What is Saddle Mountain BLM camping?
Drive I-10 west toward California and about 45 minutes past the last Buckeye exit a ragged brown ridge appears to the south, a notch in the middle of it like a saddle. That is Saddle Mountain, a pile of volcanic rock about 1,700 feet above the Tonopah desert, and the Bureau of Land Management land around its base is one of the most used free camps in central Arizona. There is nothing here: no sites, no toilets, no water, no host. There is a lot of flat, firm ground, creosote and ocotillo, a hill that glows at sunrise, and a sky that goes all the way down.
Camping is free and limited to 14 days in any 28. From December through February a few dozen rigs are usually scattered across the flats, from pop-ups to Class A motorhomes, and the social geography is simple: the smooth spurs near Courthouse Road hold the big trailers, the rocky tracks toward the mountain hold the vans and tents. Jeep tracks and single-track loop the base for mountain bikes, and a steep use trail climbs to the summit, roughly 3 miles round trip with 1,600 feet of gain and a scramble at the top.
What you get is free, flat, big-sky desert camping with good cell signal 85 minutes from Old Town, at about 1,300 feet. What you do not get is a single service: no water, no toilet, no trash, no shade, and from May to October no reason to come.
How to camp Saddle Mountain right
Pay nothing, follow the rules. Free, first come, first served, 14 days in any 28, after which the BLM expects you to move at least 25 miles. Camp on existing disturbed flats only, scrape nothing new, and pack out everything. Groups and commercial use need a BLM permit. The leave no trace basics are the whole management plan out here.
Get there. Loop 101 or Loop 202 to I-10 west, then about 45 miles to exit 94 at Tonopah. Go south through Tonopah on the paved road, follow it as it bends west onto Salome Highway, and turn south on Courthouse Road; the dirt spurs onto BLM land begin on the left within a mile or two. About 85 minutes from Old Town, all paved until the last few hundred yards. Exit at Tonopah even if your map suggests the Salome Highway exit farther west; that route is dirt for miles.
Pick a spur. The first spurs on the left are the busy ones with the biggest rigs. Drive on toward the mountain and take a track that makes you slow down, and you will have a quarter mile of creosote to yourself. The entrances vary from graded to rutted, and the closer to the mountain, the rougher; walk a spur before committing a trailer, and stay off them after rain, when the washes soften enough to trap one. Face the rig east for the sunrise on the cliffs.
Pick the season. November through March. The shoulder months are hot and summer is 110-plus and empty. Afternoon wind is routine, flies can be thick after wet winters (bring screens), and snowbird season from December through February is when the flats fill.
Water and waste. None on site. Tonopah’s truck stop has fuel and propane, a private ranch a few miles east on Salome Highway has sold dump and potable-water service to campers for a modest fee, and Buckeye, 30 minutes east, has groceries. Portable toilet or trowel; pack out everything including paper.
Fire. Fine in an existing ring when the BLM has no restrictions, which generally means November through April; central Arizona BLM restrictions usually begin in May. Bring your own wood. Exploding targets and fireworks are banned year-round on Arizona BLM land.
Climb it early. The summit route is a use trail and then a scramble, not a trail; see our scramble ratings if the distinction is new. The last pitch is loose. The view runs across the Tonopah desert to the Harquahalas and the Eagletails.
Dogs. Welcome; keep them off the summit scramble and watch for cholla. Verizon and AT&T both work well here, which is why remote workers winter in these spots.
Skip it if you want a creek or a toilet. Gunsight Wash is the other big free BLM camp in the region, Burro Creek has water and a developed campground, and Castle Hot Springs Road is the free desert camp closer to the north Valley.
Public land at the end of the Valley
Saddle Mountain is volcanic, a pile of Tertiary rhyolite and andesite left from eruptions millions of years before anyone saw it, and the same flows left seams of chalcedony and fire agate that make the mountain one of the best-known rockhounding sites in Arizona. The desert around it was never farmed the way the Gila and Salt valleys were. The Hohokam, the Patayan of the lower Colorado and the Yavapai all used it for hunting and gathering, and hikers report petroglyphs around the mountain’s base that the BLM has not described publicly. Scottsdale’s own preserve takes the same quiet approach to its rock art, for reasons laid out in our note on why rock-art locations stay vague.
The settlers came for the groundwater, and it was hot. Wells around Tonopah run warm, many of them 70 to 95 degrees and some well over 100, and in the 1920s and 1930s people tried to make something of it. John Beauchamp, a major landowner and the first postmaster, built his house in 1920; the community once called Lone Peak took the name Tonopah and is dated to 1929. In 1934 the Saguaro Sanitarium broke ground on June 17, an attempt to turn the hot wells into a health resort. None made Tonopah a town; it is still unincorporated, and a 2009 vote to change that failed.
The land around the mountain stayed federal largely because nobody wanted it. Arizona’s dry desert flats that could not be irrigated were never homesteaded in bulk, and they became the core of the Bureau of Land Management’s holdings when Congress decided, in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, that the remaining public domain would stay public. That is why you can drive off a paved county road and camp for free for two weeks: this is land the government kept by default, not land it set aside for recreation.
The next neighbor arrived in the 1970s. Construction of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, about ten miles east, began in 1976; its first reactor entered commercial service in January 1986 and the third in January 1988, and it became the largest power producer in the country, cooled by treated sewage water piped from the Valley’s cities.
The Valley is still coming. In 2017 a company associated with Bill Gates bought 24,800 acres between Buckeye and Tonopah for $80 million to plan a new city, and subdivisions have crept west along I-10 from Buckeye ever since. The BLM land around Saddle Mountain is not going anywhere, but the empty miles between it and the West Valley are shrinking.
Why it matters
Saddle Mountain is what most of Arizona actually is: federal land nobody fenced, open to anyone who drives out and stops, managed with a stay limit and a request to clean up. It explains the state’s snowbird economy, in which thousands of retirees and remote workers spend the winter in free desert camps, and it shows the edge of the Valley moving west toward it, with a nuclear plant and a planned city as the waypoints. For a Scottsdale camper, it is the easiest free winter night in the open desert, with cell signal, flat ground for a big rig and a real scramble at the door. Bring all your water, take a rough spur for privacy, and come on a new moon if the stars are the point.