What is Riggs Flat Campground?
The Pinaleño Mountains rise from the Gila valley near Safford to 10,720 feet at Mount Graham, the greatest vertical relief of any range in Arizona, and the Swift Trail climbs almost all of it: a 35-mile road that starts in creosote and ends in Engelmann spruce, 22 miles paved and 13 dirt, with pullouts over three states and switchbacks that discourage anything long. Near the top, past the Columbine Visitor Center, Forest Roads 803 and 287 run another 5 miles through meadow and old-growth to Riggs Flat Lake, an 11-acre reservoir built by Game and Fish in 1957 for trout fishing, at 8,600 feet.
The campground wraps the lake in fir, spruce and aspen: about 30 sites, each with a table and fire ring, vault toilets, a small boat ramp, and drinking water from a seasonal system. The lake is stocked with rainbow, brown and brook trout through summer and allows boats with a single electric trolling motor. Short walks reach overlooks of West Peak, the Aravaipa valley and the Galiuros. On a July afternoon it is 40 degrees cooler than Safford. Two other campgrounds break the drive up: Shannon, at 9,025 feet about 22 miles in, and Cunningham, across from the visitor center at 29 miles with a public horse corral; both are $15 a night, vault toilets, no water. The summit itself, with its observatories and the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel’s refuge, is closed to the public; the lake is the end of the public road.
What you get is the most alpine campground in southern Arizona, with a lake, water and bears. What you do not get is a reservation, a short drive, or a road a long trailer should attempt.
How to camp it right
Pay on site, plan three nights. $20 a night single, $40 double, first come, first served, cash or check. Day use at the lake is $8 per vehicle or $10 per week; the Coronado annual pass covers it. Two vehicles and ten people per site, 14-day limit, no shooting. The ranger station at 928-428-4150 can tell you how full it is. Given the drive, make it a three-night trip or do not go.
Get there. Take US 60 east through Superior, Miami and Globe, then US 70 east to Safford, about 165 miles and 2 hours 50 minutes. Go 8 miles south on US 191 to the Swift Trail (AZ 366), turn right, and climb: 22 miles of good pavement with hairpins, a gate at the pavement’s end, then 13 miles of graded dirt to Columbine, then 5 more miles of forest road to the lake. Allow 90 minutes for the mountain and about 260 minutes total from Old Town. The Forest Service recommends high clearance for the dirt and advises against trailers over 22 feet; the first-come sites have short pull-ins.
Pick the season. April 15 to November 14. The gate at the end of the pavement closes November 15 to April 15, and a late spring snow can keep it shut into May. Midweek in June or September the lake loop is half empty; Fourth of July and Labor Day fill it by Thursday. Afternoon lightning arrives most days in July and August, usually by two, and nights are in the 30s all summer.
Water. Potable water on a seasonal system that the Forest Service shuts in cold weather and that has been off during our visits; bring jugs regardless.
Camp by the rules. Black bears are regular. Food and trash go in bear-proof containers or a closed vehicle with the windows up. Camp on the lake side for the view, the back side for shade and quiet.
Fish and paddle. Rainbows, browns and brook trout, stocked through summer; an Arizona license is required. Fish early from the dam with small spinners. A canoe with an electric motor is the only powered boat allowed; nothing louder goes on the water.
Dogs. On leash.
Skip it if the distance is the problem. Arcadia is the lower, nearer Mount Graham night at the end of the pavement. Spencer Canyon on Mount Lemmon is the sky-island campground an hour closer to Scottsdale, and Big Lake in the White Mountains is the trout lake with reservations. For the night sky, which is the other reason to be at 8,600 feet, see the stargazing guide.
The road a forest supervisor got his name on
Mount Graham was a mountain with people on it long before it had a road. Dead Douglas firs near the top date to 1102; the Western Apache called it Dził Nchaa Si’an, Big Seated Mountain, held its heights against rival tribes and buried their own there, and the San Carlos Apache still regard the summit as sacred ground. Spanish parties searching for the Seven Cities of Cibola passed its foot in the 1500s. In 1846, during the Mexican-American War, Lieutenant William Emory of the Army’s Topographical Engineers put a name on it for his colleague James Duncan Graham, and the name stuck in English.
Anglo settlement in the Gila valley began in 1874, and the mountain promptly went to war. During the Apache campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s, Army signalmen hiked up from Fort Grant at the southern base to Heliograph Peak, 10,002 feet, and flashed mirror messages across the territory. Settlers arrived in numbers in the early 1880s, and the forest that the Apache had defended became lumber: sawmills went up on the slopes, summer homes clustered around the mill camps, and a wagon road for hauling timber down the mountain became the line the modern road would follow.
The road came in pieces. In the 1920s the government began improving it, and by about 1927 a graded route reached Arcadia, named the Swift Trail for Thomas T. Swift, supervisor of what was then the Crook National Forest. The 1930s did the rest. Civilian Conservation Corps camps at Treasure Park and Columbine in summer and Arcadia and Noon Creek in winter pushed the road up the mountain and built the campgrounds, trails and buildings the forest still uses; Noon Creek, which the road passes, is named for how far a rider could get on horseback in half a day. The Crook National Forest was folded into the Coronado in 1953 and the Safford Ranger District created. Game and Fish dammed Riggs Flat for a trout lake in 1957, and in 1960 the state took the road into its highway system as State Route 366, 22 paved miles and the rest gravel, a division that has not changed since.
The summit’s last chapter is the contested one. The Mount Graham red squirrel, a subspecies found nowhere else, lives in the spruce-fir forest above the lake, about 400 of them by one 1990s count, and the summit is also one of the darkest, highest observatory sites in the lower 48. Construction of the Mount Graham International Observatory began in 1989 over formal opposition from the San Carlos Apache Tribal Council and lawsuits from the squirrel’s defenders; the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope and the Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope opened in 1993, and the Large Binocular Telescope saw first light in 2004 and ran both of its 8.4-meter mirrors together in 2008. Safford switched to low-intensity streetlights so the sky would stay dark. The road above Riggs Flat was closed to the public as a squirrel refuge, which is why the lake, and not the summit, is where the public drive ends.
Why it matters
Mount Graham is Arizona’s sky-island argument in one place: a sacred Apache mountain, a timber road built by Depression labor, a 1957 fishing lake, and a summit where a university’s telescopes and an endangered squirrel were fought over for a decade. It also shows what elevation does in this state; 7,000 feet of climbing takes you from creosote to Engelmann spruce in 35 miles, and the campground at the top is 40 degrees cooler than the town at the bottom. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is firm: four and a half hours each way is only worth it for three nights, in June or September, with jugs of water and a canoe with an electric motor, and then it is the coolest campsite in southern Arizona.