What is Second Campground?
Where US 60 drops into Salt River Canyon and crosses the river, the north bank belongs to the White Mountain Apache Tribe and the south bank to the Tonto National Forest. A dirt road leaves the reservation side of the bridge and follows the river downstream, and about 6 miles along it is Second Campground: a primitive tribal camp of flat ground, rock fire rings and a vault toilet under the canyon walls, at roughly 3,000 feet. American Whitewater marks it as the designated primitive campground at mile 6 of the Upper Salt run, which is why in March and April it is full of outfitters’ trailers and people in drysuits. The rest of the cool season it is mostly empty.
The first nine miles of the Salt below the bridge are class III, and this is the takeout for the day run. If you do not boat, the reasons to come are the river itself, smallmouth bass and channel catfish, and a canyon night far from any town. Farther downstream the road ends and the canyon is wilderness on the forest side and closed tribal land on the other.
What you get is the only developed place to sleep on the Upper Salt without a wilderness launch, on land that has been Apache for as long as there have been Apache, for the price of a daily permit. What you do not get is water, a table you can count on, a reservation, a signal, or any permission to wander beyond the corridor the permit names.
How to camp it right
Buy the permit first, in the right place. The Black and Salt River Special Use permit, posted at $25 per adult per day, one per person, no reservations; children under 10 are free with a permitted adult. It is the only permit that covers camping in the canyon corridor; a standard tribal camping permit does not. Vendors are the Carrizo Store (US 60 at SR 73, about 15 miles up the hill from the bridge), the Game and Fish office at 100 W. Fatco Road in Whiteriver, the Hon-Dah stores on SR 260, Sportsman’s Warehouse in Show Low and Western Drug in Springerville. The tribe’s online system was down through 2026. From the Valley you reach the bridge before any vendor, so buy the day before or plan to drive up to Carrizo and back.
Get there. US 60 east through Globe and Miami, then the long climb and descent through Salt River Canyon to the bridge, about 2 hours 25 minutes from Old Town. Just across the bridge on the reservation side, turn onto the dirt river road and follow it downstream, keeping the river on your left, for about 6 miles. Dry, it is a slow sedan road with a few exposed stretches cut into the slope; wet, it is clay, and you should not be on it. Allow 25 minutes. There is no sign saying “second”; you will know it by the toilet and the fire rings.
Pick the season. Open all year, but October through April is the window; summer in the canyon bottom runs well past 100 degrees and the road is a bad idea in monsoon storms. March and April are rafting season and the camp fills with outfitters on weekends; November through February you may have it alone.
Camp high and back. At least 75 feet from the water, which the tribe enforces, and above the high-water line in spring, because the Salt comes up fast with snowmelt and the canyon is a flash-flood channel in any season.
Water. None. Bring all of it; the river is for bass.
Fish for what is there. Smallmouth bass and channel catfish, not trout; the tribe sells a second-pole permit for this stretch. The permit covers fishing, hiking and sightseeing in the corridor as well as camping.
Know the rules. Firearms are banned on the reservation, fires must stay small, and you pack out everything, including the human waste the tribe asks primitive campers to remove. Dogs on a leash no longer than 10 feet. Respect the closed area west of Salt River Draw: non-members may only drive through it on Route G1. Cibecue Falls, the hike most people pair with this camp, was closed until further notice on the tribe’s pages in 2026 and needs its own $45 permit when open.
Skip it if you want a table, trout and a tap. Lower Log Road up the hill is the tribe’s developed campground; Diamond Creek Junction is the Black River equivalent of this one. For a Forest Service river camp without tribal permits, the Gila River at Winkelman is the nearest. For the tame lower Salt and its horses, see the tubing guide.
The river that is a border
The Salt River Canyon is a line on more than one map. The north bank and everything above it is the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, about 1.67 million acres of the White Mountain Apache Tribe; the south bank is the Tonto National Forest. The canyon was the southern edge of Western Apache country long before either, and the Cibecue and Carrizo bands farmed the side creeks that drop into it while the Salado, centuries earlier, left granaries in the cliffs.
The reservation grew out of a fort the Apache asked for. In 1870 the Army established Camp Apache, later Fort Apache, on the White River at the suggestion of White Mountain Apache leaders who wanted protection from their enemies and from the settlers; in 1871 General George Crook enrolled 50 White Mountain men as scouts, and Crook’s later efforts helped the tribe keep a large portion of its homeland as a reservation when most Apache were being concentrated at San Carlos. The peace was not simple. On August 30, 1881, troops from Fort Apache rode to Cibecue Creek, about 25 miles up the hill from this camp, to arrest Nock-ay-det-klinne, a medicine man and chief of the Canyon Creek band whose dances alarmed the agency. He was killed in the fight that followed, the Army lost seven or eight men, Apaches attacked the fort two days later, and the uprising that resulted sent Geronimo and Juh off the reservation for two more years of war. The Army left Fort Apache in 1922, handed it to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1923, and the boarding school that followed is now a National Historic Landmark.
The road and the government came in the same decade. US 60 was pushed through the canyon in the 1930s, and the Salt River Canyon Bridge, a steel arch at the bottom of the grade, carried it across the river in 1934; it was listed on the National Register in 1988 and kept as a pedestrian overlook when a new bridge replaced it in 1996. The same year the bridge opened, the White Mountain Apache adopted a constitution under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, and in 1936 elected the tribal council that governs the reservation and, through its Game and Fish Department, this campground.
Recreation on the river is a late arrival. In 1984 Congress designated the Salt River Canyon Wilderness, 32,101 acres on the forest side downstream of here, with 27 sets of rapids and a Forest Service permit required for trips between March 1 and May 15. The reservation bank was not included; it stayed tribal land under tribal rules, which is why a camp like this one can exist six miles below the bridge where the forest side has nothing. The tribe’s Black and Salt River Special Use permit, and the day run from the bridge to Second Campground that outfitters now sell by the thousand each spring, are the result. The tribe’s price list has climbed from $15 to $20 to $25 in the pages still online, the online permit system has been down for an extended stretch, and Cibecue Falls, the canyon’s most-photographed side trip, is closed until the tribe says otherwise.
Why it matters
Second Campground is a lesson in whose land you are on. The same river is a national forest wilderness on one bank and a sovereign nation’s territory on the other, with different permits, different rules and different histories, and the camp sits on the side that asked for a fort in 1870 and has governed itself since 1936. It is also, plainly, the best place within three hours of Scottsdale to sleep beside a big river in a deep canyon without a lottery. The verdict: buy the permit the day before, go between November and April, camp high, bring every drop of water, and treat the tribe’s rules as the law they are.