What is Seven Springs Recreation Area?
Twenty miles past the last stoplight in Carefree, Cave Creek Road turns to gravel, climbs through the chaparral and drops into a canyon where the creek actually runs most of the year and the sycamores are big enough to shade a car. This is Seven Springs, and it has been the Valley’s nearest green campground since the Civilian Conservation Corps built it in 1934. The CCC Campground, at about 3,300 feet, still carries their initials and is where you sleep.
The campground is modest: spread-out sites with tables and fire rings, vault toilets, no drinking water, no trailers over 16 feet, $16 a night. A quarter mile south is the Cave Creek Group Campground, a reservable site for up to 150 people with ramadas and a campfire circle, built the same year. A few hundred yards north is the free Cave Creek Trailhead, where Cave Creek Trail #4 heads downstream along the water and the Bronco, Skunk Tank and Cottonwood trails loop into the hills. On the way in you pass Sears-Kay Ruin, a Hohokam hilltop village, and the Bronco Trailhead.
The Seven Springs Picnic Site itself, the ankle-deep swimming spot the whole area is named for, is currently listed as closed: its entrance road washes out regularly and there is no vehicle access. You can still walk to the creek from the campground. What you get here is shade, water you can hear from your tent, and a trail out the back of camp; what you do not get is a tap, a hookup, a reservation or a guarantee of a site on a March Saturday.
How to camp Seven Springs right
Pay before you leave town. The CCC Campground is first come, first served at $16 per site per night, paid with a Tonto fee-machine pass; Senior and Access pass holders pay half. There is no machine at the creek and no cell signal, so buy the pass at the Cave Creek Ranger Station (40202 N. Cave Creek Road) on the way up. The group campground is $75 a night and reservation-only on recreation.gov, up to a year ahead. The trailhead is free and needs no Tonto Pass.
Get there. Take Scottsdale Road or Pima Road north to Carefree, then Cave Creek Road north out of town. It becomes Forest Road 24 and stays paved for about 11 miles, passing the turn for Bartlett Dam Road and the Bronco Trailhead. The last 9 miles are gravel, graded and passable to a careful sedan when dry but narrow, with blind curves and a few creek dips. Figure about 75 minutes from Old Town with no traffic, closer to 90 if you are towing anything. The campground is on the left just before the group site; the trailhead lot is a little farther on. Both are small.
Arrive early in the good months. October through April is the window, and the week after a good rain is the best of it. The campground is small and fills with Valley families by Friday noon in March and April; the group site next door can be loud on a reserved weekend. Pick a site away from the road and toward the creek.
Water. None anywhere in the area. The creek is pretty and untreatable: Giardia, and a trickle by June. Carry a gallon per person per day.
Camp above the creek. The whole canyon is a flash-flood channel during monsoon and in a wet winter, and the picnic site’s road has been washed away more than once. If rain is forecast anywhere in the Bradshaws or the Cave Creek headwaters, do not camp in the wash and do not drive through a flooded dip. Summer is hot but shaded, and quieter.
Walk from camp. Cave Creek Trail #4 is easy and shaded for its first two miles, which is exactly the right length for a morning walk from the tent; the Skunk Tank and Cottonwood trails make a longer loop into the hills. The riparian corridor is one of the best in the Tonto for birds.
Dogs and horses. Dogs on leash, everywhere. Horses are welcome on the trails and at the Cave Creek and Bronco trailheads, not inside the group campground.
Skip it if you want hookups, water or a guaranteed site. Cave Creek Regional Park is 30 minutes closer, takes reservations and has showers; Horseshoe Campground on the Verde has cottonwoods and a bigger river. For a day in the same canyon without the gravel, Spur Cross Ranch at the bottom of the creek is the county’s version.
The campground the Corps left behind
People have camped by this creek for a thousand years. Around 1050 Hohokam farmers built a fortified village of about 40 rooms on a knob above Cave Creek, a few miles below the springs, and lived in it for roughly a century and a half; its stone foundations are Sears-Kay Ruin, on the National Register, with a one-mile loop trail you pass on the drive in. After the Hohokam the canyon belonged to the Yavapai and the Tonto Apache, who used the creek’s permanent water and the springs above it until the Army’s campaigns of the early 1870s drove them to the reservations.
The Americans came up the creek for gold. Soldiers from Fort McDowell settled what became the town of Cave Creek in 1870, prospectors from the Bradshaw Mountains struck gold there in 1873, and the stage road and the mines pushed north into the hills through the rest of the decade. The springs at the head of the canyon were a stock watering stop and a place to get out of the heat long before anyone called them a recreation area. In 1905 the whole canyon came under federal management when the Tonto Forest Reserve was proclaimed on October 3 to protect the watershed above the Roosevelt Dam then being built; it became the Tonto National Forest in 1907.
What turned a watering stop into a campground was the Depression. In 1934 the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal program that put unemployed young men to work on federal land, built the campground, the group camp a quarter mile south and the picnic ground at the springs. The stone fire rings, the retaining walls and the layout of spread-out sites under the sycamores are theirs, and the campground has carried the Corps’ initials as its official name ever since. The Forest Service’s own page does not give the camp’s number or say how many men worked here; the 1934 date is the one that survives.
The canyon’s recent history is written in fire and water. On June 21, 2005, lightning started the Cave Creek Complex Fire, which burned 243,950 acres across the district, at the time the third-largest wildfire in Arizona’s history; the desert above the canyon still shows it in the missing saguaros. And the creek that is the reason to come has repeatedly taken the picnic site’s entrance road with it, until the Forest Service gave up listing it as open. The campground and the trailhead, built on higher ground, have outlasted the picnic ground the whole place is named for.
Nothing new is planned. The campground has no water, no reservations and no site count, and the last nine miles of road are the same gravel the Corps drove in on.
Why it matters
Seven Springs is the clearest example within an hour of Scottsdale of what the New Deal built in Arizona and what the Forest Service has been able to keep. A 1934 campground still works because it was laid out by people who understood shade and flood, and it still has no tap because nobody has paid to add one. It is also the Valley’s nearest riparian canyon, the place to show a child what a desert creek looks like when it runs. The verdict is plain: in the cool months, on a weekday or an early Friday, this is the best cheap overnight north of Scottsdale. Buy the pass in town, bring the water, and sleep above the creek.