What is Tsaile Lake Campground?
Where the Chuska Mountains drop toward the head of Canyon del Muerto, a dam across Tsaile Creek holds a reservoir of about 260 acres at full pool, at roughly 7,000 feet, with the Diné College campus and its hogan-shaped cultural center on one shore and ponderosa and pinyon on the others. The Navajo Nation stocks it with rainbow, cutthroat and brown trout and channel catfish when there is water to hold them, which in dry years is not much. The “campgrounds” that Google and the camping apps list by name, Tsaile Lake, Black Pinnacle and South Shore, are the places local families have always camped: flat dirt pullouts above the water with stone fire rings, no toilets, no tables, no trash cans, no water. Nobody maintains them and nobody takes a fee at the gate.
That does not make them free. The Navajo Nation closes its land to non-Navajos who lack a permit, and Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation sells a camping and backcountry permit it lists at $15 per person per night. Fishing needs a second permit from the Department of Fish & Wildlife, and state licenses do not count. Do both before you come and the lake is yours: an evening of trout rising in front of the Chuskas, elk bugling in September, and more stars than Scottsdale has streetlights.
What you get is a high, quiet lake on a sovereign nation with a college for a neighbor and a world-class canyon beginning at its outlet. What you do not get is anything a campground usually provides, and the lake level itself is not guaranteed.
How to camp it right
Get the permits first. A Navajo Nation camping permit, bought online through Navajo Parks & Recreation or by phone at 928-871-6647, is required to camp; there is no fee station at the lake and the Parks office in Window Rock is 60 miles away, so print it before you leave the Valley. A Navajo fishing permit is required to fish; the posted non-Navajo prices are $15 for a day, $25 for three days and $40 for a season, and the price sheet is old, so confirm. The Tsaile gas station on IR 12 sometimes stocks fishing permits; ask the clerk which shore the stocking truck used last. Camping without a permit is trespassing on tribal land.
Get there. About 5 hours 50 minutes. Take the Chinle route, SR 87 to Payson, SR 260 to Heber, SR 377 to Holbrook, I-40 east to Chambers and US 191 north to Chinle, then Indian Route 64 east for 30 miles along the North Rim of Canyon de Chelly, past the Antelope House and Mummy Cave overlooks, to Tsaile. The lake is just east of the college off Indian Route 12. All paved; the last few hundred yards to the shore are dirt and soft after weather. Drive IR 64 in daylight, because free-range cattle and horses stand in the road after dark. Chinle has the last real groceries; Tsaile has a gas station and convenience store.
Pick the season. Year-round in principle, late April through October in practice. Snow closes the shore roads in winter; July and August bring afternoon thunderstorms and mosquitoes along the weedy shallows. Spring and fall are the trout months.
Water and toilets. None. Bring all water, a portable toilet, and bags to carry out waste and trash; there is nowhere to bury it that a sheep will not find.
Pick the site. The best spots are on the south and east shore away from the college, and a flat spot with a view is worth more than a spot near the water, which is shallow, weedy and buggy in July.
Camp by the rules. No alcohol, firearms or fireworks anywhere on the Nation. Fires only in existing rings, and not at all when fire restrictions are posted. Check the Nation’s boating rules before launching anything with a motor; a kayak or float tube is the safe assumption. Dogs are fine; keep them away from livestock. The sky is as dark as any in Arizona; the stargazing guide explains what you are looking at.
Skip it if you want toilets and a table. Stay at Cottonwood Campground in Chinle or the privately run Spider Rock Campground on the South Rim and fish the lake as a day trip. For forest camping with the same permit, Wagon Wheel at Lukachukai and Buffalo Pass in the Chuskas are both within an hour.
A dam that ended a thousand years of flood farming
The canyons below Tsaile Lake were farmed for roughly a thousand years before the dam. Ancestral Puebloan families built the cliff villages of Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto, then left them; Hopi people used the canyons on and off from about 1300 into the early 1700s; and in the 1700s the Navajo, the Diné, moved in from northern New Mexico and stayed. Their method was the oldest one on the Colorado Plateau: plant corn, squash, melons and peaches on the canyon floor and let the spring floods off the Chuska Mountains water them. Tsaile Creek, which drains the plateau where the lake now sits, was one of the streams that fed Canyon del Muerto.
The canyons were also a refuge, and twice an army came for them. In 1805 a Spanish force under Antonio Narbona killed 115 Navajos and captured 33 in Canyon del Muerto, the slaughter that gave the canyon its name. In 1863 and 1864 Kit Carson’s troops swept through, killing, burning hogans and crops and seizing sheep, until the Navajo surrendered and were marched to Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. They came home under the treaty of 1868, and the canyon farms resumed. In 1931 the federal government made the canyons a national monument, 83,840 acres, on land that stayed Navajo, the only Park Service unit owned and run that way.
The dam came in 1964. The Bureau of Reclamation built Tsaile Dam 52 feet high and about 1,950 feet across, holding roughly 5,500 acre-feet, to steady the flow in the wash, deliver dependable irrigation to the canyon farmers downstream and make a fishing lake. The Navajo Times, writing about it decades later, put the result plainly: the ancient flood irrigation lasted until 1964, when the dam went in. Reclamation’s own documents acknowledge that as families left the canyon for jobs in Chinle and elsewhere, irrigation became a secondary purpose and recreation the main one.
The college followed. In 1968 the Navajo Nation chartered Navajo Community College, the first college founded by Native Americans for Native Americans, and chose the Tsaile and Wheatfields area for its permanent home in part because it had water, forest and lakes. Classes began at the Tsaile campus in October 1973 and it was dedicated in May 1974, its buildings octagonal like a hogan, its Ned Hatathli Center the landmark of the plateau. It became Diné College in 1997. The lake has been the campus’s front yard ever since.
The dam has not aged gracefully. Reclamation, which inspects it though the Nation owns it, opened a Safety of Dams review in 2011 and has kept the reservoir partly drawn down; the Nation’s fishing office notes the resulting swings in level and stocking. Canyon farmers told the Navajo Times in 2019 that after a wet spring they still could not get stored water released. What is coming is a repair that has been studied for more than a decade, and until it is built the lake will be smaller than the maps suggest.
Why it matters
Tsaile is a small lake that explains a large thing: what the federal government’s twentieth-century plumbing did to the oldest farms in Arizona. The dam that made a trout lake for the college town ended the flood farming that had fed Canyon del Muerto since before the Navajo arrived, and the argument about who gets the water is still going. It also explains the Navajo Nation’s rules. The permit you buy is the Nation exercising ownership of land that it fought to keep, and the lack of facilities is a choice to leave the shore as local families have always used it. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: arrange the permits, bring everything, and spend one night here between Canyon de Chelly and the Chuskas. It is not a campground; it is a place to be a guest.