What is Sunny Flat Campground?
Cave Creek Canyon opens onto the New Mexico border on the east side of the Chiricahuas, a slot of orange rhyolite cliffs riddled with the caves that named it, with a perennial creek and a floor of sycamore, oak and Arizona cypress. It is the most famous birding canyon in the United States: the elegant trogon nests along the South Fork, a dozen hummingbird species pass through, and in April and May the village of Portal fills with people carrying very long lenses. More than 300 bird species have been recorded in these mountains. Black bears, coatis and Apache fox squirrels are routine.
Sunny Flat is the canyon’s main campground, three miles up the paved Forest Road 42 from Portal. The sites, about a dozen of them, ring a grassy meadow beside the creek at roughly 5,200 feet, so that the cliffs are the view from your table rather than something you walk to; the trade-off is that the middle of the meadow is open and bright, hence the name. It has year-round drinking water, which none of the other three Cave Creek camps can claim, vault toilets, tables and fire rings, pull-ins for trailers to 28 feet, and no hookups. The Vista Point Trail and the Cave Creek Visitor Information Center, a former ranger residence run with the Friends of Cave Creek Canyon, are a short walk downstream, and the Cave Creek Nature Trail connects the lower canyon from here to the Silver Peak trailhead.
What you get is the best base in the canyon: water, cliffs, the creek and the South Fork five minutes away, for $20. What you do not get is a reservation, shade in the middle of the meadow, a guarantee against a flood evacuation, or any relief from the five-hour drive. In spring you share it with the world’s birders; in October you may have it alone.
How to camp Sunny Flat right
Bring cash and arrive early. $20 single, $40 double, cash or check at the site, 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 site. On a spring weekend every site is taken by nine in the morning; arrive midweek in late April or early May, when the campground turns over daily, or in October, when the sycamores go yellow and the birders have gone home.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east, all the way through Tucson, Willcox and San Simon into New Mexico, to US 80 at Road Forks. Go south 28 miles past Rodeo, turn west on Portal Road for 7 miles to Portal, then 3 miles up FR 42 to the campground; everything is paved. About 275 minutes from Old Town. The shortcut over the mountains from the Chiricahua National Monument side, FR 42 over Onion Saddle, is 30-plus miles of rough dirt, closed in winter, and not faster. Fill your tank in Rodeo or Animas; Portal has a cafe and a store and not much fuel.
Pick the creek edge. Sites on the creek side of the meadow have shade; the middle is sunny by name and by nature. Trailers to 28 feet fit the pull-ins; FR 42 has a 41-foot vehicle limit; no hookups.
Water. Potable, year-round, the only tap of the four canyon campgrounds. Idlewilde and Stewart run water May through October and Herb Martyr has none.
Watch the forecast. The campground is evacuated when 1.5 inches or more of rain is forecast, and the rule is enforced; Cave Creek drains the biggest watershed in the range and has moved boulders the size of trucks in living memory. FR 42 and 42B also close for snow, flood and fire danger; call the Douglas district. The flash flood entry explains the mechanics.
Bears. Everything scented stays in the car or the bear bins, never in the tent. Coatis and skunks work the camp too; the wildlife guide covers them.
Bird at dawn. Walk up the South Fork road before the cars, listen for the trogon’s bark from late April on, and stop at the visitor center for the sightings board and the bear news. Season: April and May for the birds and the crowd, summer afternoons for storms, winter for quiet, cold and often lovely weather.
Dogs. On leash; no horses or pack stock in camp.
Skip it if you need a reservation or a quiet spring. Stewart, a mile down the road, is the shadier fallback; Herb Martyr at the end of the road is the smaller, waterless one with the better trailheads; and Bonita Canyon at the national monument on the west side is reservable, if you can live with the drive around.
The canyon that scientists and birders took over from the Apache
Cave Creek Canyon has been inhabited for as long as anywhere in Arizona. Archaeologists defined the Cochise culture, the desert foragers who preceded farming across the Southwest from about 3000 to 200 BCE, from sites around the Chiricahuas including this canyon; Mogollon and Mimbres farmers followed from roughly 150 BCE to 1450. In the nineteenth century the range belonged to the Chiricahua Apache of Cochise and Geronimo, who used its canyons as refuge and its passes as roads to Mexico. That ended a day’s ride south of here: Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon on September 4, 1886, and the Chiricahua, including the scouts who had helped catch him, were shipped to Florida as prisoners of war.
Settlers were already in the canyon. In the fall of 1879 Stephen Reed brought a wagon up Cave Creek, probably on an Army track, and that winter extended the road to the junction of the main and north forks, where his family homesteaded as the first non-Apache household in the Chiricahuas. A General Land Office survey in 1884 shows the canyon road and the ford below Portal already established. Portal itself began in 1902 as a stop between the railroad at Rodeo and the mining boom town of Paradise over the ridge, which flared and died within a decade. The same year the federal forest reserve that would become the Coronado National Forest was set aside; in 1906 a proclamation pushed its boundary down-canyon to take in Reed’s road, and the ranger station moved from Rodeo into the canyon soon after.
The Depression built the canyon you drive. A Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the lower canyon put in trails and replaced the ranchers’ wire gates with cattle guards, and Cochise County built the present road, bypassing Reed’s track near the CCC grounds, by 1934; the salvaged CCC barracks became the core of a Portal house after the war. The Forest Service’s campgrounds, Sunny Flat among them, belong to this era of meadow sites along the creek, but the agency publishes no construction dates and we have not found one. The canyon’s guest ranches, the Sierra Linda from 1920 and Gordon Newman’s cabins from 1930, were the first businesses selling the cliffs to visitors.
Science arrived in 1955, when the American Museum of Natural History bought the Painted Canyon Ranch a few miles up the canyon and opened the Southwestern Research Station, which has hosted biologists, geologists and anthropologists ever since. Birders followed the scientists. The canyon’s position, a wet, high island between the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts within sight of Mexico, puts the elegant trogon, the Mexican chickadee and a dozen hummingbirds at the north edge of their ranges, and in the decades after the station opened Portal became a pilgrimage site; Sally and Walter Spofford’s ranch feeders were a stop on every birder’s list until the Spoffords closed them in 2002. The Friends of Cave Creek Canyon now run the old ranger residence as the visitor information center where you check the sightings board.
Fire and water wrote the latest chapter. The Horseshoe Two Fire, started by people in Horseshoe Canyon on the southeast side of the range on May 8, 2011, burned 222,954 acres of the Chiricahuas before it was contained on June 25, the fifth-largest fire in Arizona’s history. The floods that came off the burned slopes in the monsoons after it rearranged creek beds and trails across the range, and the Forest Service’s rule that Sunny Flat empties whenever 1.5 inches of rain is in the forecast is the canyon’s standing memory of what Cave Creek can do.
Why it matters
Cave Creek Canyon is the clearest place in Arizona to see how a landscape changes owners without changing itself. The Apache held it as a fortress, a homesteader turned it into a road, the Forest Service and the CCC turned the road into campgrounds, a New York museum turned the ranch at the top into a laboratory, and the birders made the whole thing famous. The cliffs and the trogons were there the entire time. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: it is five hours each way, so go for three nights, not one; aim for the last week of April on weekdays or any week in October; take a creekside site, keep the car locked against bears, and treat the rain forecast as the ranger it is.