What is Potato Patch Campground?
Where SR 89A tops out on Mingus Mountain between Jerome and Prescott Valley, the highway passes a picnic area on one side and, on the other, the entrance to Potato Patch. The name is a leftover from a homesteader’s garden on this cool, flat saddle at 7,200 feet between the Mingus summit and the Woodchute Wilderness. The campground is 41 sites in two loops of ponderosa pine and oak: Loop A, 28 single sites and one double, non-electric, each with a level tent pad, paved parking, a table and a fire ring with a grill; and Loop B, 12 sites with 30-amp electric hookups where tents are not allowed. Three composting toilets, two of them accessible, potable water at hydrants, garbage service and a Forest Service host round it out.
That electric loop is the point. National forest campgrounds in Arizona almost never have power, and with the hookups at Mingus Mountain Campground across the road still dead from a 2024 lightning strike, Potato Patch is the closest place to Scottsdale where you can run an air conditioner in the pines without a state park reservation. In July, when the Valley is at 110, the summit runs in the 70s and nights need a blanket.
Across the highway, Mingus Lake is a small pond stocked with rainbow trout. Woodchute Trail No. 102 climbs from near the campground into the 5,923-acre Woodchute Wilderness for a long view north toward the Peaks, and a segment of the Great Western Trail passes next to the loops. What you get is pavement to the pad, power if you book it, water, a host and cool air. What you do not get is the cliff-edge view, the hang gliders, a shower, a dump station or any firewood for sale.
How to camp Potato Patch right
Book the loop you can use. $14 a night non-electric, $18 with electric, $5 per extra vehicle, $28 for the group site. Most sites on recreation.gov or 1-877-444-6777; some held first come, and midweek in May, September and October you can usually drive up. Exact change for the self-pay kiosk if you arrive without a booking. Senior and Access passes are half price. 14-day limit in 30 days anywhere on the forest. Loop B is electric and RV-only; tents go in Loop A, and the outer edge of A, where the sites back onto open forest, is the best of it.
Get there. About 2 hours 20 minutes by either route. With a trailer, take Loop 101 north to I-17, north to exit 278 (SR 169) at Cordes Junction, west to SR 69, briefly north, then SR 89A east about 12 miles up the Prescott Valley face of Mingus to the summit; the entrance is on the left on FR 106, directly across from the Summit Picnic Area. In a car you can instead take I-17 to Camp Verde, SR 260 to Cottonwood, and 89A up through Jerome, 15 miles of tight switchbacks with the best views and the worst shoulders in the state; the turnoff is then on your right. There is no dirt to drive; the campground road and the pads are paved. Combined vehicle length is limited to 40 feet.
Pick the season. May 1 to October 31. Summer is the reason to come; October brings oak color and cold nights. Expect frost in May and October and afternoon lightning most days from mid-June to mid-September; this summit is exposed, so pitch early and spend the hot hours in Jerome, 20 minutes down the hill, where parking is easier at 2 p.m. than at noon. See monsoon if that is new.
Water. Hydrants for drinking water only; filling RV tanks is prohibited and the host enforces it. No dump station; the nearest is at Dead Horse Ranch in Cottonwood. Fill tanks before you climb.
Fire. Only in the rings, and only when restrictions allow; May and June are usually restricted. No firewood or ice is sold on the mountain and gathering is not allowed, so bring wood from Cottonwood or Prescott Valley.
Walk and fish. Cross 89A to Mingus Lake at dusk for the trout and the quiet; anglers 10 and older need a state license. Woodchute Trail No. 102 leaves from near the campground into the wilderness, and the half-mile drive up to the Mingus launch overlook gives you the sunset view your campground does not have.
Dogs. Six-foot leash or cage, attended at all times. No OHVs in the campground, no fireworks anywhere on the forest.
Skip it if you want the view. The hang-glider overlook over the Verde Valley is at Mingus Mountain Campground a half mile away; showers and a dump station are at Dead Horse Ranch, 20 miles down the hill, and Lynx Lake outside Prescott has a bigger lake and a store. Visit Tuzigoot on the way up or down; the Sinagua pueblo on its hill above the Verde is the view from the summit made close.
The mountain that fed a copper camp its timber
Mingus Mountain is the high point of the Black Hills, 7,818 feet, and to the Yavapai it is Hwa:lkyanana. They hunted its slopes and farmed the Verde below, in sight of the Sinagua pueblos at Tuzigoot and along the river that were occupied until about 1400 and empty when the Spanish passed. The mountain’s English name is disputed between two historians: Marshall Trimble credits the brothers Joseph and Jacob Mingus, who settled in the 1880s and ran a sawmill near its base, while Terrance Stone credits William Mingus, a prospector who worked the mountain in the 1870s and died in 1911. Either way the name belongs to the mining years.
Those years began on the north face. Copper claims were filed in 1876, the United Verde Copper Company formed in 1883 and named its camp Jerome for a company secretary, and after a bust in 1884 William A. Clark, the Montana copper king, bought the properties in 1888 and made Jerome one of the great copper towns of the West, more than 10,000 people in the 1920s on a hillside so steep the jail slid downhill. A mine that size eats a forest. The pine, oak and manzanita of Mingus and the ridge to its north were cut for mine timbers, fuel and lumber, and the north side of that ridge got a wooden chute to send logs down toward Jerome, which is why the ridge is Woodchute Mountain and the wilderness is the Woodchute Wilderness. The homesteader who planted potatoes in the summit saddle was farming the one flat, cool, watered spot on a mountain otherwise given to logging and mules.
The federal government stepped in while the trees were still falling. The Prescott Forest Reserve was proclaimed in 1898 to protect the Black Hills watershed, and it became Prescott National Forest in 1908; the saddle, the potato patch and the remaining pines were inside it. The road came next. The state built State Route 79 from Prescott over Mingus to Clarkdale in 1927, paved the Jerome-to-Cottonwood side in 1935 and the whole route by 1938; it was renumbered US 89A in 1941, became SR 89A in 1993, and the Jerome-Clarkdale-Cottonwood stretch was named a historic road on May 13, 1992. The summit became a place to stop, with the picnic area on one side and, in time, the campground on the other; the Forest Service’s pages do not record when Potato Patch was built or when the electric loop was added, and the Mingus Lookout complex at the top is on the National Register.
Jerome’s end made the mountain’s recreation. Phelps Dodge, which had bought the United Verde from the Clarks in 1935, shut the mine in 1953, and the town fell below 100 people; the Jerome Historical Society formed the same year, the Douglas Mansion became a state park in the 1960s and the town was named a National Historic Landmark in 1967. The ghost town that came back as an arts town is the reason a campground on the summit above it stays full on summer weekends. In 1984 Congress made the logged-over ridge to the north the 5,923-acre Woodchute Wilderness, and the pines have been growing back for a century.
Why it matters
Potato Patch is a Forest Service campground on a mountain that a copper mine once treated as a woodlot, and the fact that it is cool, green and quiet now is the whole story of the national forests in one saddle: the reserve of 1898 saved what Jerome had not yet cut. For the Valley it is also the simplest answer to the hardest summer question, where to take a trailer to sleep in pines without a dirt road or a state park lottery. The verdict for a Scottsdale camper: book Loop B if you have a plug to use and Loop A if you do not, fill the tanks in Cottonwood, spend the hot hours in Jerome, and take the view from the other campground.