What is Rim Campground?
Where SR 260 crests the Mogollon Rim about 31 miles east of Payson, Forest Road 300 leaves it to the west, across from the Mogollon Rim Visitor Center. One paved mile in, a loop road turns off into flat ponderosa forest, and that is Rim Campground: 26 sites in two loops of 13 at roughly 7,500 feet, each with a fire ring, grill and table, with accessible vault toilets, trash service and a host from May through the first weekend of October. The design is the same as Mogollon four miles farther on: parallel pull-offs about 40 feet long along the loop road, no spurs, which keeps it simple and keeps it $18.
It is not on the Rim edge and it is not on the lake. What it has is position. It is the first campground you reach, the only one on this road you can get to without gravel, and the one where sites 1 to 13 are still open at dusk on an ordinary Friday. The Rim Top Trailhead, start of the 4.3-mile Rim Lakes Vista Trail and a trailhead for the General Crook Trail, is a few minutes back toward the highway; the first overlook, with the whole Tonto Basin and the Mazatzals laid out below, is a short walk from the lot. Woods Canyon Lake and its store are 3 miles farther out FR 300.
What you get is the quickest real Rim camping from the Valley, about 130 minutes from Old Town, on pavement the whole way. What you do not get is reliable drinking water, a view from camp or silence: the highway hums faintly at night. For a first Rim night, or a Friday you could not leave town until five, that is a good trade.
How to camp Rim Campground right
Book the back loop or gamble on the front. $18 a night for up to eight people and one vehicle, $12 per extra vehicle. Sites 14 to 26 are on recreation.gov, and that loop sits a little deeper in the trees, away from the highway. Sites 1 to 13 are first come, first served and often still open on a Friday evening outside holiday weekends; pay the host or the fee tube on arrival.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, 75 miles to Payson. Turn east on SR 260 and drive about 31 miles, through Christopher Creek and up the grade. At the top, turn left on Forest Road 300; the campground is 1 mile in on the right. All paved.
Use it as the Friday fallback. Leave Scottsdale after work and you can be in a first-come site by nine without touching gravel, then move to Aspen or a dispersed spot farther out FR 300 in the morning if you want to.
Bring water anyway. Assume none. The Forest Service page says both that potable water is not available and that drinking water is an amenity, and recreation.gov says it is there. Carry what you need in jugs; Sharp Creek on SR 260 on the way up has spigots.
Size the rig. Tents, pop-ups, short trailers and small motorhomes are fine. A long fifth-wheel is not the right rig here, and left-side slide-outs open onto the road.
Pick the season. Generally May 1 to Columbus Day weekend, conditions permitting; FR 300 closes with snow and generally reopens in April. June and September are best. Nights are cold in every month of the season.
Walk the edge in the morning. The Rim Top Trailhead is the east end of the Vista Trail; the first overlook is a few hundred yards in and is where you take the photo. Afternoon lightning in July and August is a daily monsoon event on the Rim, and the edge is a bad place for it.
Dogs. Leashed and attended at all times; nuisance dogs can be asked to leave without a refund.
Skip it if you want the lake at the door or the Rim edge from your tent. Mogollon has water and the west end of the Vista Trail; Aspen has the lake and a spur for your trailer.
The highway that made the Rim a weekend
For most of its history the top of the Rim was hard to reach from anywhere. Western Apache bands used it as summer range, and the Tonto Apache and Yavapai climbed up from the basin below to hunt and gather. When the Army came in the 1870s, it came along the edge rather than up it: from 1872 General George Crook had a supply road cut along the top of the Rim between Fort Whipple, Fort Verde and Fort Apache, and the first wagons crossed in 1874. FR 300 follows that line west from the campground, and the Rim Top Trailhead, a few minutes away, is where Crook’s road meets the modern highway.
For eighty years after Crook, getting up the Rim from the Valley meant days on dirt. The Sitgreaves National Forest took in the Rim top in 1908, and the country stayed cattle range and timber, with Payson a ranching town at the end of a long, bad road. The change came in two pieces. In 1955 the state designated State Route 160 from Payson to Show Low, assembled mostly from existing forest roads. In 1958 the Beeline was paved to Payson, with a ribbon cutting on July 19, and the bottom of the Rim was suddenly a few hours from Phoenix on pavement.
The climb itself took longer. SR 160 was renumbered SR 260 at the end of the 1960s to avoid confusion with US 160 to the north, and the paving from Payson to Show Low was completed by about 1974, after some fourteen years of work. That is the moment the campgrounds along FR 300 became what they are now: the closest cool pine forest to a hot, growing metropolitan area, two hours from Scottsdale on pavement. Rim Campground, one mile from the highway, is the purest product of that road; when the Forest Service built it is not in any record this guide could find, but its whole reason for being is that it is the first turn after the top.
The road is still being finished. In 1995 the state scheduled SR 260 between Payson and Heber-Overgaard to become a four-lane divided highway with wildlife crossings, and the project has never been completed; much of the route is still two lanes and closes during winter storms. Meanwhile the old road has been turned back into history. In the 1970s Eldon Bowman, Boy Scouts and local volunteers retraced and marked the whole Crook road for its centennial, nailing chevron blazes to the trees, and the General Crook Trail was later named a National Recreation Trail. You can walk it from the Rim Top Trailhead and see the markers within minutes of your site.
Why it matters
Rim Campground explains how the Valley found its summer escape. The Rim was always there, a 2,000-foot wall of cool forest a hundred miles from Phoenix, but it took the Beeline in 1958 and the paving of SR 260 in the 1970s to turn it into a place people go on a Friday night. Everything along FR 300, the lake campgrounds, the dispersed sites and this plain loop of pull-offs, follows from that road. For a Scottsdale visitor, Rim is the easy one: no gravel, a first-come site at dusk, the edge a short walk away. Bring your own water, take a back-loop site if you can, and walk to the overlook before the afternoon storms.