What is Sawmill Flats Campground?
The Globe-Young Highway, SR 288, climbs out of the Tonto Basin into the Sierra Ancha, trades pavement for graded dirt near Workman Creek, and runs north through ponderosa and Gambel oak to the ranching town of Young. Sawmill Flat is a small clearing on that dirt stretch at about 5,800 feet, roughly 20 miles south of Young and 22 miles north of the SR 188 junction, a couple of miles from the Workman Creek Falls turnoff, where the Forest Service long ago put in a handful of sites with tables, fire rings and vault toilets. Google Maps spells it “Sawmill Flats.”
It has always been minimal and free: about five sites by most counts, no water, no trash service, no host, a 16-foot trailer limit, and a season that runs roughly mid-May to mid-October before snow closes the high road. Hunters fill it in the fall. What we cannot tell you is whether it is open this year. The Tonto’s current website lists the Pleasant Valley district’s campgrounds as Airplane Flat, Colcord Ridge, Haigler Canyon, Upper Canyon Creek and Valentine Ridge, and Sawmill Flat is not among them. That may mean a page was never migrated or that the sites are no longer maintained. Call the Payson Ranger District, (928) 474-7900, and ask.
What you get, if it is open, is a free table and toilet under the pines in a range most Valley people have never driven into. What you do not get is certainty: treat it as a bonus, not a plan, and have a dispersed backup in mind.
How to camp Sawmill Flat right
Call first, then drive with daylight. The status is unconfirmed, so phone Payson before you build a trip around it, and drive up SR 288 with enough light to keep going if the gate is shut or the sites are taken. The hunters who fill it in October and November arrive midweek.
Pay nothing. No fee has ever been charged here as far as we can find, and no Tonto Pass is needed on this side of the forest. If a fee tube has appeared, pay it.
Get there. Shea Boulevard to SR 87 north about 60 miles, then SR 188 southeast about 35 miles past Roosevelt Dam to the SR 288 junction. Turn north and climb about 22 miles: paved at first, then graded gravel from the Workman Creek area, where the pavement ends. The campground is on the highway a couple of miles past the FR 487 turnoff for Workman Creek Falls. About 2 hours 45 minutes from Old Town. A careful sedan manages the dirt when dry; after rain or snow it is slick, and the Forest Service advises four-wheel drive or chains on the Young end. Trailers over about 16 feet do not fit.
Have the backup ready. Dispersed camping is allowed along most of the surrounding forest roads under the usual rules: existing site, 14 days, pack it out. The pullouts on the Workman Creek side and the flats near Rose Creek have been dispersed camps for decades.
Water. None. Workman Creek runs below the road but filter or treat anything you take from it, and carry a gallon a day per person regardless.
Fire. The Tonto is usually under restrictions by June. Dead and down wood only when fires are allowed, no saws; bring a stove.
Pick the season. Late May to early July and September to mid-October are the good windows. Late September, after the monsoon and before the hunters, is the week to be here, with the maples in Workman Creek starting to turn. Monsoon afternoons bring lightning to these ridges, and the first snow can close SR 288 above Workman Creek in November.
Dogs. Allowed; keep them leashed in the campground.
Do the falls and the crest. Workman Creek Falls, a 200-foot drop at the end of FR 487, is the reason most people are on this road. The Parker Creek trail and the other Sierra Ancha Wilderness routes start along the highway. Young, with a cafe and a small store, is 20 miles of dirt north.
Skip it if you need a sure thing. Valentine Ridge, north of Young below the Rim, is listed and free, and Cholla on Roosevelt Lake is the big, developed, reservable option at the bottom of the hill.
A research forest, a feud and a uranium road
The Sierra Ancha has two names older than this one. The Western Apache call it Dził Nteel, Wide Flat Mountain, which is exactly what the summit plateau looks like from the Tonto Basin. And in the box canyons on its east side, draining to Cherry Creek, are a cluster of cliff dwellings, built around 1280 by people whose pottery and walls share traits with both the Salado and the Mogollon, and abandoned by about 1350. Tree rings in their roof beams fix the dates.
The road north of the campground leads to the bloodiest chapter of Arizona’s territorial range history. From 1882 to 1892 the cattle-ranching Grahams and the sheep-running Tewksburys fought the Pleasant Valley War around what is now Young, a feud that killed somewhere between 35 and 50 people and that some historians think set back Arizona’s bid for statehood. The ranch country it was fought over is the same open valley SR 288 drops into at its north end.
The slopes around Sawmill Flat became a laboratory. Forest Service scientists laid out watershed plots here in 1925, the area became the Parker Creek Experimental Forest in 1932, and in 1938 it was expanded and renamed the Sierra Ancha Experimental Forest. Civilian Conservation Corps crews installed the weirs that measure Workman Creek’s three forks, and the research was aimed at a question the Valley still asks: how forests above Roosevelt Lake affect the water that reaches it. The range’s crest was set aside as the Sierra Ancha Primitive Area in 1933 and became one of Arizona’s original wildernesses under the Wilderness Act in 1964, at 20,850 acres.
The road up Workman Creek has a stranger history. Uranium was noticed in the Sierra Ancha around 1950, and after a federal airborne survey a staking rush followed in 1954. Small mines opened up Workman Creek along what is now FR 487, the road to the falls, and shipped ore to a buying station in Globe from 1955. The ore was spotty and low grade, and by 1957 production had stopped and the station had closed. Leave any old workings you find alone.
The campground’s own history is the thinnest part. The name presumably remembers a sawmill, but no published record we could find says which mill or when, and the Forest Service has not published when it built the sites. What is documented is the recent part: the campground has dropped off the Tonto’s recreation website, where the Pleasant Valley district now lists five other sites, and nobody has announced whether that means closure or neglect.
Why it matters
The Sierra Ancha is the part of the Tonto that explains the Valley’s water. The experimental forest on these slopes was set up to measure what the watershed above Roosevelt Lake gives to the canals that serve Scottsdale, and the dirt highway past Sawmill Flat runs straight through it. The same road ties together a prehistoric cliff-dwelling culture, a range war and a short Cold War mining boom, which is a lot of Arizona for one quiet stretch of gravel. For a Scottsdale camper the practical verdict is narrower: Sawmill Flat may or may not be there, so call ahead, carry water, and come for Workman Creek and the high pines rather than for this particular clearing.