What is Molino Basin Campground?
The Catalina Highway climbs from saguaros at 3,000 feet to firs at 9,000 in 27 miles, and Molino Basin is the first campground it reaches, about 5.7 miles past the forest boundary at 4,500 feet. The setting is high-desert oak scrub: Arizona live oak, mesquite and cottonwood along Molino Creek, which flows for a day or two after rain, under rocky grassland hills. There are a few dozen individual sites, the Forest Service’s own count, spread along the creek and the highway, plus a reservable group area with a big shelter, grills, bear lockers and six tent pads. Each site has a table and fire ring; the toilets are vaults; there is no water.
What sets it apart is the calendar. Every other campground on Mount Lemmon opens in spring and closes in fall. Molino Basin does the opposite, opening around November and closing around April, because at this elevation winter is the season: 60-degree days, cold clear nights, and a trail system that is pleasant when the higher mountain is under snow. The Arizona Trail passes directly through camp, the Molino Trail climbs into the Pusch Ridge Wilderness, and the Molino Basin and Bellota trails roll east through the grassland.
What you get is a $20 first-come site 20 minutes above Tucson in the one month the rest of southern Arizona is full. What you do not get is water, quiet from the highway, or anything to do in summer, when it is closed.
How to camp it right
Pay the tube, or book the group site. $20 a night per single site, first come, first served, paid with cash or check at the fee tube. The group area is $100 a night plus $10 per vehicle on recreation.gov. Pass discounts apply only to the site the pass holder occupies. The day-use picnic area is $8 per vehicle.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east into Tucson, then east across the city on Grant or Tanque Verde Road to the Catalina Highway. From Tanque Verde Road it is 4.2 miles to the forest boundary and another 5.7 to the campground entrance on the right, all paved. About 135 minutes from Old Town. The lot at the group area holds about 17 cars; individual sites have their own pull-ins. On winter weekends the campground is also a trailhead for the Arizona Trail and the climbing areas above, so day-use parking gets tight by mid-morning.
Arrive early in the snowbird months. Friday before noon in January and February, when Tucson’s climbers and Arizona Trail hikers fill it by dark; midweek you will have your pick. The sites on the east side of the creek are quieter than the ones along the highway, which carries cyclists from dawn and motorcycles until dusk.
Water. None. Fill up at a gas station on Tanque Verde Road, not at the campground. Molino Creek runs only after rain or snowmelt.
Pick the season. November through April. The Forest Service page showed the site closed in mid-October 2026, which is normal pre-season; confirm the opening date before a November trip. In summer, go up the mountain to Rose Canyon or General Hitchcock.
Vehicles. RVs and trailers under 22 feet, no hookups, no dump station, two vehicles and ten people per site, 14-day limit.
Walk out the back. The Arizona Trail north from camp for an hour at sunset gives the view back down to the Rincons; the Molino Trail climbs into the wilderness. Drive 25 minutes up the highway after breakfast to stand in snow at Windy Point.
Dogs. On leash in camp and on most trails, but not in the Pusch Ridge bighorn sheep management area.
Skip it if you want a destination rather than a base. It is plain, the highway is right there, and Tucson’s lights are 20 minutes below. Catalina State Park on the other side of the range has water, showers and reservations; Sabino Canyon is the day trip; and Peppersauce on the back side of the mountain is the other low, quiet, first-come option. Treat Molino as a base for the mountain and it earns its $20.
The road the prisoners built
Molino Basin exists because of the highway, and the highway exists because of a newspaper publisher and a prison. Frank Harris Hitchcock, a former U.S. Postmaster General who published the Tucson Citizen, wanted a road to the cool top of the Santa Catalinas, and in 1933 he got construction started with federal relief money. Labor was the problem, and the solution was a federal prison camp set up at the foot of the range, a mile above where the campground now sits, whose inmates did the blasting and grading. Hitchcock died in 1935, long before the road was done; it is named for him.
The camp’s history is darker than a road crew’s. During the Second World War it became the Catalina Federal Honor Camp, and among the men sent there were Japanese Americans jailed for resisting internment. Gordon Hirabayashi, a Japanese American student who refused to report to a camp and was convicted in 1942, served his sentence of hard labor here, building the road that leads to this campground. His convictions were vacated in the 1980s after the government’s wartime evidence was shown to be false, and in 1999 the Coronado National Forest renamed the old prison site the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site; he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2012. The camp’s foundations, a small campground and interpretive signs are a short drive up the highway from Molino, and the Arizona Trail walks through them.
The road finally reached the top in 1950, 17 years after it began, 27 miles and more than 6,000 feet of climb from the desert to the firs. Molino Basin, the first flat ground with shade above the forest boundary, became the first campground on it and, because of its elevation, the only one the Forest Service could keep open in winter. The highway it sits on was narrow and bumpy for forty years until a run of seven federal projects between 1988 and 2007 widened it, added shoulders and guardrails and won it an engineering award; the last project alone cost $15 million.
The wilderness above camp has its own story. Congress designated the Pusch Ridge Wilderness, 56,430 acres, in 1978, largely to protect one of Arizona’s last desert bighorn sheep herds. Development in the foothills and the Catalinas’ popularity shrank the herd until it was gone; in November 2013 Game and Fish released 31 bighorn into the range, and in February 2014 two lambs were spotted, the first born on the mountain in nearly 25 years. That is why the Molino Trail’s upper reaches are closed to dogs. Fire has shaped the mountain as much as the road: the Aspen Fire of June 2003 burned 84,750 acres and destroyed 340 homes and businesses in Summerhaven at the top, and the lightning-caused Bighorn Fire of June 2020 burned 119,987 acres across the range before it was out in late July. Molino Basin, in the oak grassland below the pines, came through both and reopened each winter as before.
Why it matters
Molino Basin is a plain campground on an extraordinary road. The Catalina Highway is the Southwest’s best drive from desert to alpine, and the fact that it was built by prisoners, including men jailed for refusing an internment order the country later repudiated, is a piece of Arizona history that sits a mile above your tent with signs explaining it. The campground’s winter calendar is the other lesson: at 4,500 feet the season is the opposite of the mountain’s, which is what makes a $20 first-come site available in January when nothing else in Tucson is. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: use it as the base for a winter weekend on the mountain, arrive Friday morning, bring all your water, and walk up to the old prison camp before you drive to the snow.