What is Scott Reservoir?
Scott Reservoir is a small irrigation lake in the ponderosas a few minutes above Lakeside, at about 6,800 feet, with a gravel lot, picnic tables, portable toilets and an accessible boat ramp on its east shore. It covers roughly 80 acres when full and averages about 10 feet deep, which is shallow enough to warm in summer and murky enough to keep the weeds down. Arizona Game and Fish stocks it with rainbow trout, locals fish it from shore and from small boats, and on a still morning it is as pretty as the bigger lakes down the hill and emptier than any of them. It is free.
It was, for a long time, also a place people camped, informally and without facilities. That ended on February 28, 2026, when the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests issued an order prohibiting camping on the forest land around the reservoir through February 28, 2029, citing unsanitary conditions. The Forest Service now lists the site as open for day use only, and this entry is filed as a lake, not a campground, because that is what it is. Some maps also show a Cooley Lake Campground nearby; the Forest Service publishes no campground page for Cooley Lake, so do not plan a night there without asking the Lakeside Ranger District.
What you get is a quiet, stocked pond in the pines with a ramp and a table, five minutes from groceries, for nothing. What you do not get is drinking water, a flush toilet, a campsite or a guarantee of a fish. For a visitor from Scottsdale it is a stop, not a destination, and a good one on the way to Show Low Lake or Fool Hollow.
How to do Scott Reservoir right
Pay nothing, reserve nothing. No pass, no permit, no reservations; day use only. The parking area is small and rarely full except on summer holiday weekends, when Pinetop-Lakeside’s population triples.
Get there. Take Shea Boulevard to SR 87 and the Beeline north to Payson, then SR 260 east over the Rim through Heber-Overgaard and Show Low to Lakeside, about 3 hours. Just east of the Lakeside Ranger District office on SR 260, turn north on Porter Mountain Road (Forest Road 45) and go 1.5 miles; the Scott Reservoir sign is on the right, and the short access road beyond it is rough in spots but fine for a careful car when dry. Figure 3 hours 15 minutes from Old Town.
Do not camp. Prohibited through February 2029 by Forest Order 03-01-07-26-001, and the violation is a Class B misdemeanor. The nearest legal camping is Show Low Lake, ten minutes away, or Fool Hollow in Show Low, both with toilets, which was the point of the order.
Bring your own water and paper. No drinking water. Portable toilets, picnic tables, a dumpster June through September; pack out trash the rest of the year, and bring toilet paper, because the portables run out.
Fish early, paddle early. The lake is stocked with catchable rainbows in spring, early summer and fall and holds bass and sunfish all year; a license is required from age 10. The Forest Service lists motorized boating as allowed, so check Game and Fish for current motor limits. Dawn is the hour: the water is glass, the trout are up and the wind has not started.
Pick the season, watch the sky. Open year-round as weather allows, with May through October for fishing and paddling. From July through September thunderstorms build over the Rim most afternoons and arrive fast; the Forest Service’s own page tells boaters to leave the water when storms approach, and a lightning strike on a small open lake is not theoretical. The monsoon field manual covers the pattern; be off the water by noon.
Dogs. Fine, under control, with water of their own; the lake water is warm and weedy by August.
Skip it if you want a lake day with a campsite attached. Woods Canyon Lake on the Rim has three campgrounds, a store and boat rentals an hour closer to Scottsdale, and Big Lake is the real White Mountains trout lake if you are driving this far anyway.
The irrigation pond that got too popular to sleep at
The country below the White Mountains was Western Apache land long before it was anybody’s fishing hole, and still is: the Fort Apache Reservation, home of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, begins a few miles south of the lake, and the streams that feed the Pinetop-Lakeside lakes rise on the reservation’s edge. The first non-Apache residents were Mormon families who arrived in the mid-1880s, settled the meadows along Show Low Creek and Porter Creek, and cut the ponderosa for sawmills, which were the area’s first industry. Lakeside took its name from the ponds those settlers made; Pinetop took its name from a saloon keeper’s nickname.
Scott Reservoir is one of those ponds, built later and bigger than most. It is an earthen dam across Porter Creek, about 38 feet high, impounding water for the farms downstream. The usual account, repeated by Arizona Game and Fish, dates it to 1928; the federal National Inventory of Dams records it as completed in 1945 and owned by the irrigation company that served Show Low, Pinetop and Woodland. The two dates may describe an original dam and a rebuilt one, or simply a records gap; nothing we found settles it, so take the lake as a product of the 1920s to 1940s, when every creek on this side of the Rim was being dammed for hay and cattle. Its job was irrigation, and the perennial inflow that keeps it stable in drought is the reason it has always held fish.
Recreation arrived the way it did on every irrigation lake in the Arizona high country: Game and Fish started stocking it, the Forest Service, which owns the land around it, added a lot, tables and eventually an accessible ramp, and nobody built anything else. Through the decades when Pinetop-Lakeside grew from a sawmill town into a summer colony for the Valley, incorporating as one town in 1984, Scott stayed the least developed of the in-town lakes, which was its appeal. People camped on the forest around it because they always had, with no toilets, no water and no one counting.
The forest nearly lost all of it in 2002. The Rodeo-Chediski Fire, started in two places on the Fort Apache Reservation in June and merged into a single blaze of more than 460,000 acres, emptied Show Low, Pinetop-Lakeside and Heber-Overgaard of some 30,000 people. The fire was held short of the towns, and the lake and its pines survived, which is why there is still a shaded shoreline to argue about.
The argument ended in 2026. On February 28 the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests issued Forest Order 03-01-07-26-001, prohibiting camping on the National Forest around the reservoir for three years, through February 28, 2029, citing unsanitary conditions from people using the area overnight without bathroom facilities. It is a blunt tool, and an honest one: the Forest Service had neither the money to build a campground here nor the staff to police a free one, so it closed the overnight use and kept the day use. Whether the order is renewed in 2029 depends on whether the lot stays clean in the meantime.
Why it matters
Scott Reservoir is a small case of a large Arizona pattern: a lake built for cows and hay a century ago, adopted by anglers because the state kept putting trout in it, and then loved to death by a Valley population that treats the White Mountains as its backyard. The camping ban is the Forest Service admitting that a free, unmanaged shoreline cannot survive 30,000 summer residents a few miles away. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: it is a fine free hour with a rod or a kayak on the way to a real campground, and nothing more. Fish it at dawn, leave it cleaner than you found it, and sleep at Show Low Lake.