What are Reef Townsite and Ramsey Vista?
The Huachuca Mountains stand over Sierra Vista like a wall, and Carr Canyon Road is the one road that goes up the wall: about 7.7 miles from SR 92 to the top, the first 1.4 paved and the remaining 6.3 miles a dirt grade of tight switchbacks with no guardrails that gains 2,500 feet past the cliffs of the Carr Reef. At the top, in ponderosa pine and oak at 7,200 feet, is Reef Townsite, where a mining camp called Reef worked tungsten and gold from the late 1890s into the 1950s. The land came back to the public in 1970 and the Forest Service built the campground in 1988 directly on the town: 16 sites with tables and tent pads set inside the outlines of old cabin foundations, a reservable group area for 50, vault toilets, and a 0.75-mile interpretive loop past the mill foundations and the old water system. A mile further, at the end of the road and 7,400 feet, Ramsey Vista has a smaller loop of sites, a horse corral, and the trailheads for Comfort Spring and Carr Peak.
Carr Peak is the reason to be up here. The trail climbs about 2.8 miles and roughly 2,000 feet through aspen regrowth in the old burn to a 9,220-foot summit with a 360-degree view that includes Mexico, the San Pedro Valley and the Miller Peak Wilderness next door. In midsummer the campgrounds run 20 degrees cooler than the valley and 35 cooler than Scottsdale.
What you get is the highest drive-to camping in southern Arizona’s border ranges, with a ghost town under your tent and a 9,000-foot peak out the back. What you do not get is water, a reservable individual site, a road a trailer can climb, or a season longer than April to November.
How to camp it right
Pay on site. First come, first served, cash or check at the board. Ramsey Vista is $15 single, $30 double. The Reef group area is $45 on recreation.gov. The Forest Service does not publish Reef’s individual-site rate online; bring cash for a comparable fee and read the board. Interagency senior and access passes discount the holder’s own site. The limit is 14 days, with quiet hours 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east past Tucson and Benson to exit 302, SR 90, south 25 miles through Sierra Vista, then SR 92 south about 8 miles to Carr Canyon Road on the right. The paved stretch passes the Carr Canyon picnic area and Carr House; the pavement ends at 1.4 miles and the switchbacks begin. Allow a slow half hour for the dirt, drive it in daylight the first time, and go down in low gear. About 215 minutes from Old Town in total. The Forest Service recommends high clearance beyond the Clark Spring trailhead and prohibits vehicles over 20 feet and trailers over 12 feet past the picnic area; the switchbacks physically will not take them.
Pick the season. April through November; the road is closed about December 15 to March 15, longer in a snowy year. June is the sweet spot, when Sierra Vista is 95 and the Reef is 75; July and August bring afternoon lightning to the summit most days, so read the monsoon manual and be off Carr Peak by noon.
Water. None at either campground. Fill in Sierra Vista, which the Forest Service names as the nearest source.
Pick your camp. Reef Townsite is the prettier campground, with tent pads inside the old cabin foundations and the mill ruins a short walk away; Ramsey Vista has the trailhead, the corral and the views east over the San Pedro Valley.
Fire and bears. Black bears are present; store food in the vehicle. Fire restrictions are common in May and June before the monsoon.
The hike. Carr Peak at dawn: 2.8 miles and 2,000 feet from the lot outside Ramsey Vista, the last 0.3 mile on the Carr Peak Spur. The trail crosses the 1977 and 2011 burn scars, so there is less shade than the pines around camp suggest. Three to four hours round trip. The Reef Townsite loop is a 0.75-mile walk through the ruins, and the Carr House nature trail at the bottom of the road is free.
Dogs. On leash in camp; allowed on the Carr Peak Trail.
Skip it if the road makes you nervous or the rig is long: Parker Canyon Lake is paved all the way and an hour away. For the Huachucas on foot, the Miller Peak backcountry is next door; Cochise Stronghold across the valley is the granite alternative at lower elevation.
The town that mined the Reef and left its foundations
The Huachucas were Chiricahua Apache mountains, a range they held against rival tribes and then against the Army, which planted Fort Huachuca at the north end in 1877 to control the passes to Mexico. What brought Anglos up Carr Canyon was not the Apache war but silver 20 miles east. Tombstone needed timber for buildings and for the steam engines in its mines, and the band of quartzite cliffs along the Huachucas’ eastern front, the Carr Reef, had pine on top of it. In January 1879 Dick Gird, the assayer who had partnered with Ed Schieffelin in founding Tombstone, opened the Reef’s first sawmill. James Carr ran another sawmill on the peak that now carries his name, and in 1881 he filed a claim for the Huachuca Mill Toll Road, the original route up the mountain and the ancestor of the switchbacks you drive today. I could not find a construction date for the modern Forest Road 368.
Tombstone faded in the mid-1880s and so did the timber trade, and the Reef turned to the rock under the trees. The first gold and silver claims were filed in 1893. About 1899 investors spent $150,000 on a stamp mill east of the townsite; it ran six weeks before technical failures shut it down. A second mill went up in 1903 and a third in 1916, and in the early 1900s the camp had a post office and about 100 miners working for the Exposed Reef Mining Company, living in cabins that the first postmaster’s wife, Alice Walker, described as primitive construction with mud filling the chinks. The Forest Service adds tungsten to the gold and silver, which fits: tungsten was the metal the First World War wanted, and the 1916 mill came in on cue. The Reef never boomed and never quite died; miners came back on and off for half a century, and only in the mid-1950s did they stop returning. By then the buildings were gone and the foundations were what remained.
The land came back into public ownership in 1970, and in 1988 the Forest Service did something unusual with it. Rather than clear the site, it built Reef Townsite Campground on the town, setting tent pads inside the old cabin outlines and laying a 0.75-mile interpretive loop past the ore-mill footing and the remains of the water system. The high country burned in 1977 and again in 2011, and the Carr Peak Trail climbs through both scars, where aspen has taken much of the ground the pines held; the campgrounds themselves sit in surviving forest. Ramsey Vista, with its corral and its trailheads, is the newer and plainer of the two, and the end of the road.
Why it matters
The Reef is the clearest place in southern Arizona to see how a mountain gets used in sequence: Apache stronghold, then sawmill for a silver town, then a gold camp that limped through three mills and a world war, then public land, then a campground that keeps the camp’s floor plan. It also explains Carr Canyon Road itself, which exists because a sawmill owner needed a toll road in 1881 and nobody since has had a reason to make it wider. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is this: if you have a high-clearance vehicle and a tent, the Reef in June is the coolest campsite you can drive to in the border ranges, and sleeping inside a 1900s cabin foundation is the kind of detail no other Forest Service campground offers.