What is Sycamore Campground?
The Chiricahuas are a long range and almost everyone enters them from the east, at Cave Creek Canyon, or at the national monument on the northwest corner. West Turkey Creek is the canyon in between, on the west side above the Sulphur Springs Valley, and it has what Cave Creek has: a perennial stream, a riparian forest of sycamore, oak and pine, and trails into the Chiricahua Wilderness. What it does not have is pavement, a visitor center or a reputation, which is the point.
Sycamore Campground straddles the creek at 6,200 feet, eight sites on both banks with tables and fire rings, shaded by the trees that name it. Just above camp the creek comes down a series of small waterfalls through a rocky cleft that fills with wildflowers in spring and summer, and Sycamore Falls is a short, trail-less scramble upstream. There are waterless vault toilets, bear-proof storage, and no drinking water. Six trails leave Forest Road 41 along the creek and tie into the network that crosses the range, so a strong hiker can reach the crest or Rustler Park from here. Gould’s turkeys, Coues deer and black bears are the usual company, and there is no cell signal at all.
What you get is the Chiricahuas with nobody on them: running water beside the tent, a waterfall before breakfast, wilderness trails from the road, for $15 and nine miles of dirt. What you do not get is drinking water, a ranger, a store, a paved road, a trailer longer than 16 feet or any help if the creek crossings flood. For the paved version with water and flush toilets, Sunny Flat in Cave Creek Canyon is the other side of the same mountains.
How to camp Turkey Creek right
Pay like this. $15 single, $30 double, cash or check at the campground, first come, first served, 14 days in any 60. Senior and Access passes pay half for the holder’s site. Day-use visitors pay the overnight fee to use the tables. Two vehicles and ten people per site.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east through Tucson to exit 331, US 191, south 21 miles to SR 181, then east 12 miles to where the highway makes a sharp left; continue straight onto Forest Road 41 and follow it about 9 miles of graded dirt to the campground. The Forest Service recommends high clearance and warns the road can be impassable after rain; when dry, a careful car manages. About 240 minutes from Old Town. Willcox, on I-10, is the last real town for groceries and gas; Sunizona has a little. The dirt road over Apache Pass from the north saves no time and adds 30 minutes of washboard.
Pick the season. Open year-round. April and May, when the creek is up from snowmelt and the cleft is full of wildflowers, and October, when the sycamores turn, are the best months. In July and August the monsoon brings lightning most afternoons and runoff down the cleft; the road has crossings, and flash floods can shut it for days. Winter brings snow at this elevation and a nearly empty campground.
Water. None. Filter the creek or bring it from Willcox.
Vehicles. Trailers to 16 feet, no hookups, and a tight loop. No horses or stock in camp.
Bears. Food, coolers and trash in the bear boxes or the locked car, windows up. Bring your own firewood or a stove; dead wood near camp is gone.
Choose the far bank. The sites across the creek are the quiet ones. Walk upstream to the falls in the morning, then pick a trail: Saulsbury #263 climbs the creek toward the Crest Trail near Chiricahua Peak; Mormon Ridge #269 and Mormon Canyon #352 make a loop; Morse Canyon #43 leaves the end of the road. All are primitive and steep, and you will see more deer and turkeys than people.
Dogs. On leash in camp.
Skip it if eight sites and no water at the end of a dirt road is not what you came for. Bonita Canyon at the monument has flush toilets 40 minutes away; Pinery Canyon is the free high camp on the road over the range; Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoons across the valley has the granite and the history. If quiet creekside camping in a wilderness is what you came for, nothing else in the Chiricahuas does it better.
The canyon on the back side of Cochise’s mountains
The Chiricahuas are the rim of a volcano. About 27 million years ago the Turkey Creek Caldera erupted and dropped roughly 2,000 feet of ash across what is now the range, which welded into the rhyolite that erodes into the hoodoos of the national monument and the cliffs above this canyon; West Turkey Creek drains the old caldera floor. People came long after the rock cooled: Cochise culture hunter-gatherers from about 3000 B.C., Mogollon and Mimbres farmers from around 150 B.C. to A.D. 1450, and by the 1600s the Chiricahua Apache, for whom the range, probably named with an Opata word for turkey mountain, was home ground and fortress.
The Apache wars that made the mountains famous began at Apache Pass, at the range’s north end, with the Bascom affair of 1861, when an Army lieutenant’s bungled attempt to recover a kidnapped boy turned Cochise from a wary neighbor into an enemy for a decade. Fort Bowie went up at the pass in 1862 after the Battle of Apache Pass; Cochise made peace in 1872 and died two years later in the Dragoons across the valley, and the reservation briefly granted to his people was dissolved in 1876. Geronimo’s band held out in the Chiricahuas and the Sierra Madre until his surrender in 1886, after which the entire Chiricahua people, scouts included, were shipped to Florida. The canyons on the west side, Turkey Creek among them, were the kind of country the Army scouted for ranchería sites during those years, and the fort at the pass was abandoned in 1894.
Then came the ordinary West. The first recorded mining claim in the range, the Hidden Treasure, was filed in 1881; ranchers took up the Sulphur Springs Valley below the canyon, and the Forest Service arrived with the Chiricahua Forest Reserve in 1902 and the consolidated Coronado National Forest in 1917. Mining in the range peaked in the 1920s and again in the 1950s and then quit. The high country was set aside as a primitive area in 1933, became the Chiricahua Wilderness with the Wilderness Act of 1964, and was enlarged in 1984 to about 87,700 acres; its western boundary runs just above the campground, which is why the six trails from FR 41 are foot and horse only. The campground itself is a mid-century Forest Service camp with no published opening date; the bear boxes and waterless toilets are later upgrades.
The modern event is fire. On May 8, 2011, a human-caused fire started in Horseshoe Canyon on the range’s southeast flank and ran north for seven weeks; the Horseshoe Two Fire burned 222,954 acres, most of the Chiricahuas, before containment on June 25, the fifth-largest fire in Arizona history at the time, and destroyed 23 structures. The high forest above Turkey Creek burned hard. The trails from FR 41 were closed for seasons and have been cleared slowly since, and a hiker today climbs through standing snags on the ridges and thick regrowth in the canyons. The creek and the sycamores at the campground survived; the Forest Service still lists the trails as primitive, which after 2011 means it.
Why it matters
West Turkey Creek is the Chiricahuas without the story attached: the same volcano, the same Apache country, the same wilderness, reached from the plain side the Army came from rather than the pretty side the birders found. It explains how a mountain range in southern Arizona works, a sky island with running water in its canyons and nothing but grassland for fifty miles around, and why the people who held it fought so long to keep it. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is plain: four hours and nine miles of dirt to eight sites on a creek with a waterfall and six trails and no one else, best in April, May and October, with every cooler in the bear box.