What is Sulphide del Rey Campground?
Halfway up the west side of the Pinal Mountains, where Forest Road 651 levels out in a bench of ponderosa pine at about 6,000 feet, there is a small campground on the site of a mining company’s summer camp. A century ago the Sulphide del Rey company’s workers lived up here between shifts to get away from the heat of Globe and Miami, and the Forest Service kept the name when it turned the clearing into a campground. Today it is a vault toilet, picnic tables and fire rings under the pines, with some old rock work around the edges and no fee.
It is the least visited of the Pinal campgrounds because it is neither at the top nor at the trailheads. Pinal Campground is 5 miles higher on the same road, 1,500 feet cooler and under firs; Pioneer Pass is on the other road with the summit trails. Sulphide del Rey is the quiet middle, good in spring and fall when the summit is cold, and good any time the others are full. The Forest Service does not publish a site count; plan on a handful of pullouts.
What you get is a free night in real pines two hours and twenty minutes from Scottsdale, with a toilet, a table and a fire ring, almost always to yourself. What you do not get is water, trash service, a view, a trail from camp or anything to do but sit. For that, drive the last five miles to the summit.
How to camp Sulphide del Rey right
Pay nothing. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit, no pass and no reservations. There is no fee tube because there is no fee.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east and on to Globe, about an hour and forty minutes. In Globe, take Jess Hayes Road southeast to the junction of Icehouse Canyon Road (FR 112) and Sixshooter Canyon Road. Follow FR 112 for about 2 miles to the FR 55 fork, take the right fork, and drive 2.5 miles on FR 55 as it turns to dirt. At the junction with FR 651, turn left and climb 5 miles of graded mountain gravel to the campground on the right. About 9 miles from Globe and roughly two hours and twenty minutes from Old Town; a passenger car is fine when it is dry. Globe has the last gas, ice, water and groceries.
Pick the season. Year round on paper, April through October in practice. In May and October, when the summit at 7,500 feet is frosty at dawn, 6,000 feet is pleasant; in high summer the summit campgrounds are cooler and worth the extra five miles. Snow can close FR 651 in winter, and monsoon storms make the gravel slick in July and August.
Water and trash. None of either. Fill up and buy ice in Globe, and pack out everything.
Fire. Rings only, and only when the Tonto is not under restrictions, which it usually is from late spring into the monsoon. Check before you count on a campfire.
Rigs. Trailers under 20 feet, which is a little more generous than the 16-foot limit at the summit camps; the road here is gentler too.
Use it as a first night. If you arrive after dark, stop here; the road to it is tamer than the upper stretch of FR 651, and you can move up the mountain in the morning. Look for the old foundations and rock work from the mining camp around the edges of the site. The night sky at 6,000 feet above Globe is dark enough to be worth the stargazing list.
Dogs and wildlife. Dogs on leash. The Forest Service notes abundant wildlife here, which in the Pinals includes black bears; keep food in the vehicle.
Skip it if you want something to do at the campground itself. It is a place to sleep between hikes higher up the mountain, not a destination. Pinal and Upper Pinal at the summit have the firs, the views and the trailheads; Kellner Canyon lower down has the creek.
A copper company’s summer camp that the forest kept
The Pinals are a sky island, a block of granite and schist standing 4,000 feet above Globe with pine and fir on top, and their history is the history of people going up them to get out of the heat. The Salado lived in the valleys around the range until about 1450; the Western Apache and the Kwevkepaya band of the Yavapai moved in after them and summered on the mountain, which the Apache called Dził Nnilchí’ Diyiléé, the pine-burdened mountain. Spanish parties in the 1600s rendered that as Pinal, and fought at least one battle with Apache warriors in the range. The name stuck to the mountains, the creek, and eventually the county that does not contain them.
The mines came in 1875, when silver was found in the Pinals and then the far richer copper around Pinal Creek below; Globe City was laid out in 1876, and by the 1880s the Old Dominion smelter at its edge was the economic engine of eastern Arizona. The range itself was pocked with claims from 1875 into the early 1900s, producing copper, silver and trace gold, and the Gibson mine on the west side had its best run from 1906 to 1918, when it accounted for 99 percent of the Pinals’ recorded output. Smaller companies worked the west-side canyons too, and one of them, the Sulphide del Rey, built a camp on this bench at 6,000 feet so its men could sleep somewhere cooler than the smelter town 2,500 feet below. The Forest Service’s own description is all that survives of the company in the official record: once the site of an old mining company whose miners lived here to escape the heat of the lower elevations, where they worked by day. The company’s dates, its owners and what exactly it dug are not published, and this guide will not guess at them; the rock work at the edges of the campground is the evidence.
The Pinals went into the national forest system in 1908, as part of the Tonto, and as the small mines quit the Forest Service kept the company’s clearing and its name. The road up, FR 651, was graded to the summit over the following decades as Pinal Peak acquired a fire lookout, radio towers and campgrounds; by the mid-twentieth century the mountain was Globe’s own summer retreat, and Sulphide del Rey had become the halfway campground, free, with a vault toilet and tables, used mostly by people who ran out of daylight on the way up. No active mines remain anywhere in the range.
Fire is the recent history. The Telegraph Fire started near Superior on June 4, 2021, burned 180,757 acres east toward Globe before it was contained on July 3, and ranks among the largest in state history; the Pinals’ lower west slopes were in its path and the forest roads up the mountain closed for the summer. The high forest around the campgrounds kept its canopy. The Forest Service has not changed the campground since, and has shown no interest in doing so.
Why it matters
Sulphide del Rey is a reminder that most of Arizona’s mountain campgrounds began as someone else’s idea: a logging camp, a sawmill, a sheep camp, or, here, a copper company’s bunkhouses on the one cool bench on the road. The Forest Service inherited the clearing and the name and left both alone, which is why the campground is free and empty and why the stones around its edge are a hundred years old. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is modest and real: the quiet middle stop on the Pinal Peak road, two hours and twenty minutes from Old Town, right in May and October, right any time the summit is full, and right as a first night when you arrive late. Fill up in Globe.