What are Myrtle Lake and Lost Lake?
The top of the Mogollon Rim is pocked with shallow basins where the limestone has dissolved and the snowmelt has nowhere to go, and a few dozen of them hold water long enough to be called lakes on the map. Myrtle Lake and Lost Lake are two of those, on the Coconino National Forest beside the Rim Road and roughly two miles behind Myrtle Point, where the Rim drops 2,000 feet to Christopher Creek. Lost Lake sits at about 7,860 feet; Myrtle Lake, 0.8 miles northwest of it and the one Google pins, is about the same. Both are meadow ponds ringed by ponderosa: a few acres of water after a wet winter, a cracked flat with a puddle after a dry one, grazed by cattle in summer and visited by elk at dusk in numbers that make the camping worthwhile.
That is the whole honest description. The Forest Service publishes nothing on them, Arizona Game and Fish does not stock them, and there is no trail, table or toilet. They are what you camp beside on this quiet middle stretch of the Rim Road, between Knoll Lake to the west and the busy Rim Lakes to the east, and the view you walk two miles south to find at Myrtle Point is the reason the stretch is quiet in the first place: the people are all at the lakes with boat ramps.
What you get is a free night in the pines beside water that reflects the sky and draws the elk, and an edge-of-the-world overlook with nobody on it. What you do not get is fish, a swim, a toilet, or any guarantee the ponds will be there in June.
How to camp the Rim Road here right
It is free; camp by the rules. No fee, no reservation. Dispersed camping is on existing sites and pullouts along FR 300 and its spurs, at least 100 feet from the water, 14-day limit, as everywhere on the Rim Road. Pack out everything; there are no dumpsters for miles.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, to Payson, then SR 260 east about 30 miles up the Rim to the top, where Forest Road 300, the Rim Road, leaves on the left at the Rim Visitor Information Station. Drive west about 15 miles of graded gravel, past Bear Canyon Lake’s turnoff, to the FR 300C spur signed for Myrtle Point; Myrtle Lake is beside the main road there, and Lost Lake is about half a mile south on a two-track toward the Rim edge. Figure about 175 minutes from Old Town. From the SR 87 end, FR 300 east past Kehl Springs and Knoll Lake is a similar distance of gravel and slower. Either way the main road is fine for a car when dry; the spurs are not, and everything is mud after a storm.
Pick the season, and the week. The Rim Road opens when the snow goes, usually late April or May, and closes with the first big storm in November. The ponds are fullest in May and again in late August after the monsoon; in a dry June they are cracked mud. September and October bring the elk rut, cold nights and the best camping of the year.
Water. None you would drink. Bring all of it; the nearest tap is Knoll Lake Campground, 10 miles west.
Fire. The Coconino restricts or bans campfires on the Rim most summers by June. Carry a gas stove and check before you go.
Walk to the point. FR 300C runs about two miles south to Myrtle Point. Go at the end of the day; the Rim faces south and the light on the Sierra Ancha and Four Peaks is the show. The Myrtle Trail climbs to the point from the Highline below, so the hikers you meet came up from Christopher Creek, and Horton Creek is the other classic climb up the same wall.
Dogs. Allowed; keep them out of the ponds, which the cattle have been in first.
Skip it if you need water you can see. Knoll Lake and Woods Canyon Lake are real lakes a half hour either way; come here for the quiet, the elk and the edge of the Rim.
A soldiers’ road along the edge
The Rim’s top is Kaibab limestone, laid down in a Permian sea and capped in places by basalt, and limestone dissolves. Rain and snowmelt open shallow depressions and sinkholes with no outlet, and in a country where the streams all run off the edge, those pockets of standing water were the only water on the plateau for anything that walked. The Western Apache bands who wintered in the canyons below the Rim came up in summer to hunt and gather; the Yavapai held the country to the west; and the game trails to the sinkhole ponds are older than any road. Dozens of these ponds dot the Rim from Baker Butte to Forest Lakes. Two of them, for reasons no gazetteer records, were named Myrtle and Lost.
The road came with the Army. Between 1872 and 1874 General George Crook’s troops cut a supply route from Fort Whipple at Prescott, by way of Camp Verde, along the Rim edge to Fort Apache, roughly 200 miles of wagon road laid along the escarpment because the top was flat and the water holes were there. Crook used it in the Apache campaigns; the settlers who followed used it for decades; and when the Forest Service graded its Rim Road, FR 300, it followed the Crook road along this stretch, which is why the lakes sit a few yards off a gravel highway. In the 1970s Boy Scouts re-marked the old alignment with the small chevron blazes you can still find nailed to ponderosas along the road.
Below the edge a second road was going in at the same time. The Highline Trail, established around 1870, linked the homesteads strung along the base of the Rim from Pine to Christopher Creek, and the settlers’ children walked it to school in Pine. Short, brutal trails climbed from it to the top wherever a break in the cliffs allowed; the Myrtle Trail, which tops out at Myrtle Point two miles south of the lakes, is one of them, and whoever Myrtle was gave her name to the point, the trail and the lake. When the Coconino National Forest was created in 1908 the Rim edge became its boundary with the Tonto below, so the ponds and the point are Coconino and the Highline is Tonto. Zane Grey built a hunting cabin under the Rim to the east and used the Highline for his hunts; the cabin, restored in the 1960s, stood until June 25, 1990, when the Dude Fire started below the Rim and burned more than 30,000 acres, killing six firefighters, a disaster the memorial off SR 260 now marks. The view south from Myrtle Point is still partly of that burn.
The last few decades have brought rules rather than buildings. Rim Road camping, once anywhere you could pull off, is now on existing sites with a 100-foot setback from water; campfire restrictions arrive most years by June; and the ponds, always seasonal, now dry earlier in drought years and depend on the monsoon to refill. The Forest Service has never built anything at either lake, has never stocked them, and does not list them on its recreation pages, which is exactly why there is an elk herd at dusk and nobody else.
Why it matters
Myrtle Lake and Lost Lake explain the Rim better than the lakes with boat ramps do. They are what the plateau’s water looked like before Game and Fish built dams: shallow, seasonal, limestone-floored and shared with cattle and elk. The road beside them is an Army supply line turned Forest Service gravel, and the point two miles south is where the settlers’ trail met the soldiers’. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is plain: do not drive three hours for the ponds, but if you are camping the Rim Road, pick this stretch, camp back in the pines, carry your water, and walk to the edge at sunset.