What is Pine Grove Campground?
If you asked a Flagstaff ranger which Lake Mary Road campground to send your parents to, the answer would be Pine Grove. Its 46 sites are spread through a stand of tall ponderosa at about 6,900 feet, each with a picnic table, fire ring and grill, and most are wide and level enough that you do not spend the first hour leveling a trailer. Sixteen sites and the toilets are fully accessible. There are coin showers, a dump station, potable water and a camp host, which is more than any other Forest Service campground on the road offers, and a concessionaire runs it for the Coconino.
What it does not have is a lake. Upper Lake Mary is four miles back toward town and Ashurst Lake a few miles on, so Pine Grove is a base, not a shoreline. That cuts both ways: no ski-boat traffic, no wind off the water, and a quieter night than at Lakeview or Ashurst. Elk graze the meadow at the south end in the evening, and the forest around it is part of the largest continuous ponderosa stand in North America.
It is for families and RVers who want a hot shower at the end of the day and a wide, level site under the pines, and for anyone with a wheelchair or a walker in the party. What you get is the most complete Forest Service campground within two and a half hours of Scottsdale. What you do not get is a hookup, a view of water, a site for a 40-foot fifth wheel, or a bargain: it costs a few dollars more than the lakes.
How to camp Pine Grove right
Reserve half, gamble on half. $34 per night for one vehicle and up to eight people; $10 for a second vehicle. 24 sites are reservable on recreation.gov up to six months ahead; 22 are first come, first served and usually gone by Friday afternoon in summer. Senior and Access passes get 50 percent off the camping fee. Showers are $7; the dump station is free for registered campers and $14 for others; day use is $12 per vehicle. Check-in 2 p.m., check-out 11 a.m.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17, I-17 north to exit 339 (Lake Mary Road) south of Flagstaff, then Lake Mary Road southeast about 15 miles. Watch for Forest Road 651 on the right; the campground is a few hundred yards in. Paved to the gate; the campground roads and spurs are gravel. About 2 hours 25 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. Supplies are 20 miles away in Flagstaff; the last gas and groceries on the way in are at the I-17 interchange and along Lake Mary Road’s first mile.
Pick the season. Early May to mid-October. June and September are the best months: dry, cool, uncrowded. The monsoon arrives in early July and delivers an afternoon thunderstorm most days through August; mornings are clear. Fire restrictions are common in May and June; call the Coconino hotline (928-226-4607) or ask the host before lighting anything. Nights are in the 40s in June.
Water. Potable water from spigots, but the Forest Service restricts it to registered campers, so this is not a free fill-up stop for the Mormon Lake crowd.
Measure the rig. Trailers over 33 feet and motorhomes over 45 feet are not permitted, and the limit is enforced at check-in. No hookups anywhere; the dump station is why RVers come.
Pick the loop. The outer loop sites back onto open forest and are the ones to reserve; the inner loop is closer to the showers and the traffic that goes with them. The showers are coin-operated and the change machine is not always working, so arrive with quarters and go before dinner when the water is hottest.
Use it as a base. Upper Lake Mary for a kayak or ski-boat day, Ashurst for trout, Mormon Lake’s Dairy Springs and lodge 15 minutes on, Walnut Canyon 25 minutes toward town. It is the obvious stop on the Flagstaff leg of our day trips list for anyone turning a day into a weekend.
Dogs. On leash, always. No horses or pack animals.
Skip it if a shoreline matters more than a shower. Pick Lakeview or Ashurst and come here to dump and rinse off on the way out, or go to Canyon Vista closer to Flagstaff for a smaller, cheaper night in the same pines.
A campground between two man-made lakes
There was no lake here until a lumber company needed one. Walnut Creek drains the Anderson Mesa country southeast of Flagstaff and runs intermittently down to Walnut Canyon, where Sinagua farmers built cliff rooms in the limestone and lived until the 1200s; after them the plateau was Yavapai and Apache range, grazed by their horses and then by Anglo cattle. Flagstaff grew up in the 1880s on the railroad and the sawmill, and the sawmill belonged to the Riordan brothers, whose Arizona Lumber and Timber Company cut the ponderosa for a hundred miles around. The town’s problem was water. In 1904 the company dammed Walnut Creek with an earthen embankment to make a reservoir, and named the result Lower Lake Mary for Mary Riordan, a daughter of the family. The Coconino National Forest followed in 1908, and the road out to the new lake became Lake Mary Road.
The lower lake was shallow and leaky, and Flagstaff kept growing. In 1941 the city built a second, larger dam upstream and created Upper Lake Mary, five miles long when full, which has been the city’s main surface water supply ever since and the lake that Pine Grove’s campers drive four miles to reach. The two lakes are the only real open water on this side of Flagstaff, and they explain the campgrounds: Lakeview on the upper lake, Ashurst on the natural lake to the south, and Pine Grove in the forest between them, placed where the ground was flat and the pines were tall rather than where the water was.
Pine Grove’s own construction date is the one fact we could not pin. The Forest Service developed the Lake Mary Road campgrounds in the postwar decades, as the road was paved toward Mormon Lake and Phoenix families began driving up every summer weekend to a forest 30 degrees cooler than home; Pine Grove’s generous, level spurs suggest a layout from the trailer era rather than the 1930s tent era of Double Springs down the road. What is documented is what came later: a concessionaire took over the road’s campgrounds, Pine Grove’s loops were rebuilt with 16 fully accessible sites, coin showers and a dump station, and half the sites went onto recreation.gov. It became, in effect, the service hub for every camper on Lake Mary Road, which is why the dump station charges non-campers and the water is for guests only.
The forest around it carries the newer story. The ponderosa stand that stretches from Flagstaff to the Rim is the largest in North America, and it has become the focus of the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, the thinning program that has run since 2010 to reduce the kind of crown fire that burned the Rim country in 2002 and 2011. The elk that walk through Pine Grove’s meadow in the evening are grazing a forest the agency is actively trying to open back up. The lakes, meanwhile, rise and fall with the snowpack: Upper Lake Mary was nearly dry in the drought years of the early 2000s and 2020s and full again after wet winters, which decides each summer whether Lakeview has a lakeview.
Why it matters
Pine Grove explains how northern Arizona got its lakes, which is that a sawmill and a city built them, and how the Forest Service built its campgrounds, which is around the roads and the flat ground rather than the water. It also shows what a concessionaire-era campground looks like when done well: accessible sites, a shower, a dump station, and a price a few dollars above the neighbors. For a Scottsdale family the verdict is simple. If your party includes a grandparent, a wheelchair or a trailer that needs a level pad, this is the campground on Lake Mary Road; the lakes are a short drive, and the shower is worth the quarters.