What is Owl Creek Campground?
The Gila River leaves New Mexico, collects the San Francisco at Clifton, and then cuts the Gila Box, 23 miles of cottonwood-and-cliff canyon that the BLM manages as a riparian national conservation area. Owl Creek Campground sits on a bluff at the top of it, 7 sites on good gravel at about 3,400 feet, each with a table, grill, fire ring and a shade ramada, with a vault toilet, trash cans and a fee tube that wants $5. Site 1 is built accessible. A short trail from the kiosk drops to the Old Safford Bridge picnic area and the Gila River boat put-in, the start of the Gila Box float. It is nearly four hours from Old Town, and the last 4 miles are gravel.
A note on the map: some online maps and listings put this campground near Alpine. It is not there. The BLM’s own page, its coordinates and every camper who has reviewed it put it here, south of Clifton on the Gila, which is a desert camp at a third of Alpine’s elevation and the opposite season. The campground in the White Mountains that the pin was pointing at does not exist.
What you get is a cheap, quiet winter camp with a river below, a dark sky above and a 23-mile canyon to float when the water is up. What you do not get is water, shade beyond the ramada, or any reason to be here from May to September, when the bluff is over 100 degrees and the river is a trickle.
How to camp Owl Creek right
Pay the tube. $5 per night for up to two vehicles, $2 per additional vehicle, half with a Senior or Access pass. No reservations; it is first come, first served, and on a winter weeknight you will likely have it to yourself. 14 days in any 28.
Get there. US 60 east to Globe, US 70 through the San Carlos Reservation to Safford, about 2 hours 50 minutes, then US 191 north toward Clifton. About 7 miles short of Clifton, turn west onto the signed Black Hills Back Country Byway and follow about 4 miles of winding, washboarded gravel with three one-lane bridges to the campground. Figure 3 hours 55 minutes. A two-wheel-drive pickup or SUV is fine when dry; the gravel gets greasy in rain. Do not bring a 40-foot rig past the campground; the byway’s hairpins toward Safford are not for it. Clifton, 20 minutes on, has gas and a grocery.
Pick the season. Year-round, but October through April is the one that matters. Summer is 100-plus and the ramadas are not enough. The river rises with monsoon storms upstream and with spring snowmelt from New Mexico, which is the only time it floats.
Water. None. Fill in Safford or Clifton. The Gila below is silty and needs real treatment.
Pick the site. The four river-view sites on the bluff edge are the ones to take: widely spaced pads, good gravel, the canyon opening below you. Bring firewood; the mesquite here is for shade, and the BLM wants it standing.
Float it when it runs. The put-in below the campground is the start of the Gila Box float, 23 miles to the Bonita Creek takeout near Riverview, which runs in March and April snowmelt and is too low most of the rest of the year; a canoe or packraft with a shuttle makes a classic two-day trip through cottonwood galleries and 1,000-foot walls. No permit. Check the gauge at Clifton first. Fishing is catfish and bass, and the cottonwoods hold more than 100 recorded bird species; the wildlife guide will not cover the bighorn you may see on the cliffs.
Dogs. Welcome; watch for javelina at night and keep food in the vehicle.
Skip it if seven sites, no water and a long drive for a short stay sound like a poor trade. For more river sites and a dump station, the BLM’s Riverview campground is at the Bonita Creek end of the Box near Safford; for forest and cool, Granville is 25 miles north up the Coronado Trail, and the Mount Graham campgrounds at Arcadia are an hour west.
A river box the copper towns left alone
The Gila Box is what the Gila River looks like when nobody has dammed it. Below the confluence with the San Francisco, the river drops into a canyon of conglomerate cliffs and cottonwood bottoms for 23 miles, fed by two perennial side creeks, Bonita and Eagle, that are rarer in southern Arizona than gold ever was. People farmed here for a thousand years before the river had a name on a map. The Mogollon and Salado left cliff dwellings, rock art and field terraces along Bonita Creek that the BLM still finds and does not advertise, and the Western Apache held the Box and the mountains around it until the Army took them in the 1870s.
Copper changed the neighborhood without quite reaching the river. Prospectors found it in the hills above the San Francisco in the 1870s, and the camps that became Clifton and Morenci grew up seven miles north of the campground, with the smelters, the tailings and the narrow-gauge railroads that followed. The Gila below became a working river: ranches on the bottoms, a ferry and then a road crossing where the Safford wagon road met the water. In 1918 the county replaced the crossing with a concrete bridge, concrete because the war had claimed the steel, and that is the Old Safford Bridge at the bottom of the trail from the campground, restored and kept as a picnic area and a put-in long after the highway moved to US 191. The propane cannons you hear at night are the Morenci mine, one of the largest copper operations in North America, scaring birds off its ponds.
The Box survived because it was too rough to farm and too far from the smelters to matter. In 1990 Congress noticed. The Arizona Desert Wilderness Act, Public Law 101-628, signed November 28, 1990, created the Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area, 23,000 acres along the Gila, the San Francisco, Bonita Creek and Eagle Creek, one of only two riparian conservation areas in the national system; the other is on the San Pedro. The act’s point was the water: four perennial streams in a state where most rivers are dry, with the cottonwood and willow galleries, the bighorn on the cliffs and the hundred-odd bird species that come with them.
Recreation came with the designation. The BLM laid out the Black Hills Back Country Byway, 21 miles of the old Safford-Clifton county road over the hills, and built two small campgrounds to anchor it: Riverview at the Bonita Creek end near Safford, with water, and Owl Creek at the east end, without. The BLM does not publish a construction year for Owl Creek; the ramadas, the accessible site and the kiosk belong to the 1990s style of BLM building, and campers who have been coming since describe a campground that has barely changed. The Gila Box float, from the bridge to Bonita Creek, became a quiet classic for canoeists in March and April, and the campground became its base. It has never been crowded, which in Arizona is the rarest amenity of all.
Why it matters
Owl Creek is a seven-site campground at the mouth of one of the last undammed stretches of a major Arizona river, which makes it more important than its size. The Gila Box shows what the Salt and the Verde looked like before Roosevelt and Bartlett, and the 1990 act that protected it was the state’s first real recognition that a desert river’s value is in the water, not the acre-feet. For a Scottsdale visitor it is nearly four hours away and worth it only in winter or in a spring with snow in New Mexico, when you can float the Box from your campsite. Take a bluff site, bring every drop of water, go down to the bridge at sunset, and let the mine’s cannons remind you what the rest of the river country became.