What is Sinkhole Campground?
Sinkhole is the small, orderly campground on the way in to Willow Springs Lake: 26 back-in sites in a single loop of ponderosa pine at 7,560 feet, half a mile north of SR 260 and about a mile from the lake by foot path. The roads and spurs are chip-sealed, each site has a fire ring with a grill and a picnic table, and the campground has drinking water, accessible vault toilets, trash service and a camp host. It is named for the collapsed limestone sinkholes that pock this stretch of the Rim; the Sinkhole Trail from Canyon Point visits one.
The place to compare it with is the Woods Canyon Lake complex ten minutes west, where Aspen Campground alone has well over a hundred sites and the lake has a store and a rental dock. Sinkhole is a quarter the size and a step quieter, with the same elevation, the same pines and a lake you can walk to. The trade is that there are no showers and no hookups; those are at Canyon Point, five miles east.
What you get is a reservable, watered, hosted Rim campground close to the pavement with a stocked trout lake a mile’s walk away, at a quarter the scale of its neighbors. What you do not get is a shower, a hookup, a dump station, a lake at your site or real silence, since SR 260’s trucks are audible on the grade at night.
How to camp at Sinkhole right
Reserve and pay like this. A single site is $25 per night for up to eight people and one vehicle; each extra vehicle is $12 per night. Sites 14 through 26 reserve on recreation.gov; sites 1 through 13 are first come, first served, paid at the campground. Senior and Access passes take half off the single-site fee at most Forest Service campgrounds; confirm when you book. Reserve one of sites 14 through 26 the moment your dates are firm; the reservable half of a 26-site campground on the Rim goes fast for summer weekends and holiday weeks. If you are gambling on a first-come site, arrive Thursday, or on a Friday before noon, and have Canyon Point as your fallback.
Get there. Take Loop 101 or Loop 202 to SR 87, the Beeline, north about 90 minutes to Payson, then SR 260 east for roughly 30 miles, up the Rim face past Christopher Creek to the plateau. A mile or so past the Rim Visitor Information Station and the Woods Canyon Lake turnoff, turn left on the signed Willow Springs Lake Road (FR 149); the campground entrance is about half a mile in, before the lake. Everything is paved. Figure about 2 hours 15 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. Forest Lakes, four miles further east on SR 260, has gas, a small grocery and a phone signal. The nearest real town is Payson.
Pick the season. Generally May 1 to October 31, conditions permitting, and the opening slides later in a snowy spring. Late May through early July and September are the best weeks. Expect heavy rain most afternoons in July and August and nights in the 40s even midsummer; set up the rain fly first and plan the hike for the morning, and read the monsoon field manual. In early October it can freeze. Bring the sleeping bag you would take to Flagstaff.
Water and toilets. Potable water and accessible vault toilets, yes. Showers, hookups and a dump station, no.
Fire. Fires are allowed in the rings when no restrictions are in effect, and Rim fire restrictions arrive most years by June. Check the Apache-Sitgreaves alerts page the week you go; gas stoves are always fine.
The lake. The walk to the lake is a real mile on a forest path, so a kayak is a car trip, not a carry; the boat ramp is a short drive up the same road. Willow Springs is a stocked trout lake with a 10-horsepower motor limit and no fee to fish or launch.
Dogs. Welcome on a leash, attended at all times; the rules allow the host to send nuisance dogs home without a refund.
Skip it if silence or a hot shower is the priority. The dispersed sites along the Rim Road are the answer to the first; Canyon Point, five miles east with showers and electric sites, is the answer to the second. For the lake at your door, Rim Campground at Woods Canyon is the trade-off in the other direction.
A lake the state built for the weekend
The Rim top is limestone over sandstone, and where the Kaibab limestone has dissolved it has dropped, leaving the collapse pits that give this campground its name; some hold water after snowmelt, and the Apache who hunted the Rim’s elk and turkey knew them. This was White Mountain and Tonto Apache country into the 1870s, when General Crook’s Army cut a wagon road along the Rim’s edge from Camp Verde to Fort Apache a few miles south of here, the road the Rim Road, FR 300, still follows. On July 17, 1882, 25 miles west near General Springs, the Army and about 60 White Mountain Apache fought the Battle of Big Dry Wash, the last major engagement between the two.
The lake is younger than most of the people who camp beside it. Willow Springs Canyon had no lake and no permanent stream, just a drainage that ran with snowmelt into Chevelon Creek, until the Arizona Game and Fish Department dammed it in 1967 to make a trout lake for the Valley’s weekenders: 158 acres, about 60 feet deep, at 7,513 feet, with the department holding the sole water rights and the lake filling on snowmelt alone. There is no inflow to speak of; when the lake spills, the water runs 3.4 miles down Willow Springs Canyon, joins Woods Canyon to form Chevelon Creek and flows another 12 miles to Chevelon Canyon Lake. It was built for recreation and nothing else, which is unusual in a state where almost every lake is a reservoir for a city or a farm, and it has become one of the most visited lakes in the region for the plainest of reasons: it is the closest cool water to Phoenix on a paved road.
The campgrounds followed the pavement. As SR 260 was built up the Rim face and across the plateau, the Forest Service laid out Sinkhole, Canyon Point, Aspen, Rim and the rest of the Rim Lakes campgrounds in the 1960s and 1970s; Sinkhole’s own construction year is not on the agency’s pages, and I could not pin it. It was rebuilt at some point with the chip-sealed spurs and accessible toilets it has now, and half its sites moved onto the national reservation system.
The fire that defines the Rim country east of here passed it by. The Rodeo-Chediski Fire of June 2002, set near Cibecue and merged with a second fire near Chediski Peak, burned 468,000 acres toward Show Low, Heber-Overgaard and the Rim communities before it was controlled on July 7, the largest fire in Arizona’s history until the Wallow Fire of 2011. The Rim Lakes stayed green, and inherited the campers who had lost their usual spots to the east. Fire restrictions have arrived almost every June since.
What is coming is the same pressure as everywhere on the Rim: more reservations, earlier, for the same 26 sites.
Why it matters
Sinkhole sits beside a lake that exists only because the state decided, in 1967, that the Valley needed somewhere cool to fish on a paved road, and the campground is the plain, well-run product of that decision: water, toilets, a host, a reservation and a mile’s walk to the trout. It explains the Rim Lakes as a whole, which are not reservoirs but recreation built on snowmelt, and why the Rim is the first place Phoenix goes when it gets hot. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is practical. Book sites 14 through 26 early, bring a cold-weather bag in July, carry the kayak by car, and you have the quietest reservable campground on the Rim’s busiest road, two hours and a quarter from Old Town.