What is Riverview Campground?
The Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area is one of two riparian NCAs in the country, about 23,000 acres where the Gila River, Bonita Creek, Eagle Creek and the San Francisco River run through cliff-walled canyons northeast of Safford. Cottonwood and sycamore line the water, bighorn sheep work the cliffs, and more than 200 bird species have been counted along Bonita Creek alone. It is a long way from anywhere and the BLM runs it with a light hand.
Riverview Campground is its one developed camp: 13 sites on a bench on the north side of the Gila, each with a shade structure, picnic table, fire ring and grill. Ten are pull-ins and three are pull-throughs, all recently enlarged so a trailer fits. There is potable water and a toilet. Site 1 is the accessible one, with a raised fire ring, a wheelchair-height table and a graded aggregate pad. The reservable Flying W group picnic area sits next door and is free to use when nobody has booked it. Down the road are the river day-use sites, the Gila River boat put-in, the Old Safford Bridge and the trailhead for the historic Safford-Morenci Trail; a few miles on is Bonita Creek, the perennial stream that is the best birding in the Gila Valley.
What you get for $5 is shade, water, a toilet, a river view and silence. What you do not get is a store, a signal, a lake or anyone else; the nearest groceries are in Safford, and the campground is as empty in late October as any in this collection.
How to camp the Gila Box right
Pay on site. $5 a night for a site with two vehicles, $2 per extra vehicle, first come, first served, cash in the tube. Senior and Access passes get half off. The BLM’s 2024 fee plan proposed $15; the page still read $5 when checked, so bring enough for either. Stay limit is 14 consecutive days in any 28, here and for primitive camping anywhere in the NCA. Floating the Gila requires a separate BLM river permit and fee.
Get there. US 60 east through Globe, then US 70 east to Safford, about three hours. Continue 5 miles east on US 70 to Solomon, turn left on Sanchez Road and follow it to the end of the pavement, then follow the signs onto Bonita Creek Road. The BLM describes that road as narrow, winding and steep in places with blind corners, which is accurate; the last mile to the campground is gravel, rocky in sections, with the roughest spot on the hill down into camp. A passenger car does it. About 200 minutes from Old Town. Safford has the last gas and groceries. Drive the road in daylight the first time.
Pick the season. Year-round, but October through April is the comfortable window and spring after a wet winter is the only reliable river season. The Gila Box sits between 3,100 and 4,400 feet; summer days run well over 100 degrees and the shade structures earn their keep. Nights in late October are cold and clear.
Water. Potable water and a toilet at the campground. None at the day-use sites, on the Safford-Morenci Trail or at Bonita Creek; carry what you need for the day.
Pick the river side. The sites on the river edge of the bench have the view and the cottonwoods below. Site 1 is the accessible site. Trailers fit the three pull-throughs best; the BLM says the road does not need four-wheel drive or high clearance, and that holds when it is dry.
Spend the day on the water. Mornings belong to the Bonita Creek watchable wildlife area, a wheelchair-accessible overlook with shade shelters above a canyon where the creek runs all year and more than 100 bird species have been logged. Afternoons go to the Safford-Morenci Trail, the river picnic sites or the Old Safford Bridge, the 1919 span that is now the put-in for Gila floats. Side roads need four-wheel drive and are rarely maintained; ask the Safford Field Office after rain.
Dogs. Allowed on leash. Keep them off the riparian areas, where camping is prohibited for the same reason.
Skip it if three-plus hours each way for 13 sites by a slow desert river sounds like a bad trade. Pair it with a Mount Graham campground such as Arcadia or Riggs Flat and it becomes a weekend; add the hot springs at Hot Well Dunes on the way home and it becomes a good one. For a Gila River campground closer to the Valley, the Winkelman recreation area is 90 minutes nearer.
A pack trail to the copper mines, and a river the law finally noticed
People have lived on this stretch of the Gila for as long as anyone has farmed in Arizona. Hohokam farmers were irrigating the river and building stone-house villages along its tributaries by about 300 BC; the mano and metate fragments and potsherds at the mouth of Bonita Creek date to roughly 800 to 900 AD. Around 1275 to 1325 Ancestral Puebloan people moved down from northeastern Arizona for the water and the game and left the rock art and small cliff dwellings that still sit in the canyon walls. After 1600 the canyons were Apache country, farmed, hunted and used as a travel corridor between the mountains and the river.
The first Americans to write about it were soldiers. In the fall of 1846, during the war with Mexico, General Stephen Watts Kearny led his column from Santa Fe toward California along the Gila with Kit Carson as guide, and camped at Bonita Creek. Settlement waited another generation for copper. The mines at Morenci opened in the 1870s, and in 1873 the handful of families along Bonita Creek built the Safford-Morenci Trail to pack supplies over the Black Hills to the camps, a steep, rocky route that survives as a hiking trail at the north end of the conservation area. Anglo and Hispanic ranchers and farmers filled in the valley through the late 1870s and 1880s, and the trail stayed in use until a road replaced it: the Old Safford-Clifton Road, begun in 1915 and finished in 1920, crossing the Gila on the Old Safford Bridge, built in 1919 just below today’s Owl Creek campground and still standing as the float put-in.
The homesteads came last. In the 1920s the brothers Simon and Ivaldo Serna built a stone cabin at the mouth of Bonita Creek and farmed the bottomland; the Cueto family started the Twin C Ranch in 1929, and their descendants still run it. The Civilian Conservation Corps built low stone walls for erosion control in the 1930s. Safford, meanwhile, had found that Bonita Creek’s spring-fed flow was the most reliable water in the valley, and a portion of the creek supplies the town’s municipal system to this day. The Sernas left in 1965 and the cabin fell in.
What saved the canyons was a change in how the federal government thought about desert rivers. For most of the twentieth century the BLM’s job on the Gila was grazing leases. On November 28, 1990, in the Arizona Desert Wilderness Act, Congress created the Gila Box Riparian National Conservation Area, one of only two riparian NCAs in the nation, with the stated purpose of conserving and enhancing the riparian corridor: 23 miles of the Gila and 15 miles of Bonita Creek, plus Eagle Creek and the San Francisco. The statute put the area at about 20,900 acres; the BLM now manages about 23,000. The Serna Cabin was stabilized and rebuilt from old photographs after the designation, the Safford-Clifton road became the Black Hills Back Country Byway in 1992, and the BLM built the modest recreation sites you use today: Riverview and its 13 shaded sites, the Owl Creek camp by the bridge, the Flying W group area, the river picnic sites and the Bonita Creek overlook.
The Gila Box has never had a crowd to manage, and that shows in the price. Riverview’s $5 fee is a relic of the 1990s; the Safford Field Office’s 2024 fee proposal would raise it to $15, still cheap for shade, water and a toilet. The real pressure on the place is upstream: the Gila’s flow depends on snow in New Mexico and on what Clifton and the farms divert, and a dry winter means no float season and a thin creek. The cottonwoods and the sheep do not seem to mind.
Why it matters
The Gila Box is the Gila River as it was before Coolidge Dam and the Valley’s canals turned it into a dry bed west of Florence: a living desert river with a perennial tributary, cliffs, cottonwoods and the oldest continuous farming in the state along its banks. The 1990 designation was the first time Congress protected an Arizona river for its riparian corridor rather than its reservoir, and the model has been copied since. For a Scottsdale camper it is a three-hour drive to a $5 site with water and shade, which is the best such bargain in the state, and a weekend with Mount Graham above it is worth the gas.