What is Moqui Group Campground?
A mile off SR 87 on the plateau above the Mogollon Rim, the Coconino National Forest built a campground for crowds. Moqui Group Campground is three separate gravel pods, Simmons, Spooner and Ernst, each laid out for up to 50 people, in a stand of ponderosa, Gambel oak and aspen at 6,915 feet. The Winslow Kiwanis Club helped pay for it, and the Forest Service says so on the sign. Each pod has picnic tables, ground grills, big pedestal barbecues, fire rings, vault toilets, trash collection and piped drinking water, which is rarer than it should be up here, and the pods share horseshoe courts and an amphitheater. A host lives on site in season.
It is a reservation-only group facility, $85 a night per pod, booked on recreation.gov, with Simmons and Ernst combinable for groups of 100. Simmons and Spooner take RVs and trailers up to 22 feet, three per pod; Ernst is for tents and small campers. There are no hookups and no dump station. The surrounding country is the draw: the Cabin Loop and General Crook trails, the Arizona National Scenic Trail, fire lookouts, and water at Knoll Lake and C.C. Cragin Reservoir a half hour away.
What you get is the only reservable camp of this size between Payson and Flagstaff, with water, toilets, trash service and an adult on duty, for less than a dollar a head. What you do not get is a lake at the door, a shower, a campfire in a dry June, or a site for fewer than ten people; the season is early May to late September, and it is closed now until spring.
How to camp it right
Reserve early. Required, on recreation.gov, $85 per pod per night for 10 to 50 people; Simmons plus Ernst for up to 100. Summer weekends go months ahead, so book the week the group’s dates firm up. Check-in 2 p.m., check-out noon, 14-day limit. Groups over 100 are sent to the Elks Picnic Ground or the Long Valley Work Center; call the Mogollon Rim Ranger District in Happy Jack, 928-477-2255.
Get there. SR 87, the Beeline, all the way: through Payson, Pine and Strawberry, up the Rim and across the plateau to milepost 298.8, about 46 miles north of Payson, where Forest Road 138 leaves the highway on the right, signed for Moqui. The campground is a mile in on good gravel. About 2 hours 30 minutes from Old Town. From Flagstaff it is 55 miles down Lake Mary Road to Clints Well, then 9 miles southeast on SR 87. Happy Jack, 10 minutes north, has gas, two convenience stores and two restaurants; Clints Well has a restaurant and a store.
Sort the pods. Put the tent-heavy, kid-heavy half of the group in Ernst and the trailers in Simmons or Spooner; the pods are separate enough that noise in one does not carry badly to another.
Pick the season. Late May and June are dry and warm by day, cold at night. July and August bring a thunderstorm most afternoons, so bring a canopy; the monsoon is reliable up here. September is the quiet month and the best one.
Water and toilets. Piped drinking water, vault toilets, trash service. No showers, no hookups, no dump station. Bring a long hose for filling jugs from the spigots.
Fire. Rings and grills are provided, but the Coconino is under Stage 1 or Stage 2 restrictions most summers, and Stage 2 means no wood or charcoal fires at all. Check before you load the firewood and have a propane plan.
Vehicles and rules. Stay on the gravel. RVs to 22 feet in Simmons and Spooner only; OHVs may be driven only in and out; no refrigerated semis. No horses, no amplified music, dogs leashed and never unattended, quiet hours enforced by the host.
Skip it if you are fewer than ten or want a lake. Knoll Lake for fishing and the Rim Road for the view are each about 30 minutes south, Kehl Springs is the free small-group alternative on the Rim, and Jacks Canyon is the horse camp.
A campground named for a word nobody uses anymore
The name is the oldest thing here. Moqui is what the Spanish, and after them the Army and the early Forest Service, called the Hopi; the Hopi never used it, it carries an insulting sense in a neighboring language, and the government dropped it a century ago. It survived on the map of the Rim country the way old names do, attached to a lookout and a flat and eventually to this campground, and the Forest Service has never renamed it. The plateau it sits on was summer range for the Tonto and White Mountain Apache, and long before them for Sinagua and ancestral Pueblo farmers whose descendants include the people the word was meant for.
The first infrastructure was military. In 1872 General Crook’s crews built a wagon road from Fort Whipple at Prescott to Fort Apache, running along the Rim’s edge a few miles south of here, and in July 1882 the Battle of Big Dry Wash, fought beside that road, was the last major engagement between the Army and the Apache in Arizona. Then the land changed hands on paper: the San Francisco Mountains Forest Reserve was created in 1898 at Gifford Pinchot’s request, and on July 2, 1908 Theodore Roosevelt merged it with neighboring reserves into the Coconino National Forest. The new forest’s first buildings on the plateau were working ones. Fire-guard cabins went up at the springs, General Springs among them in 1915; the Cabin Loop trails that now link them for hikers were the guards’ patrol routes; and the lookout on Baker Butte, the Rim’s high point, has been staffed since 1921.
Logging made the neighborhood. In 1947 the Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Company built a camp at Onion Flat, 10 minutes north, and named it Happy Jack; it had 300 people by 1948 and about 500 at its peak, with a ranger station, a post office and, after a 1970 petition, a school. When the nearby timber ran out, around 1974, the company moved the camp 13 miles toward Clints Well, and in 1983 the post office followed to Long Valley, which locals call Happy Jack Too. The gas station, the two stores and the two restaurants your group will shop at are what is left of a company town, and the Mogollon Rim Ranger District office sits where the camp’s ranger station did.
Recreation arrived as the mills left. The Rim Lakes campgrounds filled in through the 1960s and 1970s; the Arizona Trail, proposed by Flagstaff teacher Dale Shewalter in 1985, was named a National Scenic Trail by Congress on March 30, 2009 and declared complete on December 16, 2011, and its route across the plateau passes a few miles from Moqui. Somewhere in that era the Winslow Kiwanis Club took on the idea of a group camp for the scout troops, church groups and reunions that were showing up in the pines with nowhere legal to put fifty people, and helped the Mogollon Rim Ranger District plan and build it. The Forest Service credits the club for the concept, the construction and the donations on its sign and its web page, and that is the entire written history of the campground; it has not published a year, and neither will I guess one.
What has changed lately is the booking. Moqui moved onto recreation.gov with a per-pod fee, the host program gives it an adult on site all season, and the Stage 2 fire restrictions that now arrive most Junes mean a group camp built around fire rings and pedestal barbecues spends part of every summer cooking on propane.
Why it matters
Moqui is a reminder that the Rim country was a working forest before it was anyone’s weekend: an Army road, a fire guard’s cabin, a lumber camp, and only then a campground, built because a service club in Winslow noticed that big groups needed a legal place to sleep. The old name on the sign is a small lesson in how long a government takes to catch up with its own maps. For a Scottsdale group the verdict is plain: if you have twenty to a hundred people and want water, toilets, a host and pines two and a half hours from home, this is the only place that does it on a reservation, so book it the day your dates are set and bring a canopy.