What is Rim Road (FR 300) Dispersed Camping?
The Mogollon Rim is a 200-mile escarpment where the Colorado Plateau ends and drops 2,000 feet to the Tonto Basin, and Forest Road 300, the Rim Road, runs along the top of the most dramatic 40 miles of it. The road follows the General Crook Trail, the wagon road the Army cut in the 1870s between Fort Verde and Fort Apache, and every few miles a short spur runs south to the edge. On those spurs, and on the pullouts in the pines behind them, you can camp for free on an existing site for up to 14 days. No fee, no reservation, no water, no toilet, and a view from your tent that drops straight into the desert.
The west half, from SR 87 to about Knoll Lake, is Coconino National Forest and the quieter stretch. Kehl Springs Campground and the General Springs cabin, where a marker tells the story of the 1882 Battle of Big Dry Wash, are here, along with the spurs to Milk Ranch Point (FR 218) and the small, reedy Potato Lake. The east half, from Bear Canyon Lake to SR 260, is Apache-Sitgreaves; Promontory Butte (FR 76), FR 171, FR 169 and the designated sites at Larson Ridge (FR 237) are all in this stretch, close to the Rim Lakes and much busier for it.
What you get is the best free camping view in central Arizona, cool nights at 7,500 feet when the Valley is at 110, and the room to be a quarter mile from anyone. What you do not get is a single service: water, trash, toilets and, most summers after mid-June, a campfire are all things you bring or do without.
How to camp the Rim Road right
Follow the dispersed rules. Free. Camp on an existing site within 300 feet of a road, at least 100 feet from water, and not within half a mile of the Rim Lakes or a mile of a developed campground. 14 days in any 30. Groups over 75 need a permit. Do not drive into meadows or cut a new site; the Forest Service closes spurs that get torn up, and it has closed several.
Get there. For the west end, take SR 87, the Beeline, through Payson, Pine and Strawberry and up the Rim; about 29 miles north of Payson, a few miles short of Clints Well, FR 300 leaves the highway to the east, signed for the General Crook Trail. Figure about 2 hours 20 minutes from Old Town to the turnoff. For the east end, go to Payson and take SR 260 east about 30 miles to the Rim Visitor Information Station; FR 300 starts directly across the highway, about the same drive time. The road is graded gravel, washboarded and dusty, fine for a careful sedan when dry. End to end is a slow two hours. The spurs to the edge are rougher, several want high clearance, and rain turns everything to clay.
Pick your end. The west half is quieter and has the longest runs of true rim-edge sites; Milk Ranch Point and Promontory Butte want high clearance. The east half is closer to the lakes and to Forest Lakes for gas, and much busier. Arrive Thursday for any holiday weekend; the edge sites are gone by dark.
Pick the season. The road closes with snow, usually November until late April or May. Late May to early July and September to mid-October are the windows. Early October, with aspens turning and the summer crowd gone, is the best week of the year up here, and it can snow.
Water, toilets, trash. None, none and none. Carry a gallon a day per person and more to put out a fire. Toilets are at the developed campgrounds only: Kehl Springs, Knoll Lake, and Mogollon and Rim near SR 260. Bury waste six inches deep and 100 feet from water, and pack out the paper; the rules in our Leave No Trace entry are the whole code here.
Fire. This is the big one. Most summers both forests are under restrictions by June, and Stage 2 means no wood or charcoal fires anywhere, developed ring or not. Check both forests’ alerts before you leave, and bring a stove. The Dude Fire scar below the western edge is the reminder.
Weather and dogs. Rim-edge sites take the full force of wind and lightning; in monsoon season be back from the edge by early afternoon and sleep in the sheltered sites a quarter mile back when a storm is forecast. Dogs are fine, under control; this is elk and bear country.
Skip it if you want a toilet and a tap. Bear Canyon Lake and Knoll Lake have both and the same elevation, and the dark sky over the Rim is the same from a developed site; see our stargazing guide.
The Army road along the edge
The Rim was a frontier long before it was a road. Mogollon farmers lived in the canyons below the edge a thousand years ago; by the 1700s the escarpment divided the Western Apache bands of the high country from the Tonto Apache and Yavapai of the basin below, who climbed it each summer for acorns, deer and the cool. When the Army arrived it needed to supply Fort Apache, on the White River far to the east, from Fort Whipple at Prescott, and the only sensible line between them ran along the top of the Rim where the ground was flat and the springs reliable.
General George Crook had the road built. A crew from Prescott began improving the Fort Whipple-to-Fort Verde section in late 1871; in the spring of 1872, when the snow went, two larger crews started toward each other from Verde and Apache, planning to meet partway. Pack trains were using the route by the summer of 1873, and in late September 1874 the first wagon train crossed, carrying among others Martha Summerhayes, the young wife of an infantry officer, whose account of the trip in Vanished Arizona is the best description of the Rim in the 19th century. The road ran about 200 miles and stayed in use for decades after the Apache wars ended. Its one battle came in July 1882, when Army columns caught a band of White Mountain Apache raiders at Big Dry Wash, a few miles north of the edge near General Springs; it was the last major fight between the Army and the Apache in Arizona, and the marker stands beside the road today.
The Forest Service inherited the road with the land. President Roosevelt designated the Coconino National Forest on July 2, 1908, taking in the western Rim; the eastern half went to what became the Apache-Sitgreaves. In 1928 the Forest Service rebuilt the Rim section of Crook’s grade as a fire-access route and numbered it Forest Road 300, following the old alignment closely and in places running on the original bed. The Rim Lakes came in the decades after the war, when the state dammed the canyon heads for fishing, and the lakes brought the campgrounds and the crowds to the east end. In the 1970s, Eldon Bowman of Flagstaff retraced the whole Crook road from Fort Whipple to Fort Apache for its centennial, with Boy Scouts and local volunteers, and marked it with cairns and the white chevrons blazed on trees that you still find along FR 300; the General Crook Trail was later designated a National Recreation Trail.
Fire has shaped the view. The Dude Fire, started by lightning below the Rim on June 25, 1990, burned about 28,000 acres in ten days, destroyed Zane Grey’s cabin and 60-odd other structures, and killed six firefighters in a burnover at Walk Moore Canyon; the bare slopes you look down on from the western edge sites are its scar, and the memorial is on the Control Road below. The fire changed how the forests manage summer, and the Stage 2 restrictions that end campfires on the Rim most Junes are its legacy as much as the drought’s. The Rodeo-Chediski Fire of 2002 burned the eastern end of the Rim beyond Heber; between the two, the forests you camp in along FR 300 are among the last unburned stretches of the edge.
Why it matters
The Rim Road is the one place where Arizona’s two halves, plateau and desert, are a single step apart, and the camping along it is free because the Army, not a recreation planner, chose the route. It explains the Apache wars, the Forest Service’s fire problem and the Valley’s summer migration in one 40-mile drive. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: it is the best cheap night within two and a half hours of Old Town from late May to mid-October, provided you carry every drop of water, arrive Thursday for a holiday, check both forests’ fire restrictions, and sleep back from the edge when the sky turns.