What is Stoneman Lake Overlook?
Arizona has almost no natural lakes, and Stoneman Lake is one of the few: an almost perfectly round basin about 80 acres across and less than 10 feet deep, at roughly 6,700 to 6,900 feet in the ponderosa and Gambel oak south of Mormon Lake. Hopi guides led the Spanish explorer Antonio de Espejo to it in 1583; the name is for George Stoneman, the Army general who ran the Department of Arizona in 1870 and 1871. Geologists still argue what made it: it sits in the Mormon volcanic field and looks like a crater, but the faults beneath it, the only route water has out, argue for a collapsed sinkhole in the limestone below. The mud on its floor holds one of the longest climate records in the Southwest, reaching back more than a million years.
The lake itself is less reliable than its history. With no inlet stream and no outlet, it rises and falls with the winter’s snow, and in the Forest Service’s own description it is usually empty. In a wet year Arizona Game and Fish has stocked northern pike and yellow perch, and the state record perch came out of here in 1984. In a dry year, which is most of them lately, it is grass and cracked mud below a few private cabins. The overlook, a pullout on the road above the southwest rim, shows you the whole bowl either way, and the small day-use area on the north shore has shaded tables, vault toilets and a gravel ramp waiting for water.
What you get is a free stop on one of the better back-road drives in the state, a geology lesson you can see in one glance, and a picnic table in the pines. What you do not get, most years, is a lake, and never a campground, a fee booth, drinking water or a paved road to the rim. Treat it as the midpoint of a drive, not a destination, and it is a pleasure.
How to visit Stoneman Lake right
Pay nothing, reserve nothing. There is no fee at the overlook or the day-use area and nothing to book. Day use only; no camping at the lake or the overlook.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17 north and about 105 miles to exit 306, Stoneman Lake Road, 19 miles past Camp Verde. Go east. The road is paved for 6.2 miles, then turns to graded dirt at a junction; bear left to stay on FR 213 where FR 83 goes right toward Apache Maid Lookout. About 2.5 miles later a small pullout on the left is the overlook, easy to miss because the basin sits below road level. To reach the day-use area, continue to FR 665, turn left, then immediately right on FR 213A for about half a mile. Figure about 120 minutes from Old Town. FR 213 continues another four miles to Lake Mary Road, so you can come home through Clints Well and Payson on SR 87, all paved, which makes the best day-trip loop on this side of the Rim.
Pick the season. May through October for the road. The Forest Service calls the last four miles unsuitable for passenger cars in wet weather and discourages winter visits; snowmelt mud in April is as bad as snow. Spring after a wet winter is the only time to count on seeing water, and even then nobody posts a level. Fall gives you the oaks turning around the basin and an empty road.
Water and toilets. Vault toilets and tables at the day-use area, nothing at the overlook, no drinking water anywhere. Fill up in Camp Verde.
Fish and boat only when it is wet. Pike and perch, electric motors only, from the gravel ramp, with an Arizona license. If the basin is grass, bring a sandwich instead of a rod.
Fire. The Coconino has closed the lake area in the past during extreme fire danger. Check restrictions in June.
Dogs. Allowed on leash.
Respect the cabins. The private summer homes along the far shore are on private land. Look, do not walk over.
Skip it if someone in the car was promised a lake. It is probably dry. Come for the drive, the geology and a picnic above a very old hole in the ground, and pair it with Dairy Springs at Mormon Lake or Clints Well for the night, or Beaver Creek below the Rim if you want running water you can count on.
A million-year hole with a general’s name on it
Nobody built Stoneman Lake, which on the Mogollon Plateau makes it nearly unique. Every other lake you pass on Lake Mary Road is a dam. This one is a round depression in the limestone, roughly 80 acres across, that has been collecting snowmelt and mud for at least a million years. The mud is the famous part. Geologists who cored the lake bed found a continuous record of pollen and sediment reaching from the early Pleistocene to the present, published in 2022 as one of the longest paleoclimate archives in the Southwest: every ice age and dry spell the plateau has had, stacked in layers under the grass you are looking at.
How the hole got there is still argued. The basin sits in the Mormon volcanic field, it is nearly circular, and for a long time the easy answer was a crater. But the lake has no outlet, and the only way water leaves is down through fractures in the rock, which is the behavior of a sinkhole, not a vent. In 1995 USGS geologist James Dohm mapped the area for his master’s thesis and came down on the side of collapse: groundwater dissolving the limestone beneath, along a northwest-trending fault of the Cataract Creek system, letting the floor drop. The Forest Service still presents both theories, and the honest summary is that the volcanic field put the fault there and the limestone did the rest.
People found it early. The plateau around the lake was used seasonally by the Sinagua, then by Yavapai and Western Apache bands, and the Hopi knew it as a waypoint on the trails from their mesas to the Verde. In 1583 Hopi guides led Antonio de Espejo, a Spanish merchant looking for silver mines in the Verde country, past the lake on his way down to what is now Jerome, the first European to record it. Nearly three centuries later the name arrived with the Army. George Stoneman, a Union cavalry general whose Civil War raid Virginia remembers in a song, commanded the Department of Arizona in 1870 and 1871; his troops used the plateau route between Camp Verde and the Little Colorado, and the lake took his name though there is no record he did anything here. He went on to be governor of California. In 1908 the forest around the basin became part of the Coconino National Forest, and over the following decades a handful of private summer cabins went up on patented land along the east and south shores, where they still stand and still ask to be left alone.
The lake’s modern career has been as a fishing hole that works one year in three. Arizona Game and Fish tried yellow perch here and it is the only place in the state the stocking ever took; the state record, 1 pound 10 ounces and 13.5 inches, was set twice in March 1984, and northern pike went in during the wet years too. The Forest Service built the small day-use area and gravel ramp for those years. What has changed lately is the ratio: the drought that began around 2000 has left the basin dry far more often than full, the ramp pointed at grass, the perch gone until the next big winter. The overlook is now the reliable attraction, and the Forest Service’s own description, usually empty, is the correct expectation to carry up the road.
Why it matters
Stoneman Lake is the plateau’s control sample. Beside the dammed lakes of Lake Mary Road and the stocked reservoirs of the Rim, it shows what water does here when nobody helps it: it collects in a hole, sinks through the limestone, and comes back only after a real winter. The mud underneath is the longest continuous climate diary in the Southwest, and the dry grass on top is its latest entry. For a Scottsdale visitor it is a free fifteen-minute stop that turns the I-17 drive to Flagstaff into a back-road loop through Clints Well and Payson, worth doing once in spring after a wet winter for the lake and any time for the hole.