What is Rock Crossing Campground?
Rock Crossing is the campground built for C.C. Cragin Reservoir, the narrow canyon lake that Payson drinks from and that kayakers consider the best flat-water paddle in the state. The campground sits 2 miles up the gravel from the ramp in ponderosa pine and Gambel oak at 7,316 feet: 31 single sites and 2 doubles, each with a table, fire ring, grill, tent pad and a steel bear food locker, with potable water, vault toilets, trash service and camp hosts in season. There are no hookups, showers or dump station, and the big-rig limit is about 32 feet. Part of it reserves on recreation.gov; the rest is first come.
Compared to the Rim lakes along SR 260, this is a quieter, more purposeful place. People are here to fish for the rainbow, brown and brook trout Game and Fish stocks in the reservoir, to paddle its twelve miles of canyon, or to walk the Arizona Trail, which crosses the reservoir country a few miles east. The Rim edge is a short drive back toward Clints Well, and the Mogollon Rim overlooks along the General Crook road are the evening drive.
What you get is the only real campground within reach of the most unusual lake on the Rim, with water, lockers and hosts. What you do not get is a lakeside site, a boat ramp you can count on for a trailer, or a spot on a June Saturday if you did not book it in advance.
How to camp it right
Book the half you can. $20 per night single, $40 double; Senior and Access passes half off singles. Some sites are on recreation.gov and go the moment the window opens for June and Labor Day; the rest are first come, first served and taken by Friday noon in summer. Check-in 2 p.m., check-out noon, 14-day limit.
Get there. Take SR 87, the Beeline, through Payson, Pine and Strawberry and up the Rim to Clints Well, about 38 miles north of Payson. Continue about 4 miles northeast on SR 87 and turn right onto gravel Forest Road 751; the campground is about 2.5 miles in, with the reservoir ramp 2 miles beyond. The gravel is graded and passable for cars in most weather, and it closes in winter. Figure about 2 hours 30 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. Clints Well has gas and a small store; stock up in Payson.
Pick the season. Early May to late September. Cold nights all season; afternoon monsoon storms in July and August, which build fast over the Rim and empty the lake of paddlers by one o’clock; frost possible in September, which is also the quietest good month.
Water and toilets. Potable water, vault toilets, trash service. No showers or hookups.
Use the lockers. This is black bear country. Food, coolers and anything that smells go in the steel locker at your site, not the tent and not the truck bed; the hosts will remind you.
Plan to carry the boat. Past the campground, FR 751 is restricted: no vehicles over 22 feet, no vehicle-and-trailer combinations over 50 feet, parking only in designated spaces, and no swimming within 50 feet of the ramp. The ramp has been closed to trailers because of low water and exposed rock, so bring a kayak or canoe you can carry down, launch at first light before the canyon wind, and confirm current status with the Mogollon Rim Ranger District at 928-477-2255.
Dogs. Leashed. No horses in the campground.
Skip it if the reservations are gone and the first-come loop is full. Blue Ridge Campground, 10 miles away on SR 87, is the fallback with water; Clints Well is the small free one at the junction; the free dispersed sites along the Rim Road are the fallback without. For the lake itself, read the C.C. Cragin Reservoir guide before you decide whether the paddle is worth the drive.
The copper company’s lake that a town now drinks
The Rim country above East Clear Creek was Sinagua ground a thousand years ago and Yavapai and Tonto Apache ground when the Army arrived; General George Crook’s military road of the 1870s runs along the escarpment a few miles south of the campground, and the Rim Road still follows it. For a century after that, the canyon of East Clear Creek was a place loggers and cattlemen crossed, not a destination. The creek was a trout stream in a slot too narrow to farm.
The lake exists because of copper. In 1962 the Phelps Dodge Corporation and the Salt River Project signed a water exchange of the kind that built half of Arizona’s reservoirs: the mining company would dam East Clear Creek, pipe the water over the Rim into SRP’s Verde River system, and in return take an equal amount from the Black River, hundreds of miles away, for its smelters and pits at Morenci. Phelps Dodge finished Blue Ridge Dam in 1965 in a canyon so narrow that the reservoir behind it, about 15,000 acre-feet, is a few hundred feet wide and miles long, the shape kayakers love. A pipeline and tunnel carried the water south to the headwaters of the East Verde River, and from there it flowed down to Horseshoe and Bartlett and the Valley’s canals. The same company had built Show Low Lake in 1952 under a sister agreement; Horseshoe Dam on the Verde was its first such trade, in the 1940s.
Recreation was incidental. The Coconino National Forest built Rock Crossing and Blue Ridge campgrounds for the anglers who found the new lake, and Game and Fish began stocking rainbows, browns and brook trout; we could not pin the year the campground opened, and the Forest Service’s page does not say. The bear lockers, tent pads and host sites are later improvements, and the recreation.gov listing is the newest layer.
The name changed with the owner. Section 213 of the Arizona Water Settlements Act of 2004, the law that settled the Gila River Indian Community’s water claims, renamed Blue Ridge Dam and Reservoir for C.C. Cragin, a long-time Salt River Project manager, and in February 2005 SRP acquired the reservoir and its pipeline from Phelps Dodge; on September 30, 2005 it transferred title, with about 77 acres of former company land, to the Bureau of Reclamation, which owns the rest of SRP’s dams. The act also gave the Rim towns something they had wanted for decades: Payson’s right to just over 27 percent of the reservoir’s yield, about 3,000 acre-feet a year. After years of pipeline repairs and a new treatment plant, Payson’s C.C. Cragin pipeline began delivering that water in 2018, which ended the town’s dependence on wells and is why the lake you paddle is also someone’s tap.
What is coming is driven by drought. The reservoir is drawn down each summer for Payson and SRP, the ramp has been closed to trailers for low water and exposed rock, and the Forest Service has tightened vehicle limits on FR 751. The lake will keep being a kayak lake rather than a boat lake, which suits the people who camp here.
Why it matters
Rock Crossing sits above the clearest example of how Arizona moves water: a copper company builds a dam on the Rim so it can pump a river in the White Mountains, the Valley’s utility inherits it through a tribal water settlement, and a mountain town plumbs itself to the result. Nothing about the lake was built for the kayakers who are now its chief users, and everything about it, from the narrow canyon to the summer drawdown, follows from the plumbing. For a Scottsdale camper it is the one Rim campground where the point is the water rather than the pines: book a site the day the window opens, bring a boat you can carry, and go in June or September.