What is Reynolds Creek Campground?
Reynolds Creek comes off the high western face of the Sierra Ancha and crosses SR 288 in a stand of ponderosa pine at 5,250 feet, about 27 miles north of Roosevelt Lake. Beside it, behind a locked gate, the Forest Service keeps a single group campground: two large ramadas, eight picnic tables, a group grill, four steel fire rings and one vault toilet. The creek runs all year, which is rare in this range, and the ground under the pines is flat and shaded. Two trailheads within a quarter mile lead into the Sierra Ancha and Salome wilderness areas and up toward the Aztec Peak fire lookout, and Workman Creek Falls is 2 miles south.
It is a group camp, full stop. Google’s pin and the owner’s old note both suggest a small free campground, and that is wrong: there are no individual sites, no walk-up camping and a $75 nightly fee. For a troop, a club or four families who want the Sierra Ancha to themselves, it is close to perfect. For two people with a tent, Rose Creek or the dispersed sites along FR 487 are the answer.
What you get is a private, shaded, year-round creek between two wilderness areas, with trout, berries, elk and a lookout to climb to. What you do not get is drinking water, trash service, a phone signal or a paved road for the last hour.
How to camp Reynolds Creek right
Reserve it or do not come. $75 a night plus $10 per additional vehicle, by reservation only on recreation.gov or 877-444-6777, 3 days to 12 months ahead. Check-in is 2 p.m., check-out noon, and the gate combination is in your confirmation; print it, because there is no cell service for the last hour. The forest’s 14-day limit applies.
Get there. Shea Boulevard to SR 87 north about 60 miles, SR 188 southeast about 35 miles past Roosevelt Dam to the SR 288 junction, then 27 miles north on SR 288, paved at first and graded gravel for the second half. The site is on the right, signed. From Young it is 20 miles south on gravel. Figure about two hours and fifty minutes from Old Town, the last hour without cell service. There is no water, gas or store between Tonto Basin and Young; the Roosevelt Lake Visitor Center is the last fill-up.
Pick the season. April through November; SR 288 closes under snow and mud in winter. October is the month: the maples and sycamores along the creek turn, the berries at Workman Creek are ripe and the summer storms are done with the road. In July and August the afternoon lightning on these ridges is real; read the monsoon field manual first.
Water and trash. No potable water and no trash service. Treat creek water; pack everything out. The creek is for wading and small trout.
Fire. Only in the four established steel rings, and only when the Tonto is not under restrictions; fires anywhere else draw citations. The 2025 Billy Fire burned the slopes south of here and closed this site for a time; it has reopened, but check the alerts page before you go.
Bears. Present and active. Store all food and trash in vehicles with the windows up.
Hike from camp. Two trailheads within a quarter mile lead into the wilderness areas and up toward the Aztec Peak lookout at about 7,700 feet, a long day with a view over the whole Tonto Basin. Workman Creek Falls is 2 miles south on FR 487 and runs hardest in spring; Parker Creek is the other trailhead on the road.
Dogs. On leash, and inside at night because of the bears.
Skip it if you are not a group. Rose Creek is free and first come a few miles south, FR 487 above the falls has dispersed sites, and Valentine Ridge and Kellner Canyon are the small Tonto campgrounds on the other roads out of Globe. Young, 20 miles north, has a cafe and a gas pump when it is open.
Cliff dwellings, a range war and Abbey’s lookout
The Sierra Ancha is the Western Apache’s Dzil Nteel, Wide Flat Mountain, and before the Apache it was the edge of three worlds. Between about 500 and 950 the range sat where the Mogollon, Hohokam and Sinagua traditions met; around 950 the Salado culture appeared with the Sierra Ancha near the center of a region almost a hundred miles across. Their monument is the Sierra Ancha cliff dwellings, masonry rooms wedged into the most inaccessible canyon walls in the range, which archaeologists call the Anchan tradition. Tree-ring dates on the roof beams put construction at about 1280 and abandonment by 1350, roughly seventy years, and the defensive sites suggest why. The Apache held the range from then until the Army’s campaigns of the 1870s.
The valley at the campground’s back door then produced the bloodiest feud in the American West. From 1882 to 1892 the Graham and Tewksbury families and their allies fought the Pleasant Valley War in the basin around Young, 20 miles north; an estimated 35 to 50 people died, the worst toll of any range war in the country, and the Perkins Store where a posse killed two Graham men in 1887 still stands in Young as a museum. Zane Grey turned it into To the Last Man. The federal government arrived a decade after the last killing: the Tonto National Forest was created in 1905 to protect the watershed above Roosevelt Dam, then under construction at the bottom of the hill, and the Sierra Ancha, which drains straight into the lake, was inside the line from the first day.
Watersheds are why the range got studied and protected early. In 1933 the Forest Service designated the Sierra Ancha Primitive Area, and in the same decade it established the Sierra Ancha Experimental Forest on Workman and Parker creeks to measure how Southwestern mountains shed water under grazing, logging and fire; the research station still sits a few miles south of Reynolds Creek, and its gauges on Workman Creek have one of the longest records in the Southwest. Asbestos was mined in the range between Asbestos and Zimmerman points, and the Depression and war years brought small timber cuts and the road that became SR 288. When Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964, the Sierra Ancha was one of the original areas it protected, 20,850 acres of canyons and cliff dwellings with Aztec Peak, 7,733 feet, on its edge. The Salome Wilderness to the west followed in 1984, which left the SR 288 corridor, Reynolds Creek and the experimental forest as the thin strip of ordinary national forest between the two.
The lookout on Aztec Peak is the campground’s literary footnote. In the 1970s Edward Abbey took a season as the fire lookout there, one of several towers he worked in Arizona, and wrote about watching storms build over the Tonto Basin from a cab you can still walk to on the trail that leaves from near the campground. The group site itself is the Forest Service’s modest later work: ramadas, tables, rings and a gate on the flattest piece of year-round creek on this side of the range, reservable because a free creekside camp this good would never be empty.
The newest mark on the landscape is fire. The Billy Fire, started by lightning on July 9, 2025 about 15 miles south of Young, burned 27,574 acres of the Sierra Ancha before it was contained on September 15. Reynolds Creek was closed while the slopes to its south burned and has since reopened; the burned ground will send mud down the creek after storms for a few summers and loose rock onto the trails for longer.
Why it matters
The Sierra Ancha is the range that explains why the Tonto exists: it was set aside not for recreation but for the water it sends to Roosevelt Lake and the Valley, and the experimental forest on Workman Creek is where the government learned how that water behaves. The cliff dwellings, the range war and Abbey’s lookout are the human layers on top. For a Scottsdale group the verdict is simple: if you can fill a troop or four families, this is one of the best-sited private camps in the forest, three hours out, with a creek, a waterfall and a wilderness on each side; if you cannot, do not drive up to find a locked gate.