What is Powell Springs Campground?
Powell Springs is a small, old campground that the Civilian Conservation Corps built in the 1930s where Hackberry Wash comes down out of the Black Hills, between the Prescott Valley side of the range and the drop to the Verde Valley. There are 11 sites under tall ponderosa pines, with the stone-and-steel bones of a CCC camp: picnic tables, fire pits and pedestal grills, a single vault toilet, and nothing else. No water, no trash service, no host, no fee.
That bareness is the point. At about 5,300 feet it is high enough to be 15 to 20 degrees cooler than Scottsdale, the wash runs after storms and in a wet spring, and the oak and riparian brush along it bring in birds and the occasional deer. Because nobody is collecting money, nobody is turning people away either, so the crowd is small and self-selecting: people who want a quiet night in the pines and are willing to carry their own water in and their own garbage out. The nearest “town” is Cherry, a cluster of old mining-era houses up the road with no services.
What you get is the quietest free pine campground within two hours of the Valley, on a dirt road a sedan can manage when it is dry. What you do not get is anything serviced: no tap, no dumpster, no reservation, no ranger, and no guarantee of a site on a nice spring Saturday. For a tour of the alternatives, the day-trips guide covers the Prescott side of the range.
How to camp it right
Pay nothing, reserve nothing. It is free and first come, first served, with the Prescott National Forest’s 14-day limit in any 30 days. There is no fee tube and no host, so there is also no one to ask whether a site is open; you drive in and look. Check-in is after 2 p.m. and check-out by noon, and quiet hours run 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Get there. Take Loop 101 north and west to I-17, then I-17 north about 75 miles past Cordes Junction to exit 278 for SR 169 (signed for Dewey and Cherry). Go west on SR 169 about five and a half miles to Cherry Road, turn north, and follow the graded dirt road 4.5 miles to the campground on the left. From Old Town that is about 1 hour 45 minutes with no traffic. The Forest Service’s own directions come from the Prescott side (SR 69 to Dewey, then SR 169 east 9.5 miles to Cherry Road). Cherry Road is fine for a passenger car when it is dry. When it is wet it is not, and after real rain or snow the Forest Service closes the campground. The loop is short and the sites close together, so a trailer longer than a small teardrop will struggle.
Pick the season. Open year-round on paper. Spring and fall are the sweet spot. Summer is pleasant up here, though monsoon storms send water down the wash and can close the road. Winter nights drop into the teens and the site closes whenever the road ices; call the Verde Ranger Station at 928-567-4121 before a December-to-March trip.
Water and trash. There is no drinking water. Bring a gallon per person per day plus what you need for cooking and the dog. Fill up in Dewey or Camp Verde on the way in. There is no garbage service; everything you bring comes home with you.
Fire. Fires only in the provided pits, and only when the forest is not under restrictions, which it often is from May into July. Check the Prescott National Forest alerts page before you load firewood.
Arrive early, pick the back sites. Eleven sites and no reservations means a popular spring weekend can fill by Friday evening. The sites farthest from the road along the wash are the quietest and shadiest. Cherry Road’s pavement-ends stretch has a few informal pullouts if you are stuck.
Dogs. Allowed on a six-foot leash, the rule across the forest’s campgrounds.
Skip it if you need water or a host. Lynx Lake is about 25 minutes west with both, Potato Patch is over Mingus Mountain, and Yavapai Campground at Granite Basin is the other CCC campground on the forest, with a lake and a fee.
The camp that rebuilt the road to Camp Verde
The ridges between Dewey and the Verde Valley were Yavapai country, the range of the Wipukepa and Yavapé bands, until the Army arrived in the 1860s. In 1871 the government gathered Yavapai and Tonto Apache families onto the Rio Verde Reserve near Camp Verde, where they dug irrigation ditches and came close to feeding themselves. Contractors who wanted the supply business complained, and in March 1875 the reserve was closed and its people marched about 180 miles to San Carlos in winter. More than 100 died on the walk. The country they left filled quickly with prospectors.
Cherry was one of the camps that resulted. Gold showed in the Black Hills, and a post office opened at Cherry on March 3, 1884, serving the Federal, Bunker, Logan, Sunnybrook and Gold Bullion mines. At its peak about 400 people lived and worked there; the cemetery, started in 1886, holds graves from the late 1800s into the early 1900s. Fourteen years after the post office opened, on May 10, 1898, the General Land Office drew the Prescott Forest Reserve around the mountains; it became a National Forest in 1907 and swallowed the Verde National Forest, including Cherry Road, on July 1, 1908.
The campground belongs to a later chapter. When the Civilian Conservation Corps came to Yavapai County in 1933, it set up a string of camps across the new national forest: a base at what is now the old county fairgrounds that built Yavapai Campground at Granite Basin, camps at Lower Wolf Creek and Indian Creek, stonework at Hazlett Hollow near Crown King. Powell Springs Camp on Cherry Road was the base for rebuilding the old road from the Prescott side down to Camp Verde, and the young men stationed there built the campground as they went: the stone pedestal grills, the fire pits and the loop that still fit eleven tents and not much more. The corps ran for nine years in the county and spent about $44 million locally before it was abolished in 1942 as the war began. A chain set in the ground here, purpose unknown, is one of the few artifacts of the camp itself.
Cherry’s post office closed on March 15, 1943, and the camp slid into the half-life of a mining ghost town, which in its case means a cluster of old houses, a few of them still occupied as retirement or vacation homes, and no store, no gas and no services. Powell Springs, with no fee to collect and no water system to maintain, was simply left alone, which is why it is the one CCC campground in the area that still feels like one: no paving, no host site, no reservation board, the original stonework under the original pines. Lynx Lake and Granite Basin got the investment; Cherry Road got quiet.
Why it matters
Powell Springs is what a Depression-era campground looks like when nobody improves it, and that turns out to be the thing people want from it. The CCC built hundreds of these across Arizona’s forests; most have been rebuilt, paved, metered and put on a reservation system, and the handful that were not are the free ones. It also sits on the seam between two Arizonas, the Prescott mining country and the Verde Valley the Yavapai were marched out of, and a drive down Cherry Road toward Camp Verde follows the road the corpsmen rebuilt. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is simple: if you can carry your own water and your own trash, this is the quietest free night in the pines within two hours of Old Town, and the catch is that you cannot reserve it.