What is Mogollon Campground?
Forest Road 300, the Rim Road, follows the edge of the Mogollon Rim west from SR 260, and for the first five miles it is paved and busy with traffic to Woods Canyon Lake. Just past the lake turnoff the pavement quits, and a short way on a gravel loop drops into the pines on the left. That is Mogollon Campground: 26 sites in two loops of 13 under ponderosa at roughly 7,500 feet, the same shelf as the lake, with potable water, accessible vault toilets, trash service and a camp host from May through the first weekend of October.
What distinguishes it is the design and the location. The sites are parallel pull-offs about 40 feet long along the loop road with no spurs, so your vehicle sits beside your table on the road edge and the whole campground feels more like a well-kept dispersed area than a concession campground. That keeps the price at $18. And the Rim Lakes Vista Trail #622 ends here: 4.3 miles along the lip of the Rim from the Rim Top Trailhead near the highway, with about 2.5 miles of it paved between Military Sinkhole and camp, past the Woods Canyon Vista overlook. From your tent, the 2,000-foot view south over the Tonto Basin to the Mazatzals is a few minutes’ walk.
It is the smaller, cheaper, less-visited sibling of Aspen and Spillway down at the lake. What you get is a quiet night in the pines and the sunset off the edge. What you do not get is a lake view, a spur to back into, hookups or a dump station. Nobody who has done that walk at sunset thinks the $18 was too much.
How to camp Mogollon right
Reserve the back loop. Sites 14 to 26 are on recreation.gov; 1 to 13 are first come, first served and paid to the host. $18 a night for up to eight people and one vehicle, $12 per extra vehicle. Mogollon sells out later than Aspen and Spillway because it has no lake, so it is the one to check when they are gone.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, 75 miles to Payson. Turn east on SR 260 and drive about 31 miles, past Christopher Creek and up the long grade. At the top of the Rim, across from the Mogollon Rim Visitor Center, turn left on Forest Road 300. It is paved for about 5 miles to the Woods Canyon Lake turnoff (FR 105); continue straight on gravel for roughly another half mile to the campground sign on the left. Figure about 145 minutes from Old Town. The gravel is sandy and washboards after rain; take it slow.
Arrive in daylight and size your rig. The sites are 40-foot pull-offs along the loop road, and you want to see how yours sits before you unhitch. Tents, pop-ups, small trailers and modest motorhomes fit; rooftop tents must park on the road, and the Forest Service advises against RVs with left-side slide-outs.
Pick the season. May 1 to Columbus Day weekend, conditions permitting. FR 300 is closed by snow in winter and generally reopens in April. June and September are ideal. Nights are cold in every month.
Respect the lightning. July and August bring daily afternoon monsoon thunderstorms, and the Rim edge is where the lightning goes; the Forest Service calls this one of the most lightning-struck places in the country. Be off the Vista Trail by early afternoon.
Water and waste. Potable water on site, accessible vault toilets, trash service. No hookups or dump station; the Woods Canyon Lake dump station charges a fee, and the store there, about two miles back by FR 300 and FR 105, sells groceries, licenses and firewood.
Walk the edge. Take the paved section of the Rim Lakes Vista Trail east from camp at sunset; the Woods Canyon Vista and Military Sinkhole overlooks are the postcard views, and the paving means you can do it with a stroller.
Dogs. On a six-foot leash, attended at all times; aggressive or nuisance dogs can be asked to leave without a refund.
Skip it if you want a spur and a lake; book Aspen. For a paved approach and an easier first-come site, Rim Campground is four miles back toward the highway. For free camping and more distance from your neighbors, the Rim Road dispersed sites run west for miles.
A governor’s name on a soldiers’ road
The Mogollon Rim is the southwestern edge of the Colorado Plateau, an escarpment that runs about 200 miles across Arizona and drops from roughly 8,000 feet on top to 4,000 or 5,000 feet in the basins below. Its cliffs are Kaibab Limestone and Coconino Sandstone, Permian sediments laid down long before anything here was a mountain; the Coconino is one of the thickest dune-derived sandstones on earth. The limestone dissolves, which is why the top of the Rim is pocked with sinkholes, and why the trail from this campground passes one.
The name is borrowed. Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollón governed Spanish New Mexico from 1712 to 1715 and as far as anyone knows never saw the escarpment; his name ended up on mountains in New Mexico and on this edge in Arizona alike. Archaeologists later used it for the Mogollon culture, the farming people of these highlands, and by the time Americans arrived the Rim top was summer hunting and gathering range for Western Apache bands, with the Tonto Apache and Yavapai in the country below.
The Army came along the edge in the 1870s. During the Apache campaigns, General George Crook had a supply road cut along the top of the Rim between his forts, crews working from both ends from 1872, the first wagons crossing in 1874. Military Sinkhole, a short walk east of this campground on the Vista Trail, was a camp and watering spot for the troops on that road; the Forest Service still names it for them. FR 300 follows the line of Crook’s road through here, and the General Crook Trail markers survive on the trees.
The forest came next. The Sitgreaves National Forest was created in 1908 from the old Black Mesa Forest Reserve and took in this stretch of the Rim; it has been run with the Apache as one forest since 1974, from the Black Mesa Ranger District. For decades the Rim top was cattle range and timber country. Recreation arrived with water: in 1956 Arizona Game and Fish dammed Chevelon Creek in Woods Canyon, two miles from here, and the lake opened in 1958, the first of the Rim lakes. The Forest Service laid out campgrounds along FR 300 to hold the crowds the lake drew; Mogollon is one of them, though the year it opened is not in any record this guide could find.
The Rim’s recent history is fire. In June and July 2002 the Rodeo-Chediski Fire burned about 468,000 acres of the Rim country to the east, the largest fire in Arizona to that date, and stopped short of the Rim Lakes. The forest around this campground survived, and the fire-restriction signs you pass every June are the lesson the Rim took from it.
Why it matters
Mogollon Campground sits on one of the great geologic lines of the continent, the place where the Colorado Plateau ends and the desert Southwest begins, and the edge is a few minutes’ walk from your table. The campground’s own history is a short one, but the Rim around it carries the whole story of how Arizona’s high country was used: a Spanish governor’s name, Apache summer range, a cavalry road, a timber forest, a fishing lake built by a state agency, and a fire that nearly took it all. For a Scottsdale visitor it is the cheapest, quietest reservable night on the Rim Road. Book a back-loop site, arrive in daylight, walk the edge at sunset and be off it before the afternoon storms.