What is Peppersauce Campground?
Most people meet Mount Lemmon from the south, up the paved highway from Tucson. Peppersauce is on the other side: a canyon on the mountain’s dry north slope, eight miles of dirt road out of the old mining town of Oracle, where Peppersauce Creek comes down out of the high country and a grove of enormous Arizona sycamores and walnuts has grown up along it. The campground is strung through those trees at 4,700 feet: roughly 17 small sites by most counts, each with a table, fire ring and lantern post, a couple of vault toilets, bear lockers, and a campground host much of the year. There is no water, no hookups and no phone signal. The group site, up a rougher spur, takes 35 people.
The creek bed is dry most of the year and the shade is deep, which makes the place work in spring and fall when the Catalina Highway campgrounds are closed or cold. A short walk away is Peppersauce Cave, a genuinely wild limestone cave with about a mile of muddy passages and a small lake at the back that has drawn Tucson students for generations; the Forest Service provides nothing there but the warning. Past camp the Control Road keeps climbing, 20-odd miles of dirt to Summerhaven, and the Arizona Trail crosses it about 5 miles up.
What you get is cheap, shaded, year-round tent camping on a side of the Catalinas most Arizonans never see, with a cave and a long dirt road for entertainment. What you do not get is water, a signal, a level pad for a trailer or any protection from the creek when it decides to run.
How to camp Peppersauce right
Pay at the tube, reserve only the group site. $15 a night single, $30 double, first come, first served, cash or check at the fee tube. The group site is $50 a night plus $10 per vehicle on recreation.gov. Campers must occupy a site for the first 24 hours; two vehicles and ten people per site; 14-day limit per year. Quiet hours are 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Get there. Take US 60 east to Florence Junction, SR 79 south through Florence to Oracle Junction, then SR 77 east to Oracle. In Oracle, turn onto Mount Lemmon Road (American Avenue becomes Forest Road 38) and follow it about 8 miles southeast; the pavement ends at the edge of town and the rest is graded dirt with a few rocky dips, fine for a passenger car when dry. About 130 minutes from Old Town. The parking area at the group site holds about ten cars; the individual sites have their own short pull-ins and nothing fits a big rig.
Pick the season. November, when the sycamores turn and the creek bed is a carpet of leaves, or March after rain, when the creek runs for a week and the walnuts leaf out. It is hot from May to September, and the summer storms are the dangerous part of the year here.
Water. None. Bring it from Oracle, and bring enough for the dog and the dishes.
Camp on the bank, not in the wash. The Forest Service flags this campground for flash-flood risk. The creek is normally dry and becomes a torrent within minutes when it storms on the mountain above, which you may not be able to see from the canyon. Pick a site above the channel, especially July through September, and read our flash flood entry if you have not camped in a desert wash before.
Vehicles. RVs 22 feet and under; trailers discouraged because the sites are small and there are no pull-throughs. The group-site spur is impassable for low-clearance cars. Beyond camp, the Control Road wants high clearance and is impassable in snow.
The cave. Bring three light sources per person, old clothes, and expect to crawl through mud and tight passages for an hour to reach the lake room. Go with someone who has been, do not go alone, and stay out after rain. It has hurt people who treated it casually.
Dogs. On leash. Watch the poison ivy along the creek, for them and for you.
Skip it if you want a campground on the Catalina Highway with pavement and a view. Molino Basin and General Hitchcock are the paved-road answers on the Tucson side, and Picacho Peak is the state park with hookups on the drive down. Come here in the cool months with a full jug and it is one of the better bargains in southern Arizona.
The quiet side of Frog Mountain
The Tohono O’odham call the Santa Catalinas Babad Do’ag, Frog Mountain, and their Hohokam ancestors farmed the valleys at its feet. By the eighteenth century the high country was Apache ground and stayed contested until the Apache Wars ended in the 1880s, which is why the mining camps on the mountain’s north slope came late. When they came, they came fast: gold and silver strikes in the late 1870s opened the Christmas and New Year mines, and a prospector named Albert Weldon named his claim the Oracle after the ship that had carried him west. The settlement took the mine’s name and had a post office by 1880. In 1881 the botanist Sara Plummer Lemmon, her husband and a local rancher reached the summit by horse and on foot, and the mountain was named for her.
The campground’s name dates from the same year and is, by the Forest Service’s own account, a joke that stuck. In 1880 a prospector named Alex McKay camped in the sycamore canyon below Oracle, left, and reported to the authorities that his bottle of hot pepper sauce had gone missing. The canyon has been Peppersauce ever since and, the Forest Service notes, the culprit was never caught. The trees he camped under are the same ones you camp under: the big Arizona sycamores, black walnuts, cottonwoods and hackberries along the normally dry wash are described as a hundred years old and more.
For the first half of the twentieth century this canyon was on the only road up the mountain. The Oracle Control Road climbed from town past the sycamores to the summit cabins at Summerhaven as a single lane of dirt, and because it was single, traffic was controlled: cars went up in one window and down in the next, which is where the name comes from. That changed when Frank Harris Hitchcock, a former Postmaster General who published the Tucson Citizen, pushed through a road from the Tucson side. Construction began in 1933 with labor from a federal prison camp at the mountain’s foot, which during the Second World War held Japanese Americans forced to work on the grade, among them Gordon Hirabayashi, whose name the site now carries. The Catalina Highway opened in 1950, seventeen years after it started. From that day Peppersauce was the back way, and it has been quiet since.
The cave gave it a second life. Peppersauce Cave, a limestone cave about ten miles south of Oracle with roughly a mile of mapped passage, was already well explored locally when a Desert Magazine article in February 1948 introduced it to the rest of the state, and a 1951 National Geographic story showed a scientist breaking off a large stalactite to study it, which tells you how the era treated caves. Tucson students adopted it; the Signing Room filled with names; graffiti and trash accumulated for fifty years. In 2001, after E. coli and coliform bacteria turned up in the cave’s lakes, the Peppersauce Cave Conservation Project was formed with Arizona Department of Environmental Quality money, volunteers hauled out the mess, and a January 2003 sampling found the water clean. About 23,000 people a year still go in, with no gate, no guide and no official parking lot.
The campground itself is the Forest Service’s modest contribution to all this: a string of small sites with tables, rings and vault toilets along a creek that is dry most of the year, a flash-flood warning on its web page, and a fee that has stayed at $15. It has never been developed further, partly because the road discourages it and partly because the canyon floods. That restraint is the reason it still feels like 1950.
Why it matters
Peppersauce is what Mount Lemmon was before the highway: a dirt road, a canyon of old trees, a mining town at the bottom and a cave the locals knew about. It explains why the Catalinas have two personalities, the paved Tucson side with its pullouts and ski lift and this side, where nothing has changed much since the Control Road stopped being the only road. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is plain: it is a two-hour-plus drive for a $15 tent site with no water, which is a bad deal in July and a very good one in November, when the sycamores turn and you can have a hundred-year-old grove and a wild cave nearly to yourself.