What is Second Crossing?
The East Verde River is the small, cold stream that drains the Rim above Payson and eventually finds the Verde near Childs. For about two miles north of town, Houston Mesa Road crosses and recrosses it, and the Forest Service has turned each ford into a day-use site: First Crossing at 7 miles from SR 87, Water Wheel at 7.5, Second Crossing at 8 and Third Crossing at 8.5. Each is a gravel pull-off, a vault toilet, a few picnic tables, and a river you can stand in up to your knees under ponderosas at 5,100 feet.
Second Crossing lacks Water Wheel’s falls and the crowd that comes with them, and it has a little more flat ground along the bank than Third. The water is clear and genuinely cold even in June, there is real shade, and on a weekday in May you may have it to yourself. Herons work the pools, the river holds small trout and smallmouth bass, and the sound of the water covers the road. It is a modest place, and that is its virtue; the big-ticket attractions of the Rim country are elsewhere, and this is where Payson families go when they want an afternoon in the water without a drive.
The one thing it is not is a campground. Several maps, including the one this guide started from, label it one. The Forest Service lists all four crossings as day use only, and a long-running Payson district order bans camping along several nearby stretches of the East Verde. If you want to sleep here, you sleep at Houston Mesa at the bottom of the road. What you get is a cheap, shaded, swimmable river two hours from Scottsdale. What you do not get is water, trash service, a lifeguard or a tent site.
How to do Second Crossing right
Pay before you arrive. A Tonto Daily Pass is required and must be displayed. It is $8 if you buy it in advance at a Forest Service office or vendor and $12 from the machine at the site. The nearest machines are at Houston Mesa Campground and Shoofly, and the Payson Ranger Station is closed weekends and sells nothing after 4 p.m. on weekdays, so the campground machine is the practical stop. The Tonto Discovery Pass (annual) and the America the Beautiful pass are accepted. For how the pass system works across the forest, see the Tonto National Forest entry.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, and follow it about 75 miles to Payson. Stay on 87 through town; a mile north of the SR 260 junction, turn right onto Houston Mesa Road (Forest Road 199). Houston Mesa Campground is immediately on your left. Continue north about 8 miles, past the Shoofly Village ruin turnoff and a couple of subdivisions, down into the river canyon. Second Crossing is the pull-off just past Water Wheel. The road is paved this far. Count on about 110 minutes from Old Town.
Park early or go midweek. Parking is a dirt lot for a couple of dozen cars. On a hot Saturday from Memorial Day on, Water Wheel’s lot fills by mid-morning and the overflow spills to Second and Third; arrive before ten or come on a weekday. Second and Third are quieter than Water Wheel in any season.
Pick the season by the water. Open all year. March through June has the best flow, when snowmelt off the Rim keeps the pools full and the river moving. By late June in a dry year it is barely moving. Winter is cold and quiet and perfectly good for a picnic. Summer weekends are crowded, and summer afternoons carry the one real hazard here.
Respect the flood risk. This is not boilerplate. On July 15, 2017, a storm over the Highline Fire burn scar sent a wall of water and ash down Ellison Creek, which enters the East Verde just upstream of this site, and killed ten members of one family at a swimming hole. No warning reached them. From July through mid-September, look at the radar before you walk down, and get out of the river at the first sign of rain upstream, whatever the sky looks like over your head. The flash flood entry explains why, and the monsoon field manual covers the season.
Bring water, take trash. Vault toilets are serviced daily. There is no drinking water anywhere on this road and no trash service. Carry a jug and a bag.
Dogs. On leash. They will want to be in the river, which is fine; pick up after them, because Payson sits downstream.
Skip it if you want a destination rather than a swimming hole. Water Wheel has the falls and the photographs. Tonto Natural Bridge, 20 minutes farther up the Beeline, is the Rim country’s real spectacle and has a parking lot that does not fill. Second Crossing is for the afternoon after you have done those.
Four fords and one creek
The East Verde is a river people lived beside long before anyone swam in it. The Dilzhe’e, the Tonto Apache, held the country from the Rim down into the Tonto Basin, and before them farmers of the pueblo tradition built Shoofly Village, a walled settlement of as many as 250 people, on the mesa 2.8 miles up this road, occupied from about A.D. 1000 to 1250 and abandoned, probably in drought, two centuries before the Apache arrived. The Army ended Apache life on the river in the 1870s: the Rio Verde Reserve near Camp Verde took them in 1871, was dissolved in 1875, and the people were marched to San Carlos. Some walked back a generation later to find Green Valley, founded in 1882 and renamed Payson for an Illinois congressman in 1884, standing on their land. It took until 1972 for the Tonto Apache to get a reservation: 85 acres south of town, the smallest in Arizona.
The crossings got their names from settlers. In 1897 Tom Greer brought his family up from Texas and dug in on the flat now called First Crossing, a cabin that was closer to a dugout, with the cook stove outside; the Forest Service made them bury it in the 1950s. The Greers built a big wooden water wheel to lift river water into an irrigation ditch, and though the wheel itself rotted away decades ago and local histories disagree about which Greer built it and when, it gave the site a half mile downstream its name. The land under all of it became public on October 3, 1905, when the Tonto Forest Reserve was proclaimed, a national forest two years later.
Recreation arrived with pavement. The Beeline Highway reached Payson in 1958 and turned a full-day drive into two hours; within a generation the East Verde’s fords were a Valley habit, and the Forest Service built the toilets and gravel lots that the Tonto Pass, introduced in 1999, now pays for. Houston Mesa Road was paved to the river. The water itself changed too: SRP pumps about 11,000 acre-feet a year from the Blue Ridge reservoir on the Rim, now called C.C. Cragin, through a pipeline that releases into the East Verde at Washington Park, with 3,000 acre-feet of it reserved for Payson. In a dry June, part of what you are standing in came out of a pipe.
Then came 2017. The Highline Fire burned 7,198 acres below the Rim from June 10 to July 20, stripping the slopes above Ellison Creek. On the afternoon of July 15, a storm over the burn scar put down heavy rain miles upstream, and at about 3:30 a surge of water, ash and logs several feet high came down Ellison Creek through a swimming hole where the sky was clear. Ten members of one extended family died. Ellison Creek enters the East Verde between Water Wheel and Second Crossing; the water that killed them passed through this site minutes later. It was the deadliest flash flood in Arizona in decades, and it is why every Forest Service sign on this road now says what it says.
The current Payson Ranger District order, running from 2024 to 2029, bans camping along the East Verde corridor here, which is why the campground label on so many maps is wrong. The Forest Service’s own listing is plain: four day-use sites, vault toilets, no water, no camping.
Why it matters
Second Crossing is the Rim country at its most ordinary, and ordinary is the point: a cold creek, a few tables, a two-dollar difference in where you buy the pass. It also explains three things about northern Arizona in one place. The Tonto Apache were removed from this river and given back 85 acres a century later. The water in the river is partly engineered, piped from a reservoir a mountain away. And a sunny day here can kill you, because the creek that feeds this stretch drains a burn scar, and the storm that fills it may be out of sight. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: go in May, pay the $8 in Payson, pick Second or Third over Water Wheel, and leave the river the moment it rains anywhere above you.