What is Spider Rock Campground?
Ten miles up the South Rim Drive from the Welcome Center, a few miles before the pavement ends at the Spider Rock overlook, a hand-painted sign points into the pinyon and juniper to Spider Rock Campground. It belongs to Howard Smith, a Navajo man who grew up herding sheep on this plateau and on the canyon floor below, and who opened his family’s land to campers as a way of sharing the place on his own terms. There are 30-odd sites spread through the trees, each with an open fire pit, plus a cluster of forked-stick hogans he built from local wood, each with a wood stove inside.
There is a water fill, a dump station, composting toilets and a $4 solar shower. There is no electricity. The plateau sits at about 6,650 feet, a thousand feet higher and much quieter than the Navajo Parks campground in Chinle, and the Spider Rock overlook, with its sandstone spire of roughly 800 feet, is a few minutes’ drive on up the road. Howard also runs guided hikes and 4WD tours into the canyon, which is otherwise closed to visitors without a Navajo guide; spend a day with him and the overlooks start to make sense.
What you get is a hogan night on Navajo land with a host whose family has worked this canyon for generations, for $20 a site in cash. What you do not get is hookups, cards, flush toilets or a short drive: it is five and a half hours from Old Town, and rustic by design.
How to camp Spider Rock right
Call, and bring cash. $20 per night for a tent or RV site; $36 for groups of 7 to 14, plus $4 per person beyond 15; hogans priced by size and season. Cash, check or traveler’s check only; no cards. Reserve at 928-781-2014 or by email through the website; walk-ins usually find a site outside holiday weekends. Tents rent for $12, firewood is $7 a bundle and sold by the bundle, not the armload.
Get there. About 5 hours 30 minutes from Old Town. Follow the Chinle route: Loop 101 to SR 87 through Payson, SR 260 to Heber, SR 377 to Holbrook, I-40 east to US 191 at Chambers, and US 191 north 75 miles to Chinle. Turn east on Indian Route 7 past the Welcome Center and the Cottonwood Campground and stay on it as it becomes the South Rim Drive; the campground is on the left about 10 miles along, signed, about 3 miles before the Spider Rock overlook lot. All paved. The campground roads are dirt and fine for trailers when dry. Chinle, 12 miles back, has the last gas and groceries, and the Navajo Nation runs an hour ahead of Scottsdale in summer because it keeps daylight saving time.
Book the hogan. Small ones sleep one or two, medium up to four, large up to six. Each has a dirt or plank floor, a door facing east and a wood stove in the middle; you bring your own pad and bag and use the campground toilets and shower. A 25-degree spring or fall night turns comfortable.
Pick the season. Open every day of the year. Late April through October for tents; spring and fall are ideal, summer brings afternoon monsoon storms, and winter brings snow and nights well below freezing at 6,650 feet, which is exactly when the hogans earn their keep. The South Rim Drive is paved and plowed.
Water and power. No electric or water hookups. There is an RV water fill, a dump station, drinking water for sale with cold drinks and snacks, and composting or vault toilets. Bring a jug anyway. Generators run 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. only, and quiet hours are 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.
Go into the canyon with a guide. Apart from the White House Trail near the Welcome Center, the canyon floor requires a Navajo guide and a Navajo Nation backcountry permit. Ask Howard about his hikes the day you arrive, because the good half-day trips fill with people who planned ahead. Drive the last few miles to the Spider Rock overlook for sunset and again before breakfast, when nobody else is there; the sky on the plateau is as dark as the stargazing guide promises.
Follow Navajo Nation rules. No alcohol, firearms or fireworks anywhere on the Navajo Nation. Fires only when it is not too dry, and never from gathered wood. Dogs are welcome on a leash; cows, sheep and horses graze through the campground, so close your cooler and expect a horse at the tent flap at 6 a.m. Pitch at the far edge of the loop for a window of the canyon through the trees.
Skip it if you want flush toilets and a short walk to the Welcome Center: stay at Cottonwood Campground in Chinle instead. For higher country to the northeast, Tsaile Lake and Wagon Wheel are the Navajo Nation’s other small camps.
Five thousand years under Spider Woman’s rock
Canyon de Chelly has been lived in for close to 5,000 years, which makes it one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes in North America. Hunters camped under its walls long before farming; around 200 B.C. Basketmaker people began planting corn on the canyon floor, and their Ancestral Puebloan descendants built the cliff dwellings, White House and Antelope House among them, that the rim overlooks frame. Hopi farmers used the canyon on and off from about 1300 into the early 1700s. Then, early in the 1700s, Navajo families moved in from northern New Mexico, bringing sheep and, later, peach orchards, and Diné have farmed it, with one forced interruption, ever since. In Diné tradition the taller of the two Spider Rock spires is the home of Spider Woman, who taught the people to weave.
The canyon’s place in Navajo memory is also a place of violence. In 1805 a Spanish expedition under Lt. Antonio Narbona entered the canyon and killed 115 Navajos and took 33 captive, an event remembered at Massacre Cave on the north rim. In January 1864, Colonel Kit Carson’s troops marched through the canyon destroying hogans, flocks and peach orchards. The campaign broke resistance across the Navajo country and began the Long Walk: some 8,000 to 9,000 people forced roughly 300 miles to Bosque Redondo in New Mexico, where many died. The treaty signed at Fort Sumner on June 1, 1868 created the Navajo reservation, and on June 18 the people started home. The families who came back to these rims and fields are the ancestors of the families who live here now.
The Park Service arrived on unusual terms. Canyon de Chelly National Monument was established on April 1, 1931, but the land stayed Navajo Nation trust land, and it remains the only unit of the park system owned by a tribe and managed cooperatively with it. About 40 Navajo families still live, farm and graze inside the boundary. That arrangement is why the canyon floor is closed without a Navajo guide, why livestock wander the rim roads, and why businesses like this one exist at all: the land is family land first and a national monument second.
Spider Rock Campground is a small, modern piece of that history. No source we found gives the year Howard Smith opened it; what is documented is the family land on the Tse Ho Tso plateau, the hand-built hogans, the cash box and the guided trips into the canyon his family has used for generations. It is a family-run, guide-led alternative to the campground in Chinle, on Diné terms.
Why it matters
Canyon de Chelly is the clearest place in Arizona to see that a national monument can be someone’s home. The overlooks show cliff dwellings, but the canyon floor shows fields, hogans and sheep, and the reason you need a Navajo guide to walk among them is that the people who survived the Long Walk came back and stayed. Sleeping at a Navajo family’s campground instead of a government one is a small way to meet the place on those terms, and buying a weaving in Chinle rather than in Scottsdale is another; the guide to buying Native art explains why. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict: it is a long drive, so give it two nights, book a hogan in spring or fall, bring cash, and take the canyon tour.