What is Riverside Campground?
Below Bartlett Dam the Verde River comes out cold and clear into a narrow canyon, and on the first flat bench on the west bank the Forest Service built Riverside: 12 sites under mesquite and cottonwood, each with a table, a grill and a fire ring, two vault toilets, and the dam face filling the view upstream. It was never a destination the way Bartlett Lake is. It was where you went when you wanted the river without the boat ramps, fishermen working the tailwater, kids in the shallows, and the kind of quiet the lake sites do not have. Sites were $16 a night, first come, first served, with a 14-day limit and a 16-foot trailer limit that kept the big rigs away.
On June 16, 2024, a wildfire started in the campground. It was human-caused, burned about 180 acres toward the lake and forced evacuations of the Bartlett recreation sites. The flames went through the campground itself, killing or weakening the trees that made the place and destroying the sites. The Forest Service closed it and has kept it closed; the current order bars entry to the campground and the whole of Forest Road 162 through March 31, 2027, and says reconstruction has to happen before anyone camps here again.
What you will get, when it reopens, is the nearest shaded riverside campground to north Scottsdale, an hour and a quarter from Old Town, on a river whose flow is set by a dam you can see from your tent. What you will not get, for years, is the shade the old photographs show. What you get right now is a locked gate three miles down a gravel road, which is why this guide exists: so you do not drive out to find it.
How to camp it right
Check that it is open. Through at least March 31, 2027, it is not, by Forest Order 03-12-01-26-24, which has been extended more than once. Call the Cave Creek Ranger District at (480) 595-3300 before you go; the gate is three miles past the last place you can turn a trailer around easily. Everything below describes the campground as it ran before the fire and as the Forest Service says it will run again.
Pay at a machine or by phone. $16 a night per site, half price with a Senior or Access pass, paid at the Tonto fee machines at the Cave Creek Ranger Station, Desert Vista Overlook or Jojoba, or by Scan and Pay on the Recreation.gov app once you have claimed a site. No reservations. Up to 10 people and three vehicles per site, 14-day limit, check-in 2 p.m., check-out noon.
Get there. North on Scottsdale Road or Pima Road to Carefree, east on Cave Creek Road about 7 miles, then right on Bartlett Dam Road (FR 19) for 13 paved miles toward the lake. Just before the Jojoba boat launch, FR 19 turns to maintained gravel and swings south; follow it about 3 miles to the campground loop, FR 162. About an hour and a quarter from Old Town. The gravel is fine for any car when dry. Trailers over 16 feet are not allowed, and the loop is tight.
Pick the season. October through April. Midweek in November or March is the quiet version. Summer below the dam is 105 and the site has lost most of its shade.
Water. None at the campground or anywhere on Bartlett Dam Road. Carry everything from Carefree.
Camp by the rules. Quiet hours 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., no generators, no glass. Take the sites farthest from the entrance road. Fire restrictions on the Tonto arrive most years by May; after 2024 nobody at the Cave Creek district is relaxed about campfires here.
Respect the river. Flow is whatever SRP releases from the dam, and it changes without notice. Keep chairs and kids above the obvious high-water line. Non-motorized boats only, launched by hand; motorboats are prohibited on this stretch. Paddlers should check SRP’s release schedule before they leave town.
Dogs. Fine on leash.
Skip it if you need a site this year, which you do. Horseshoe Campground upstream has the same river feel under cottonwoods, and the Bartlett Lake shoreline sites are open, louder and closer. Needle Rock on the free-flowing river below the dam is the day-use alternative, and Seven Springs north of Cave Creek is the other first-come Tonto campground within an hour.
Twelve sites, one afternoon in June
The bench the campground sits on has been a good place to stop for a very long time. The lower Verde is Yavapai and Tonto Apache country, the two peoples sharing hunting grounds on either side of the river, and before them Hohokam farmers whose canals begin where the Verde meets the Salt. The Army came to the river in the 1860s and built Camp McDowell 15 miles downstream of here to guard the crossing. In 1871 the government gathered the Yavapai and Tonto Apache onto the Rio Verde Reserve near Camp Verde, where they dug irrigation ditches and nearly fed themselves; in March 1875 it closed the reserve and marched them about 180 miles to San Carlos in winter. More than 100 died on the way. The Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, downstream, is the river’s Yavapai community today.
The river itself was rebuilt in the 1930s. The Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association had wanted a Verde dam since Roosevelt Dam went in on the Salt, and the Depression’s public-works money finally paid for one. From 1936 to 1939 the Bureau of Reclamation built Bartlett Dam a few hundred yards upstream of the campground: a concrete multiple-arch dam, 10 arches leaning upstream against 9 buttresses, 287 feet high, named for Bill Bartlett, a government surveyor who had worked the river. Its purpose was irrigation storage, about 178,000 acre-feet, and its effect on the stretch below was to turn a desert river that flooded in February and shrank in June into a tailwater that rises and falls with the valley’s orders for water. That is the river you camp beside: cold, clear, and on someone else’s schedule. The dam was raised and its spillway rebuilt in the mid-1990s, finished in December 1996, to 308.5 feet.
The campground is harder to date. The Forest Service does not publish a construction year for Riverside, and I could not find one; its 12 sites, its 16-foot trailer limit and its fee machines belong to the same era as the built-out Bartlett sites and the Tonto Pass, which arrived in 1999 to pay for them. For a quarter century it was the quiet alternative to the lake: fishermen working the tailwater, paddlers putting in by hand, a dozen tents under mesquite and cottonwood big enough to shade the whole loop.
Then came the summer of 2024. The Wildcat Fire had already burned near the lake in May. Around midday on June 16, 2024, a fire started inside Riverside Campground; a Tonto official said that day it was definitely human-caused but nobody yet knew how. It ran about 178 acres toward the lake, forced the evacuation of the Bartlett recreation sites and closed Bartlett Dam Road for a day. Three hotshot crews, eight engines, two heavy helicopters and the state’s new water-scooping aircraft worked it, without retardant, because the Verde basin is a retardant-free zone. It was contained on June 20. Two weeks later the Boulder View Fire closed the lake’s recreation areas again. The fire had gone through the campground itself, killing or weakening the mesquites and cottonwoods that made it and wrecking the sites, and the Forest Service closed the campground and Forest Road 162 under a post-fire recovery order that has since been extended more than once; the current order runs to March 31, 2027 and says the sites must be rebuilt before anyone camps here again.
Why it matters
Riverside is a small place that illustrates two large facts about the Verde. The first is that the river below Bartlett is a managed thing, built in 1939 and rebuilt in 1996, and the water at your feet is an irrigation delivery with a dam’s face above it. The second is what one careless afternoon does to a desert riparian campground: the trees that took a century to grow were gone in a day, and the site will be a thinner, hotter place for years after it reopens. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is to put it on the list for 2027 and call first; when the gate opens, the quietest river night within an hour and a quarter of Old Town comes back, with less shade and, one hopes, more care about fire.