What is Show Low Lake Campground?
Show Low Lake is a 100-acre reservoir on Show Low Creek, deep for its size at 33 to 50 feet, that Navajo County runs as a park with a concession-operated campground on its wooded shore. At about 6,500 feet in the pines between Show Low and Lakeside, it is the plain, practical alternative to the state park up the road: 75 campsites with tables and fire rings, some with 30-amp electric, a handful of premium lakeside sites, two group areas by the spillway, restrooms, a dump station, seasonal showers, a playground, day-use ramadas and a small store that sells bait and rents boats from May to mid-September.
The lake is why serious people come. It has produced Arizona’s last five state-record walleye, the latest at 16 pounds 2 ounces, and it holds rainbow trout, bass, channel catfish and sunfish. Motors are limited to 10 horsepower, so it stays quiet. It is also open all year, which almost nothing else in the White Mountains with a restroom can say.
What you get is a cheap, plain, year-round campground with electricity on the best walleye water in the state, in a town with every store you forgot. What you do not get is solitude, full hookups, or any of the water, showers and store between October and May.
How to camp it right
Reserve by the night count. Standard sites $24 plus tax, pull-throughs $26, lakeside $30, electric $34, each with a $10 reservation fee. Reserve online or at (928) 537-4126; reserved sites need two nights on weekends and three on holiday weekends. Some sites stay first come, first served at $24. Check-in 2 p.m., check-out 1 p.m. The lakeside sites A through F are the best $6 upgrade in the White Mountains.
Get there. Take Shea Boulevard to SR 87 and the Beeline north to Payson, then SR 260 east over the Rim and through Heber-Overgaard to Show Low. Continue south on SR 260 toward Lakeside, turn east on Show Low Lake Road and follow it to the campground entrance at 5800 E. Show Low Lake Road. Figure 3 hours 10 minutes from Old Town. The entrance station is staffed in season; after hours, reserved campers follow posted instructions.
Pick the season by what you need running. May through September has everything on: water, dump station, showers, store, rentals. October is cold, quiet and good for fishing, with the services off. Winter is for the hardy, with snow and nights well below freezing. Monsoon storms roll through most July and August afternoons.
Water and facilities. Water, the dump station and showers are free to registered campers but shut off from fall winterization until early May. Unregistered visitors pay $10 for a shower or a dump.
Fish it like the locals. Walleye at dawn along the dam and the drop-offs, trout from the stocking truck April through September, bass in the coves. Motors are 10 horsepower or less; anyone 10 or older needs an Arizona license.
Bears and fire. Black bears visit a campground that sits inside town limits. Food in vehicles, trash in dumpsters, fires only in the provided rings, nothing in the fire rings but wood. Fire restrictions here follow the city and county; fireworks are illegal in Show Low.
Dogs. Leash of 6 feet or less, always.
Skip it if you want quiet or a hookup beyond electric. It is a county campground in town, close-packed and busy on summer weekends, with services that shut off half the year. For the full-service version, see Fool Hollow; for a free, higher, quieter Forest Service site with no amenities, keep driving to Hoyer or Big Lake; for the small lake nobody fishes, Scott Reservoir is ten minutes away.
A copper company’s lake named for a card game
Show Low Creek runs off the edge of the White Mountain Apache homeland, and the pine country around it was Apache ground when Americans arrived; the Mogollon pueblos along Silver Creek and the Little Colorado had been empty since the 1400s. The town’s founding story is the one on every sign: Corydon Cooley, an Army scout, and Marion Clark homesteaded the creek in the mid-1870s, decided the ranch was too small for two, and settled it over a hand of Seven Up. Clark told Cooley to “show low” and win; Cooley cut the deuce of clubs, took the ranch, and the town and its main street, Deuce of Clubs, took the name. Cooley later ran a hotel, and the lumber town of McNary briefly bore his name.
The lake is a piece of Arizona’s water plumbing, not a local project. The Phelps Dodge Corporation needed water for its copper pits and smelters at Morenci, on the far side of the state, and the Salt River Project needed storage. Their first trade built Horseshoe Dam on the Verde between 1944 and 1946: the company paid for the dam and took an equal amount of Black River water for the mines. Under a second exchange, Phelps Dodge dammed Show Low Creek in 1952 and 1953 to make Show Low Lake, a 100-acre reservoir up to 50 feet deep whose stored water let the company take an equal amount from the Black River; Arizona Days and Ways, the Arizona Republic’s Sunday magazine, reported the “birth of a lake” in November 1953. The third trade, in 1965, was Blue Ridge Reservoir on the Rim, now C.C. Cragin. All three lakes were built by a mining company for a utility in the Valley, and all three became recreation sites by accident.
Show Low got its pair in 1957, when the Game and Fish Department dammed Fool Hollow Wash and Show Low Creek a few miles downstream to make Fool Hollow Lake, flooding the old community of Adair. Fool Hollow went to the state parks system in the 1990s and became the polished one, with paved loops and full hookups. Show Low Lake went to Navajo County, which runs it as a park and turned the campground over to a concessionaire; the plain tables, the 30-amp posts and the seasonal store are what a county budget buys.
The fish made the place. Walleye, a Great Lakes species stocked in a handful of Arizona reservoirs, grew faster in Show Low Lake’s cold, deep water than anywhere else in the state, and the lake has produced the last five Arizona state records, the most recent 16 pounds 2 ounces. The 10-horsepower limit, set for a small lake inside town, kept it a fishing lake rather than a wake lake. Rainbows from the stocking truck, bass, catfish and sunfish round it out, and the Game and Fish Department’s regional fishing guide lists it as a year-round water, which is why the campground stays open through the snow.
What is coming is modest: rate cards that creep a few dollars a year, the same seasonal shutoffs, and a town that keeps growing toward the lake. The campground has not changed in character since the concession began, and the walleye do not seem to mind.
Why it matters
Show Low Lake is the least romantic lake in the White Mountains and the one that best explains them. It was built by a copper company to move water to the Valley, named for a card game, handed to a county, and turned into the state’s best walleye fishery by a fish from the Great Lakes. It tells you that almost every lake you camp beside in Arizona is a water deal first and a campground second. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is practical: if Fool Hollow is full, or you want electricity for $34, or you fish, book a lakeside site here, keep the cooler in the truck, and go in October when the services are off and the walleye are on.