What is Pinal Campground?
The Pinal Mountains are the dark, forested range you see rising south of Globe from US 60, a sky island that climbs from the saguaros at the edge of town to a 7,848-foot summit crowned with radio towers. Near the top, in a stand of ponderosa pine and white fir, the Forest Service keeps two small free campgrounds a few hundred yards apart: Pinal, with 4 sites, and Six Shooter, with 12. Each site has a table and a fire ring, each campground has a vault toilet, and neither has water, trash service or a fee. A few hundred feet higher, Upper Pinal adds three more.
At 7,500 feet this is Rim-country climate without the Rim-country drive. On a July afternoon when Scottsdale is 112, Pinal is in the high 80s and the nights drop into the 50s. The Pinal Mountain trail system threads the summit area, with old CCC-built routes dropping into Sixshooter and Icehouse canyons and short walks to the summit towers. The campgrounds are quiet, the sites are shaded, and the only crowd is on summer holiday weekends, when Globe families come up the hill.
It is for tent campers and truck campers who want to be in the cool by lunchtime and do not mind ten miles of mountain gravel to get there. What you get is free forest camping two and a half hours from Old Town, a summit view from the Superstitions to the Catalinas, and a range that most Valley campers drive past on the way to the White Mountains. What you do not get is water, a trailer site, a host, a reservation, or a road that is open all winter.
How to camp Pinal right
Nothing to pay, nothing to book. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit, no pass. Quiet hours and no generators 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. If the four Pinal sites are taken, Six Shooter next door almost always has room under the same rules.
Get there. Take Loop 101 south to US 60 east and drive to Globe, about an hour and forty minutes through Superior and the Queen Creek tunnel. In Globe, follow Jess Hayes Road southeast past the Globe Ranger Station to the junction of Icehouse Canyon Road (FR 112) and Six-shooter Canyon Road. Continue 2 miles on paved FR 112, take the right fork onto partially paved FR 55 for 2 miles, then turn left onto FR 651 and climb 10 miles of narrow, winding gravel to the campgrounds. Total distance from Globe is 14.5 miles; total time from Old Town is about two hours and thirty-five minutes, with the last 50 minutes on dirt.
Respect the road. The Forest Service says FR 651 is fine for sedans only when dry. It is one lane with pullouts in places, the washboard gets worse the higher you go, and after a monsoon storm it can be a mess for a day. After rain or snow you want clearance, and in winter it closes under snow and ice without much notice. Trailers under 16 feet; realistically a teardrop or a truck camper is the limit.
Pick the season. Officially year round; realistically May through October. Late May through early October is the window, 20 to 25 degrees cooler than Scottsdale. Late spring brings fire restrictions some years, and July and August bring afternoon lightning; break camp before the clouds build if you are leaving that day. Nights are cold here even in June, so bring the bag you would bring to Flagstaff.
Water and supplies. None at any Pinal campground. Be in Globe by nine, fill jugs and buy ice there, because there is nothing after Jess Hayes Road. There are no dumpsters either; pack it out.
The trails and the summit. The Pinal Mountain trail system starts within a mile of camp, with routes to the summit and down Sixshooter and Icehouse canyons. The summit road continues past the campgrounds to the radio towers on Pinal Peak, and the view from up there takes in the Superstitions, the Catalinas and, on a clear day, the Valley’s smog.
Dogs, horses and bears. Dogs on leash; horses and pack animals welcome, and the Pinal trails are popular with riders. Bears live in the Pinals, so food stays in the vehicle.
Skip it if you need water or a bigger site. Pioneer Pass and Sulphide del Rey are lower down the same roads on easier grades, also free and also dry. For a developed campground with water at a similar elevation, the Rim is an hour farther; for an oak-shaded stop on the way home, Oak Flat outside Superior is the one, with its own complicated present. The range’s place in the Tonto National Forest is the backdrop to all of them.
A sky island with a radio mast and no fee
The Pinals are old ground. Salado farmers worked the canyons at the range’s foot between about 1225 and 1400 and built the pueblo at Besh-Ba-Gowah on what is now the south edge of Globe; when they left in the fifteenth century the Western Apache, who call the range Dził Nnilchí’ Diyiléé, and the Kwevkepaya band of the Yavapai, who call it Walkame, the pine mountains, made it theirs. Spanish expeditions in the 1600s translated that idea as a stand of pines, pinal, and the word attached itself to the range, then to the Pinal Apache band that lived around it, then to the county. A brief fight between Spanish soldiers and Apache warriors in the range is remembered as the Battle of the Pinal Mountains; no one has fixed its date.
Silver changed everything in 1875, when prospectors moved their camp off Ramboz Peak to the site that became Globe, at the mountains’ northern foot. The Apache were confined to the San Carlos reservation a few miles east, claims went in across the range, and Sixshooter Canyon got its name from the pistols its miners wore. Copper outlasted silver; the Old Dominion mine ran Globe for half a century, and on the Pinals’ west side the Gibson Mine produced about 12.5 million pounds of copper and nearly all the range’s output between 1906 and 1918. The Tonto National Forest, proclaimed in 1905 to protect the watershed of the Salt River dams, took in the mountains with the claims still active; the last of them played out by the early 1900s and there are no working mines in the range today.
Recreation arrived with the Depression. In the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps crews built the trails that still climb the range’s canyons, Sixshooter, Icehouse and Telephone among them, and the first picnic and camp sites in the firs near the top. The summit road came for the broadcasters: a maintained dirt road was pushed to Pinal Peak and neighboring Signal Peak for the radio and later television towers that serve Globe, Miami and the mining districts, and the campgrounds beside it, Pinal, Six Shooter and Upper Pinal, became the places Globe families went to get out of the heat. We could not find a Forest Service record of the year each campground was laid out, so we have left the decades loose. What is certain is that none of them has ever had water or a fee, and that the Forest Service’s own count for the summit recreation area, 16 units with tables, grills and four vault toilets, matches what you find.
Fire is the recent chapter. On June 4, 2021, the Telegraph Fire started near Superior and ran east across the country between Superior and Globe, burning 180,757 acres and climbing into the Pinals’ western slopes before crews held it; the summit forest and the campgrounds survived, and the burn is visible from the summit road. Drought and bark beetles have thinned the firs above 7,000 feet, and the Globe Ranger District’s management of the range now turns on fuel reduction as much as on recreation.
Why it matters
The Pinals explain the sky-island pattern that gives Arizona its surprises: a range that rises more than 4,000 feet in a few miles, carrying a slice of Rocky Mountain forest above a copper town and a saguaro desert. They also show what a national forest looks like when nobody has bothered to monetize it, which is four tables, a toilet and no envelope. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is that this is the closest free fir forest to the Valley, that it costs ten miles of gravel and every drop of water hauled from Globe, and that on a July weekend that is a fair trade.