What is Upper Canyon Creek Campground?
Canyon Creek starts in springs just under the Rim east of Forest Lakes and runs south toward the Salt through a valley that stays green all summer. Upper Canyon Creek Campground is ten designated dispersed sites strung along the creek at 6,600 feet, under old ponderosa mixed with white fir and Douglas fir, with a table and fire ring at each, vault toilets serviced about once a week, and nothing else. No water. No trash service. No fee. It is run by the Tonto’s Pleasant Valley Ranger District, which is the Young side of the forest, and it feels that way: slower, emptier and a little rougher than the SR 260 campgrounds half an hour back.
The creek is the reason to come. Canyon Creek is one of a handful of Arizona streams managed as artificial flies and lures only, with a four-trout limit, and the Arizona Game and Fish hatchery a few miles down FR 33 keeps it stocked with rainbows. It is small water, easy to wade, and best in the half mile above camp. Black bears and Abert squirrels share the valley, and the bears are the reason the Forest Service puts food storage on the sign at the entrance.
What you get is a free creek camp in tall trees with a trout stream at your feet and almost nobody else. What you do not get is water, a trash can, a reservation or a guarantee of a site on a summer Saturday.
How to camp it right
Arrive early or midweek. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit. With ten sites and no reservations, a summer Saturday afternoon is a drive back out; Friday before noon or any weekday is fine. Colcord Ridge at the FR 512 and FR 33 junction is the free fallback when it is open.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, 75 miles to Payson. Turn east on SR 260 at the main junction and drive about 33 miles, past Christopher Creek and up the long grade onto the Rim. Just past Forest Lakes, turn right (south) on Young Road, Forest Road 512, which is also signed for SR 288. The pavement ends. After 3 miles of graded dirt, with Colcord Ridge Campground at the junction, turn left on FR 33 and follow it 1.5 miles down to the creek. Figure about 150 minutes from Old Town, including 15 to 20 minutes for the dirt. In dry weather a passenger car is fine. After heavy rain or snow, FR 33’s clay turns slick and the Forest Service advises four-wheel drive or chains. Trailers over 16 feet are prohibited.
Pick the season. April 1 to November 1. Mid-May to June and September to October are best. Nights can frost in either shoulder month, and winter temperatures drop into the teens. July and August afternoons bring storms that turn the road to grease; the monsoon field manual covers the timing.
Water. None. Bring all of it, and a filter for the creek as a backup. Fill jugs in Payson or at Sharp Creek on the way up. Pack out every piece of trash.
Fish it right. Artificial flies and lures only, four trout a day, Arizona license required. The best water is the half mile upstream of camp toward the hatchery; fish it early, because the stocked trout along the road get worked over by Saturday. The hatchery’s indoor visitor center is open; the raceways have been closed to visitors since 2023.
Bears. Food, coolers and toiletries in a closed, hard-sided vehicle at night and whenever you leave camp.
Dogs. Allowed; keep them leashed around the other nine sites and out of the water where people are fishing.
Skip it if you have a family and a trailer; Sharp Creek on the highway has water and room. Valentine Ridge, farther down Young Road, is the other small free camp in this corner, and the Rim Road dispersed sites are the answer when everything with a toilet is full. For two people with a tent and fly rods, this is the one.
A creek the feud and the fire both crossed
Canyon Creek runs about 50 miles from the springs under the Rim to the Salt River, and most of that is Apache water. The White Mountain Apache Tribe’s Fort Apache Reservation begins a few miles downstream of the campground and takes in the creek’s whole middle and lower course, where a tribal permit, not a state license, governs the fishing. The Western Apache used the valley long before anyone drew a boundary across it, and the campground sits in the thin strip of national forest at the top of their creek.
The first Anglos to settle the country around it were the cattle and sheep outfits of Pleasant Valley, the basin around Young just west of here, and they spent a decade killing each other. The Pleasant Valley War between the Graham and Tewksbury families ran from 1882 to 1892 and killed somewhere between 35 and 50 people, more than any other range feud in the West; the Hashknife cowboys, the Blevins clan and a young Tom Horn all took sides. In August 1888 a posse that included Horn hanged three suspected rustlers named Stott, Scott and Wilson from a pine on the Rim north of here, a few miles from Black Canyon. Zane Grey turned the war into To the Last Man in 1921 from his cabin on the far side of the Rim, and the Young road you drive in on is still the back way into the valley where it happened.
The hatchery came next and made the creek what it is. The Forest Service owns the Canyon Creek Hatchery at the springs a few miles below the campground; Arizona Game and Fish has operated it since 1969, and a 1992 renovation gave it the twelve covered raceways it runs today, producing on the order of 300,000 catchable trout a year on spring water that drains straight back into the stream. The rainbows in the creek do not reproduce on their own, so the hatchery truck is the fishery, and the artificial-flies-and-lures rule above the OW bridge is what keeps the stocked fish in the water for more than a weekend. When the campground’s flats were first laid out for campers the Forest Service does not say in its public pages, and this guide does not invent a year.
Then the fire. The Rodeo-Chediski Fire started on the reservation on June 18, 2002, merged with a second blaze on June 23 and was not controlled until July 7; it burned 468,638 acres, about 60 percent of them on Fort Apache land, and the Canyon Creek drainage was in its path. Ash and sediment killed most of the trout, and the forest around the campground survived only in patches you can still read in the tree line. Game and Fish restocked, and the creek has since recovered a wild brown trout population alongside the rainbows. The last chapter is small and recent: in 2023 New Zealand mud snails, an invasive species, turned up downstream, and the hatchery enclosed its outdoor rearing units and closed them to visitors to keep the snails out. The visitor center is still open; the self-guided raceway tour is gone.
Why it matters
Upper Canyon Creek is the Rim’s working history in a quarter mile of stream: Apache water, feud country, a hatchery that manufactures the fishery, a fire that erased it and a creek that came back wilder than before. It is also the last free creek camp in Rim Country a sedan can reach, which is a thing worth protecting by behaving well there. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: if you fish, this is the spot, arrive Friday morning, bring water and a bear-proof routine, and leave the big trailer and the family at Sharp Creek.