What is Spencer Canyon Campground?
Spencer Canyon sits just below the top of the Catalina Highway at 8,180 feet, where the ponderosa of Rose Canyon has given way to Douglas fir, white fir and patches of aspen. It is the biggest campground on the mountain, 66 sites on a long loop, and the highest, which makes it the coolest in both senses: midsummer highs in the 70s, nights in the 40s. Each site has a table, fire ring and parking spur; there is drinking water at spigots and vault toilets the operator keeps clean and stocked. There is no lake here and nothing to do in camp but sit in the shade, which for a lot of people in August is the whole point.
The campground is run by Recreation Resource Management under a Forest Service permit, like Rose Canyon, and it is first come, first served. Two miles up the road is Summerhaven, the village near the summit, with a general store, restaurants, the Marshall Gulch picnic area and trailhead, and Ski Valley, where the Aspen Draw and Mount Lemmon trails climb to the 9,157-foot summit. Everything in the Catalinas’ high country is a ten-minute drive from your tent.
What you get is a cold night’s sleep in real conifer forest two and a half hours from Scottsdale, with water and a toilet, a village up the road and the Tucson skyline 6,000 feet below the viewpoints. What you do not get is a reservation, a hookup, a shower, a lake or a trail that starts at your site. For the lake and the reservable sites, Rose Canyon is four miles down the hill.
How to camp Spencer Canyon right
Pay like this. $31 a night single, up to six people; $49 double; $11 per extra vehicle, two vehicles per site; walk-ins and bicycles $1 each. Firewood is $10 a bundle. No reservations; pay on site, and the operator recommends buying any day pass online. The Coronado day-use pass is not valid here, because the campground is concession-run; Senior and Access passes discount only the holder’s own site.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east into Tucson, then east on Tanque Verde Road to the Catalina Highway. From Tanque Verde it is 4.2 miles to the forest boundary, which is mile post 0, and then 21.5 miles of paved switchbacks to the campground entrance on the left. About 155 minutes from Old Town, and the highway leg alone is close to an hour, because it climbs the equivalent of Canada to Mexico in life zones and every turnout has someone photographing it. The road is open year-round but closes above Windy Point during heavy snow, and chains or four-wheel drive are sometimes required in winter, when the campground is shut anyway.
Pick the season. April through October, weather dependent, and the operator warns it can close at any time in October. Call 928-978-2508 for current status. June through August is the reason it exists; a July weekend fills by Friday afternoon. Thunderstorms build over the summit most monsoon afternoons by two, so have the tarp up and dinner planned early. September is the quiet month and the aspens turn in early October, if the gate is still open.
Water and toilets. Potable water and vault toilets while operating, none in the off-season. No hookups, no dump station, no showers.
Choose the site. Drive the full loop before you commit. The outer, uphill sites back onto forest and get morning sun; the inner sites are nearer the spigots and the road. Trailers and small motorhomes up to 22 feet.
Hike from the top, not from camp. There is no trail worth the name from the campground. Drive or walk two miles up to Summerhaven for the Marshall Gulch trailhead, or on to Ski Valley for the Aspen Draw and Mount Lemmon trails to the summit and the observatory road. Dogs are allowed on leash in camp and on the summit trails; the Pusch Ridge bighorn closure that bars dogs from January through April is far below and does not touch summer campers.
Dogs. Leashed in camp. Pack and saddle stock are not permitted.
Skip it if a wasted drive would ruin the weekend. No reservations means a summer Saturday arrival can mean a full loop. Come Thursday, or have Rose Canyon booked as a fallback, or General Hitchcock lower down in mind. For the same altitude without the Tucson crowd, Riggs Flat on Mount Graham is the other sky island.
A road built by prisoners and a mountain that burned twice
The Santa Catalinas were Tohono O’odham country and then, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western Apache range; the mountain’s high meadows were summer camps, and during the Apache campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s the Army at Fort Lowell in Tucson kept a seasonal post on the mountain. The peak got its English name in 1881, when the botanist Sara Plummer Lemmon rode and walked to the summit with her husband John and the rancher E. O. Stratton, who had led them up from the north side; it was named for her on the spot. Summerhaven grew in the early 1900s as a cabin colony reached by a rough wagon road from Oracle on the back of the mountain, a day’s trip from Tucson.
The front-side road is the campground’s real origin. Frank Hitchcock, a former Postmaster General who had bought the Tucson Citizen, wanted a highway up the south face, and in 1933 the Secretary of Agriculture approved a 25-mile road from the desert to Summerhaven. Hitchcock’s method was a federal prison camp at the mountain’s foot whose inmates, mostly tax and immigration offenders, did the blasting and grading; during the Second World War the same camp held Japanese American conscientious objectors, among them Gordon Hirabayashi, whose Supreme Court case over the internment made his name, and the site is now the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Area. Hitchcock died in 1935 and never saw the road finished. It reached the top in 1950 and was named the General Hitchcock Highway; a Forest Service history puts the final paving in 1951. The upper campgrounds, Spencer Canyon among them, belong to the years after the road arrived, when the Forest Service built out the high country for the first generation of Tucsonans who could drive to 8,000 feet in an hour. The Forest Service does not publish a construction date for Spencer Canyon itself.
Then the mountain burned. The Bullock Fire in 2002 scorched the east side; the next summer, on June 17, 2003, the Aspen Fire started near the summit and ran for a month, burning about 84,750 acres and destroying 340 homes and businesses in Summerhaven, more than a third of the village, two miles above this campground. It was later ruled human-caused. The damage to the village’s water, power and streets alone ran to $4.1 million, and a Tucson volunteer effort called Lemmon Aid helped rebuild; most of the cabins you pass today date from after 2003. The forest around Spencer Canyon kept more of its canopy than the summit did, which is why the campground still sits in fir and aspen rather than in snags.
In 2020 it happened again from the other direction. A lightning strike on June 5 started the Bighorn Fire, which burned 119,987 acres of the Catalinas over seven weeks; Summerhaven and the upper mountain were evacuated on June 16 and the campgrounds stayed closed for the season. In between the fires, the road itself was remade: a Federal Lands Highway program begun in 1988 finished its last project in 2007, $15 million for shoulders, guardrails and passing lanes on a road that had been a prison-built two-lane since 1950. The campground is run today by Recreation Resource Management under permit, which is why your Coronado pass does not work at the gate.
Why it matters
Spencer Canyon is the clearest case in southern Arizona of a road making a mountain. Before 1950 the high Catalinas were a cabin colony’s secret reached from the back; after it, 8,000 feet was an hour from Tucson, and this campground is one of the things the Forest Service built to meet the cars. The two fires since then are the price of that popularity and of a century of fire suppression, and the village you drive through to reach Summerhaven’s pie is mostly a 2004 rebuild. For a Scottsdale visitor it is simple: the highest, coolest campground within three hours of Old Town, no reservations, 66 sites, come Thursday in July.