What is Stray Horse Campground?
South of Hannagan Meadow the Coronado Trail leaves the spruce and drops over the edge of the Mogollon Rim, and about six miles below the rim it passes Strayhorse: a small, shaded Forest Service campground at 7,780 feet in ponderosa pine and Gambel oak, with eight tables, seven grills, a vault toilet, and horse corrals at the back. The corrals explain it. Two of the big trails into the Blue Range Primitive Area, the Highline Trail #47 and the Raspberry Trail #35, leave from here, and the campground was built for people who ride them. Everybody else uses it as a free bed on one of the best motorcycle roads in the country.
The Forest Service page says the water is shut off and the trash service has ended, which is the quiet way the agency says it no longer maintains the place beyond the toilet. The spelling is one word, Strayhorse, on the signs and the forest’s site; Google Maps uses two words. The Blue Range below is the last primitive area in the national forest system, 4,500 feet of relief from the rim to the Blue River, and the trails into it are long, steep and listed as uncleared of hazards.
What you get is a free, quiet, oak-shaded night with corrals, 1,300 feet lower and noticeably warmer than Hannagan, on a highway that is itself the attraction. What you do not get is water, trash service, a host, a cell signal or a site count; it is a handful of parties at most, and the drive from Scottsdale is five and a half hours whichever way you come.
How to camp Strayhorse right
Claim a site, pay nothing. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit. There is no fee tube and no host. Pick a table, park the trailer where the corrals are if you brought horses, and leave the rest of the loop to whoever comes next.
Get there. Two routes, both about 5 hours 35 minutes. From the north: US 60 to Springerville, US 180/191 to Alpine, then US 191 south past Hannagan Meadow; the Forest Service says 26 miles from Alpine, the mileposts say nearer 30. From the south: US 60 to Globe, US 70 to Safford, US 191 through Clifton and Morenci past the mine and up about 60 miles of switchbacks. The northern route is faster and the southern one is the famous drive. The campground is on the west side of the highway, paved to the entrance. Do not attempt US 191 south of Hannagan in a storm or after dark with a trailer; there are no guardrails where it would matter.
Pick the season. Listed year-round; usable roughly late April to November. Ice on US 191 is the limit, not the campground. May, June, September and October are the months; July and August bring monsoon storms most afternoons, and the road has nowhere to pull off when they hit.
Water. None; shut off for years. Bring it for yourself and your animals, and more than you think for the horses at this altitude.
Ride the trails with respect. The Highline Trail #47 drops off the rim from the back of the campground and runs about 14.5 miles west; the Raspberry Trail #35 runs east to the Blue River. Both descend into the Blue Range Primitive Area, both are serious, and the Forest Service lists Blue Range trails as not cleared of hazards. Check with the Clifton Ranger District before you commit a string of horses to either one, and expect downed timber.
Add Rose Peak. About 16 miles south, a one-mile trail climbs from the highway to the fire lookout at 8,786 feet, with a view east into New Mexico and north to the Rim that is better than anything from the campground.
Dogs. Allowed; keep them leashed around stock, and remember that this is bear, elk and, since the 1990s, Mexican wolf country.
Skip it if you want a toilet and tables at 9,000 feet instead: KP Cienega is a few miles back up the hill, and Hannagan Meadow has the lodge across the road. Coming from the south and wanting an oak-shaded free camp much closer to Clifton, Granville is 16 miles out of town; wanting a creek and real remoteness, Honeymoon is 22 miles of dirt up Eagle Creek.
A horse camp on the Devil’s Highway
The Blue Range was Mogollon farming country a thousand years ago and Western Apache country when the Spanish arrived; Coronado’s column marched north through the Clifton area in 1540 on its way to the Zuni pueblos, which is the only reason a 1926 highway commission named the road for him. The Americans came for copper. Eastern prospectors staked out Clifton in 1872 after copper showed on the San Francisco River, and in 1878 Arizona’s first railroad, mule-drawn at first, began hauling ore from the Longfellow Mine at Metcalf nine miles down to the Clifton smelter. The mountains above the mines were cut for timber and grazed hard, and the Blue River canyon east of the present highway filled with homesteads whose descendants still run cattle there.
The road took more than a decade to build. Crews worked north from Clifton and south from Springerville through country with no towns between, and the Coronado Trail opened to automobiles in 1926. It became State Route 81, then in December 1938 part of US 666, the southern extension of the Four Corners highway from Gallup, and the number gave the road its nickname. The Devil’s Highway was a working route for the mine towns and the ranches, and a dare for everyone else: roughly 100 miles between Clifton and Springerville, hundreds of curves, grades that climb from 3,500 feet at the river to over 9,000 at Hannagan Meadow, and almost no guardrail. Arizona renumbered it US 191 on September 18, 1992, partly because the signs kept disappearing.
The Forest Service drew a line around the Blue River country in the 1930s as the Blue Range Primitive Area, under the pre-wilderness rules of the day, and recommended it for formal wilderness in 1971. Congress acted on the New Mexico portion in 1980 and never on the Arizona side, which leaves the Blue Range the last designated primitive area in the national forest system, managed as wilderness without the law behind it. Strayhorse is a product of that geography: a campground on the rim road at the top of two of the main trails down, with corrals because the only sensible way to cover the Highline’s 14 miles of broken country is on a horse. The Forest Service built it sometime in the mid-20th century; the agency’s own page gives no date, and we have not found one.
The country has changed around it. Mexican wolves were released into the Blue Range in the 1990s, the first in the wild in the United States in decades, and they den within a few miles of the highway. The Wallow Fire, started by an abandoned campfire near Alpine on May 29, 2011, burned 538,049 acres before it was contained on July 8, the largest fire in Arizona’s history; the scars run down the Coronado Trail toward Hannagan Meadow, while the pines around Strayhorse, a few miles south, were spared. The Forest Service’s quiet retreat since, water shut off, trash service ended, is the fate of a lot of small free campgrounds in a region with fewer rangers every decade; the corrals and the toilet are what remains of the investment.
Why it matters
Strayhorse is a small place that sits at the meeting of three big Arizona stories: a copper road that became a legend, a primitive area that never became a wilderness, and a Forest Service that keeps the toilet clean and lets the rest go. It explains the Coronado Trail better than the overlooks do, because it is where the people who actually use the country, riders and hunters bound for the Blue, leave the pavement. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: if you have horses, this is the camp; if you have a motorcycle, it is a free quiet night mid-route; if you have neither, go a few miles uphill to KP Cienega, bring your water either way, and never drive the road south of Hannagan in the dark.