What is Packsaddle Recreation Site?
Two miles down Big Wash Road from Windy Point, at about 6,000 feet on the crest of the Cerbat Mountains, the BLM maintains a second, quieter camp. Packsaddle Recreation Site is a parking area, a vault toilet, a few picnic spots and a scatter of walk-in campsites set among granite boulders the size of garages, under pinyon pine and juniper. There are no tables at most sites, no fire rings to speak of, no water and no fee. It is 9 miles of graded dirt from US 93 and nearly four hours from Old Town. It is the kind of place the BLM calls a recreation site rather than a campground because there is almost nothing in it, which is precisely why some people prefer it.
The setting is the same as Windy Point’s: a dry desert range that rises high enough to grow conifers, with the Black Mountains and the Colorado River trench to the west, the Hualapais to the southeast, and the mining town of Chloride at the foot of the slope below. Cherum Peak, the range’s 6,983-foot high point, is a short trail away. Mule deer and the odd desert bighorn work the ridges; at night the lights of Kingman glow 25 miles south and the rest is dark enough that the stargazing guide undersells it.
What you get is free, sheltered tent camping on a mountain crest with nobody around. What you do not get is a table, a fire ring, water, trash service or any reason to drive here from Scottsdale for the camping alone; it is a night on the way to somewhere else.
How to camp Packsaddle right
Nothing to pay or book. Free, first come, first served. The BLM’s standard 14-day limit applies. There is no host and no fee tube.
Get there. About 3 hours 55 minutes from Old Town. Loop 101 west to US 60 (Grand Avenue) to Wickenburg, US 93 north through Wikieup to Kingman, then 18 more miles north on US 93 to Big Wash Road, signed on the right 1.5 miles past the paved SR 62 turnoff to Chloride. Climb 9 miles of graded dirt to Packsaddle. The BLM highly recommends high clearance and advises against travel trailers; the grade and the rocks are the issue, not the surface, and a stock SUV manages it dry. Allow 30 minutes for the dirt. Windy Point is 2 miles farther and the Cherum Peak Trailhead about 4, just before the road drops steeply toward Chloride. Fill water and the tank in Kingman.
Pick the season. Year-round, but April through June and September through October are what it is for. Summer thunderstorms hit the ridge in the afternoon; winter snow can close the road, and Big Wash Road turns impassable after days of rain in any season. If the road is wet, do not try the steep descent toward Chloride; go back the way you came.
Pick the rock. Take a site on the lee side of the boulders; the wind that names Windy Point blows here too, and the granite is the only shelter. You carry everything a short walk from the parking area, so pack light and bring a pad for uneven ground.
Water and facilities. None but the vault toilet. No trash service; pack it all out.
Fire. Stoves are the sensible choice. If you use an existing rock ring, bring your own wood, keep it small, and check Kingman Field Office restrictions from May on; the pinyon-juniper burns fast.
Climb Cherum Peak. The trail leaves Big Wash Road about 4 miles past the campground: about 2 miles and 700 feet to the crest, a quarter mile of jeep road, then a short steep single track to the summit at 6,983 feet. Do it in the morning and you will have the whole range to yourself on a weekday.
Dogs. Leashed. Lions and rattlesnakes live here; keep them close.
Skip it if you are driving up from Scottsdale for the camping alone. Nearly four hours of driving to sleep on the ground for free is a poor trade unless you are already on US 93 headed to Las Vegas, Laughlin or Lake Mohave, in which case it is a far better night than a Kingman motel and twenty minutes from Katherine Landing’s side of the lake the next morning. Burro Creek has water, flush toilets and a swimming hole two hours closer, and Hualapai Mountain Park has cabins and pines on the other side of Kingman.
The chief’s mountain above the silver camp
The Cerbats are a short, steep range that happens to be high enough for pinyon, and for the Hualapai that made them worth having. The band the Americans would call the Middle Mountain People ranged these crests and the springs below them as part of a seasonal round that ran from the Colorado River to the Hualapai Mountains, and the high point of the range carries, in an Anglicized spelling, the name of their chief. Sherum, as the Army wrote it, led the Middle Mountain People through the Hualapai War of 1865 to 1870: prospectors had been finding silver, gold, lead and turquoise in the range since the 1840s, the camp of Chloride was founded on the southwest flank about 1863, and when settlers killed a Hualapai leader nine months into a peace, the bands went to war with the miners and the soldiers for five years. The war is usually dated as ending in December 1868 and one chief surrendered in 1869; Sherum kept fighting until 1870. The Hualapai were marched to the Colorado River reservation at La Paz by 1874, walked home, and were given a reservation of their own in the 1880s, well to the east of the mountains that still carry his name.
Chloride got the Cerbats after that. Mining did not spread through the range until the 1870s, after the treaty, and when it did the camp grew to about 5,000 people and served a turn as Mohave County seat. On August 16, 1899 the Arizona and Utah Railway arrived from Kingman, with a young woman named May Krider driving the last silver spike, and Chloride became the kind of town that could ship ore instead of hauling it by wagon over the road you drive to the campground; millions of dollars in silver came down the Cerbat grades. Then the ore thinned. The town was down to about 2,000 by 1917, a fire in the late 1920s took much of the business district, and by 1944 it was nearly a ghost town, with 135 residents counted in 1960. It never quite emptied, which is why it calls itself the oldest continuously inhabited mining town in Arizona.
What brought people back up the hill was paint. In 1966 Roy Purcell, a Utah State graduate student working as a miner near Chloride between semesters, covered about 2,000 square feet of granite a mile and a half outside town with murals, some of them 30 feet high, that he later described as stages of his life and the conflicts in his subconscious. They became the reason most visitors drive to Chloride, and the four-wheel-drive road that climbs past them into the Cerbats is the old ore road to the mines. Big Wash Road, which you take from the US 93 side, is the gentler way up to the same crest.
The Bureau of Land Management inherited the range’s public land and, sometime in the decades after the mines closed, built two small recreation sites on the crest road, Windy Point with tables and fire rings and a fee, and Packsaddle with almost nothing and no fee, plus the trail to Cherum Peak. The BLM does not publish a construction year for Packsaddle, and nothing about it suggests one; it is a parking area, a toilet and the boulders the Middle Mountain People knew. Chloride below has 229 people as of the 2020 census, a post office, a couple of bars and the murals, and the Cerbat crest is as empty as it has been since the silver ran out.
Why it matters
Packsaddle is a free place to sleep on a mountain that was fought over for five years and then mined out in forty, and the names on the map tell both stories: Cherum Peak above, Chloride below, the ore road between them. For a Scottsdale visitor it is not a destination; it is the best night on the way to Las Vegas, Laughlin or Lake Mohave, a four-hour drive and 9 miles of dirt from Old Town, with boulders for a windbreak and the Colorado River trench for a view. Take the lee side of the rocks, climb Cherum Peak in the morning, drive down to see the murals, and leave the toilet the only sign you were there.