What is Stewart Campground?
Four Forest Service campgrounds sit along the paved stretch of Cave Creek Canyon above Portal, and Stewart is the second one in, 2.3 miles up Forest Road 42. Where Sunny Flat, a mile farther, is an open meadow with the cliffs overhead, Stewart is a grove: tall Arizona cypress and sycamores close over a loop of pull-in sites along the creek at about 5,100 feet, and the light under them is green even at noon. The sites have tables and fire rings, there are vault toilets, and water runs from a tap from roughly May to October, when the Forest Service shuts it off ahead of the first freeze. Trailers to 16 feet fit the pull-ins; the Forest Service calls this one of the better canyon camps for a small RV.
Its location is the argument for it. Across the road a spur joins the Cave Creek Nature Trail, the easy lower-canyon path between Sunny Flat and the Silver Peak trailhead. A short way up the canyon the Cathedral Vista Trail, three tenths of a mile and nearly flat, ends at the best cheap view of the rock walls. And just beyond that, the South Fork road turns off toward the trail where elegant trogons have nested every summer for as long as anyone has counted, which is why the people at the next table may have flown in from Norway. Birding is good right in camp; so, the Forest Service notes, are black bears.
What you get is shade, a creek, and the best birding address in the canyon for $20 a night. What you do not get is a reservation, a cliff view from your chair, winter water, or a site at all after mid-morning on a spring weekend: third-party listings count 6 to 12 sites, and the Forest Service does not publish a number.
How to camp Stewart right
Bring cash and arrive early. $20 single, $40 double, cash or check at the campground, first come, first served, 14 days; day use $8 per vehicle or $10 per week. Senior and Access passes pay half for the holder’s own site. With fewer than a dozen sites, April and May weekends fill early; take a site at the upstream end for the most privacy.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east through Tucson, Willcox and San Simon into New Mexico to US 80, south 28 miles past Rodeo to Portal Road, west 7 miles to Portal, then 2.3 miles up FR 42. All paved; about 270 minutes from Old Town. Portal has a cafe-store, but the Forest Service notes there are no gas stations in Portal or Rodeo, so fill the tank before you leave the interstate. The dirt crossing of the range from the Chiricahua National Monument side over Onion Saddle is scenic, slow and closed in winter.
Pick the season. April and May for birds, fall for weather. Summer is trogon season and also monsoon season. In winter the water is off, which empties the place; haul water from Sunny Flat, which has a year-round tap a mile up the road, and enjoy having the canyon to yourself.
Watch the creek. The campground sits on Cave Creek and the Forest Service says it can close for flood risk; FR 42 itself closes for snow, floods or fire danger. A storm high in the range can send water through the canyon under a clear sky, so read the flash flood rules and call the Douglas Ranger District at (520) 364-3468 if rain is forecast.
Camp by the rules. Trailers to 16 feet, no hookups, two vehicles and ten people per site, no horses or pack stock. Black bears are active: food and trash go in the vehicle or the bear-proof bins, every scrap, every night. Quiet hours are 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., which the birders enforce themselves since they are up at five. Dogs on leash.
Walk to the birds. The South Fork turnoff is a two-minute walk, the trees around the sites hold warblers, and the creek is loud enough to drown out your neighbors. Do the Cathedral Vista walk at the end of the day when the cliffs go orange. Our desert wildlife field guide covers the coatis and the rest of what you will meet.
Skip it if you want the cliffs from your chair or a longer trailer: Sunny Flat takes 28 feet and has year-round water. For tent-only quiet, Herb Martyr is at the end of the road up the canyon, and for cooler air in summer, Pinery Canyon is on the way over the crest. Bonita Canyon at the national monument is the reservable alternative on the west side.
A canyon the Apache called home and scientists adopted
The Chiricahua Mountains are Dził Kawa, Great Mountain, to the Chiricahua Apache, and people have lived in them for thousands of years. The Forest Service notes that pictographs, pottery and other remains suggest more people may have lived near Cave Creek Canyon a thousand years ago than live there now. In historic times the range was the stronghold of the Chiricahua bands, and the long wars of the 1860s through the 1880s ended with their forced removal from the region in 1886, when Geronimo’s surrender sent the last of them to prison camps in Florida. The Apache keep their connection to these mountains today, and the Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoons, across the valley, is the other place where that history is close to the surface.
Ranchers and miners filled the vacuum. Stephen B. Reed homesteaded in the canyon in 1879; Galeyville, a silver camp and outlaw hangout, boomed briefly in the early 1880s on the other side of the range, and Paradise followed around the turn of the century. The Forest Service says the canyon’s place names recall those early settlers. It has not published who the Stewart of Stewart Campground was, and we did not find out.
Federal management came early. The Chiricahua Forest Reserve was created in July 1902, became a national forest in 1907 and was folded into the Coronado National Forest in 1917. The canyon’s Forest Service history shows on the ground in the Portal CCC House, now a rental cabin, built in the decade when the Civilian Conservation Corps was building recreation sites across the Southwest; the Forest Service does not date the campgrounds themselves, so we will not either.
What made Cave Creek famous was science. In 1955 the American Museum of Natural History turned the old Reed homestead, by then a private ranch, into the Southwestern Research Station, and generations of entomologists, herpetologists and ornithologists have worked out of it since. The canyon’s mix of Sierra Madre and Rocky Mountain species, with 370 bird species recorded and the elegant trogon at the top of everyone’s list, made it one of the best-known birding destinations in North America.
Then came the Horseshoe 2 Fire. Started by people on May 8, 2011, in Horseshoe Canyon on the Douglas Ranger District, it burned 222,954 acres of the Chiricahuas before it was contained on June 25, destroyed 23 structures and filled Portal with smoke as crews set backburns around the research station. Floods and debris flows off the burned slopes changed trails for years afterward, and the Forest Service still warns that conditions shift fast in monsoon season. The ecological recovery is slow, but the canyon’s draws, the birds and the cliffs, came through, and so did the birders.
Why it matters
Cave Creek Canyon is where the sky islands of southeast Arizona make the most sense: a desert valley floor, a creek that runs, a cliff-walled canyon full of tropical birds at the northern edge of their range, and a mountain range with a long and painful Apache history. Stewart is the quiet, shaded seat in the middle of it. It shows how a small Forest Service campground can matter far beyond its size, because of what lives in the trees around it. For a Scottsdale camper it is a four-and-a-half-hour drive and worth every minute in April or May. Bring cash, a small rig and binoculars, and arrive on a weekday.