yuma. What you do not get is water, trash service, shade, a quiet weekend or, after the fourteenth night, permission to stay.
How to camp it right
Know the stay limit. Free, no permit. 14 days in any 28-day period since November 1, 2025, then move 25 miles; the old 10-days-per-year rule is gone, though some signs and apps still show it. Camp only in existing pullouts and lots, not on the marsh or beaches.
Get there. About 3 hours 35 minutes from Old Town. Loop 101 south to I-10 west, SR 85 south to Gila Bend, I-8 west to Yuma, then US 95 north and east out of town toward Quartzsite. About 7 miles east of Yuma, turn north on Avenue 7E (it becomes Laguna Dam Road) and follow it 9.5 miles to the end of the pavement; the wildlife area and the first camping pullouts begin about a half mile beyond on graded, washboard dirt. The Foothills area of Yuma along I-8 has the last gas, groceries and dump stations. Any vehicle can make it in dry weather; take the dirt slowly with a trailer and walk a pullout before backing into it.
Pick the season, and the day. November through March, and arrive on a Monday or Tuesday. Take a pullout on the west shore well back from the ramp; by Friday afternoon the ramp lot and the nearest sites fill with Yuma pickups, boats and music until Sunday night. Summer here is 110 degrees at 170 feet above sea level with no shade, an excessive-heat trap for anyone without air conditioning, and the bugs are at their worst. This is snowbird country for a reason.
Water. None. Bring all of it, plus trash bags; there are no cans and the area shows it after busy weekends. Keep a day of water and fuel in reserve; nothing is closer than Yuma.
Bugs. Bring a bug zapper or a screen tent even in February; the biting gnats come off the cattails at dusk.
Fish and paddle. A kayak at first light up the serpentine channels at the north end is the best thing here: herons, egrets, grebes, the odd osprey, and bass holding tight to the reeds. The lake is weedy, so fish the edges and channels. An Arizona license is required at 10 and older. Betty’s Kitchen, the small interpretive area and trail at the south end near Laguna Dam, is the walk when the wind is up.
Hunting and dogs. Small-game and waterfowl seasons run through the winter; expect shotguns at dawn and keep dogs close and leashed around the ramp and the birders.
Skip it if you want solitude on a weekend. Drive on to the free BLM desert off Ogilby Road across the California line, or to the Imperial Sand Dunes if you want a different kind of noise. Painted Rock near Gila Bend is the cheap stop on the way home.
An oxbow the dams left behind
The Quechan, who call themselves Kwatsáan, farmed the Colorado floodplain here long before anyone dammed it, planting in the mud the spring flood left behind and holding the river crossing at the Gila confluence. Juan Bautista de Anza passed through on good terms in 1774; the goodwill lasted seven years, and in 1781 the Quechan destroyed the Spanish missions at the crossing and killed four priests and thirty soldiers. They fought the Americans too, in the Yuma War of the early 1850s, and ended up on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation, established in 1884 on both sides of the river a few miles below where Mittry Lake now sits.
The lake itself is an accident of engineering. In 1860 a camp called La Laguna grew up on this bend of the river to serve placer miners, with a ferry and a few merchants; by 1862 the La Paz gold rush had pulled everyone upriver and the camp was gone. Its site is under the lake. The river that drowned it was not the natural one. The Reclamation Service, in its first project on the lower Colorado, built Laguna Dam between 1905 and 1909 as the diversion for the Yuma Project, a low rock weir that raised the river about ten feet and ended steamboat travel upstream. The straightened channel left the old oxbow above the dam to fill by seepage, and for the next 45 years that is how Mittry got its water, irregularly, from under the ground. Why the oxbow carries the name Mittry none of the agency histories say, and this guide does not guess.
Then the second dam nearly killed it. Imperial Dam went in five miles upstream between 1936 and 1938 to desilt the river and feed the All-American Canal, and once the farmers downstream were drawing from Imperial, Laguna’s outlets on the California side were closed in 1948 and the oxbow lost even its seepage. The Arizona Game and Fish Commission had leased the lake from the federal government in 1942 and spent the next decade digging canals from the river to keep the marsh alive, but the supply did not stabilize until 1971, when the state and federal governments agreed to build the inlets, channels and levees that still run the lake as wildlife habitat. That agreement is why three agencies share the signs today.
The marsh has had its disasters since. In 1989 a fire started by a flare gun burned 2,000 acres and killed the cottonwoods; salt cedar came back first, and managers planted some 6,000 mesquite, cottonwood and willow to fight it. The lake has been dredged, the channels cut, the fish habitat rebuilt. Arizona Highways called it an unnatural refuge, which is exact: everything that makes it good for herons and bass was built. The last change is the one that affects campers. On November 1, 2025, the BLM, Game and Fish and Reclamation replaced the old limit of 10 days per calendar year, a rule that never matched the BLM land around it, with the standard 14 days in any 28, after which you move 25 miles. For the lower river’s larger story, the Colorado River and the drought entry is the place to start.
Why it matters
Mittry is the lower Colorado in miniature: a river bend that a dam made into a lake, a second dam nearly drained, a state agency kept alive with canals, and a 1971 compromise turned into a bird refuge, all of it artificial and all of it alive. It is also, for the price of nothing, one of the last places in Arizona where you can park beside water for two weeks without a reservation. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: go midweek in winter, bring every gallon and a screen tent, paddle the north channels at dawn, and leave on the fourteenth night as the sign now says.