What is Pinery Canyon Campground?
Forest Road 42 is the one road across the Chiricahuas. It leaves SR 181 at the gate of Chiricahua National Monument, climbs Pinery Canyon through oak, juniper and then ponderosa pine to Onion Saddle at about 7,600 feet, and drops down Cave Creek Canyon to Portal, some 30-odd miles of dirt in all. About 11 miles up, roughly a mile below the saddle, a short spur leads to Pinery Canyon Campground: by the old guidebooks’ count four or five sites with tables and fire rings, a toilet, shade and no water, at about 7,000 feet. No fee is posted. It was built for people doing exactly what you would be doing, breaking the crossing in cool air.
The honest caveat is that the Forest Service does not list it among its Chiricahua recreation sites any more, and no official page gives a site count, a fee or a season. Campers still report using it, and the forest’s general rules apply: 14 days, first come, pack it out. If the camp is full, closed or simply gone to seed, the same road offers free dispersed camping at dozens of pullouts inside the forest boundary, some by the creek under pines, and Rustler Park, the developed campground at 8,500 feet, is 2.5 miles up Forest Road 42D from the saddle. The views on the way up, back across the Sulphur Springs Valley to the Dragoons, are the reason the road exists.
What you get is a free night in real mountain forest at 7,000 feet, four hours from Scottsdale, with the best birding range in the state on either side. What you do not get is certainty about anything: not the sites, not the toilet, not the road after rain.
How to camp it right
Expect no fee and no host. None posted; first come, first served, 14-day limit. Confirm the campground’s status with the Douglas Ranger District, 520-388-8436, before you build a trip around it, and have the dispersed pullouts as the plan if it is gone.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east to Willcox, then SR 186 southeast 32 miles and SR 181 east toward the monument; just before the entrance, FR 42 turns off. The first several miles cross private land, are not county-maintained and are, by every account, badly washboarded with deep ruts; inside the forest the grading improves but the road is steep, narrow and slow. Count on 35 to 45 minutes for the 11 miles and about 255 minutes total from Old Town. High clearance is strongly recommended, trailers do not belong, and the Forest Service caps vehicles on FR 42 at 41 feet. Willcox is the last gas and groceries.
Pick the season. Roughly April to November. FR 42 closes for snow and becomes mud or ice after storms at this elevation; call before you go in spring or fall. July and August bring daily monsoon storms to the crest, which are a show from the saddle and a problem on the road.
Water. None. Carry it from Willcox, a gallon a person a day, more for the dog.
Fire. Restrictions are common from April into the monsoon on a range that burned almost entirely in 2011; bring a stove and assume the ring is decoration.
Bears. Black bears range the whole mountain. Lock up food, and leave the site cleaner than you found it; the Forest Service closes dispersed areas that get abused.
Dogs. Fine on leash.
Use the road as the trip. Go up from the monument side in the morning, cross Onion Saddle, detour to Rustler Park for the Crest Trail and the view off the east face, then drop into Cave Creek Canyon for the afternoon light on the cliffs. Allow two hours for the dirt and a paper map for the junctions near the saddle.
Skip it if you want a sure thing. Bonita Canyon at the bottom of the same road reserves on recreation.gov and has water and flush toilets; Sunny Flat and Stewart on the Portal side have water and the canyon’s birds; Herb Martyr is the free, high, dead-end alternative on that side.
The canyon that built Tombstone
The Chiricahuas have been inhabited for as long as anywhere in Arizona. Clovis hunters left the earliest traces in the valley north of Douglas; the Cochise culture, the pre-pottery people of 3000 to 200 BCE, was defined from sites around the range; Mogollon farmers followed. By the time the Spanish wrote anything down, the mountains were the stronghold of the Chiricahua Apache, the people of Cochise and, later, Geronimo, who used the range’s springs, passes and timber for two centuries.
The Americans came through Apache Pass at the range’s north end, where the Butterfield stage needed the spring and Cochise’s people disputed it. The Army built Fort Bowie there in 1862, and by 1865 its troops were cutting timber in Pine and Pinery canyons for the post, the first logging in the range and the reason this canyon has the name it does. The real cutting came with the mines. Silver at Tombstone and the reopened copper mines at Bisbee, both from 1878, needed lumber and mine timbers by the trainload, and the Chiricahuas were the nearest big forest; Pinery Canyon’s sawmills fed both towns through the 1880s while the Army ran its last campaign against the Chiricahua Apache from Fort Bowie. Geronimo surrendered in 1886, and the Chiricahua Apache were removed from Arizona to Florida, Alabama and finally Oklahoma. Rustler Park, above the saddle, is named for the men who hid stolen stock in its meadow around the turn of the century while the brands healed.
Protection arrived in two forms. The Chiricahuas were set aside as a federal forest reserve in 1902 and became the Chiricahua National Forest in 1908, later consolidated with the Dragoon and Peloncillo forests into the Coronado, whose Douglas Ranger District still runs the range. At the bottom of the Pinery Canyon road, the Erickson family’s Faraway Ranch promoted the hoodoos of Bonita Canyon until President Coolidge proclaimed Chiricahua National Monument on April 18, 1924. The Forest Service graded FR 42 over Onion Saddle as the back way between the monument and the ranches and birding lodges of Cave Creek Canyon, and sometime in the middle of the century built the small campground a mile below the saddle for people breaking the crossing. We could not find the year it was built or the year the forest stopped listing it; the sites, the toilet and the absence of a fee are what the older guidebooks and recent campers agree on.
The modern event is fire. The Horseshoe 2 Fire started near Portal on May 8, 2011, human-caused, and burned 223,000 acres, most of the Chiricahuas, before it was done. It destroyed the campground at Rustler Park, which the Forest Service rebuilt with shade canopies over the sites because the trees were gone, and it ran through the high forest on both sides of Onion Saddle in patches. Fire ecologists report weak conifer regeneration across the burn, so the Pinery Canyon pines you camp under are, in places, the survivors of a forest that will not come back in anyone’s lifetime. The campground itself survived, in the half-abandoned state it is in today.
Why it matters
Pinery Canyon is a reminder that the Forest Service’s inventory is not the same as the forest. The campground is real, free and old, and it has dropped off the official map without being closed, which happens across the Coronado as budgets shrink and fire remakes the ground. The canyon also explains the Chiricahuas: the timber that built Tombstone and Bisbee came down this road, the Apache who held the range were marched out past its mouth, and the fire that remade it started on the other side of the saddle. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is practical. Drive FR 42 for the crossing, with high clearance and a full water jug, and treat the little camp as a place to stop if it is there. Book Bonita Canyon or Sunny Flat if you need to know where you are sleeping.