What is Upper Log Campground?
McNary was a company lumber town, and the roads that fan south from it into the reservation are old log roads. Slide Creek Road drops from SR 260 down to the North Fork of the White River, and a few miles along it is Upper Log, the White Mountain Apache Tribe’s designated campground number 5 on the upper river, at about 6,430 feet. The sites sit in deep ponderosa shade a few steps from the stream, each with a table and fire ring, with portable toilets spaced along the road and a dumpster at the entrance. The tribe stocks this stretch with trout, and the stream is small enough to fish in sneakers.
It is the easier of the two North Fork campgrounds to reach from the highway and the higher and cooler of the two; Lower Log is 400 feet lower and reached from SR 73 on the Whiteriver side. Both run on the same rules: the White Mountain Apache camping permit, $15 per vehicle per day, bought ahead, eight people maximum, camp in the designated sites and 75 feet back from the water. On a June weeknight a recent visitor had the place nearly to themselves.
What you get is a quiet stream camp under big pines, about 15 minutes of dirt off SR 260, on tribal land with tribal rules. What you do not get is drinking water, hookups, level pads, a reservation, or any validity for your state fishing license.
How to camp Upper Log right
Buy the permits first. Camping is $15 per vehicle per day for up to eight people, $350 for 30 days, first come, first served; older listings say $9, but the tribe’s current price page says $15. Fishing is a separate tribal permit: $10 adult daily, $3 ages 10 to 14, $200 annual. State licenses are not valid on the reservation. Vendors are the Hon-Dah convenience store at the SR 260 and SR 73 junction, the last one before the turnoff and open store hours, plus Hon-Dah Ski and Outdoor Sport at milepost 357, Sportsman’s Warehouse in Show Low and the Game and Fish office in Whiteriver (928-338-4385). The tribe’s online sales were offline through 2026.
Get there. Shea Boulevard to the Beeline, SR 87 to Payson, SR 260 east over the Mogollon Rim through Heber, Show Low and Pinetop-Lakeside. Just past the Hon-Dah junction, buy your permits, continue a few miles on SR 260 toward McNary and turn south on Slide Creek Road, dirt, toward Hawley Lake country. The campground is a few miles down. Figure 4 hours from Old Town. Reviewers report the road graded well enough for a travel trailer in dry weather.
Pick the season. May through October. Snow closes the road in winter, and afternoon monsoon storms in July and August turn it to slick clay for an hour at a time.
Water. None, and no hookups or dump station. Fill up in Pinetop-Lakeside.
Camp by the rules. Designated sites only, 75 feet from the water, dogs on a 10-foot leash, no firearms or fireworks. Bears work these drainages, so food stays in the vehicle. The sites are not level and the trees are close, so bring blocks and a spotter for a trailer. If the campground is empty on a weeknight, which it often is, leave it cleaner than you found it; the tribe can and does close areas that get abused.
The sites and the stream. Take a site upstream of the dumpster, where the pines are biggest and the stream is loudest. Fish early with small spinners or a dry-dropper; the stocked rainbows sit in the obvious pools, the browns do not. Verizon shows a bar or two, which is rare on the reservation.
Skip it if you want a lake or a shower. Hawley Lake is 6 miles farther along the same road, with a store, cabins and a larger campground on the same permit; Pacheta Lake is the remote high-country lake camp; Hoyer in Greer, off the reservation, has showers and is 50 minutes east; and Scott Reservoir near Lakeside is the cheap Forest Service fallback.
A log road on Apache land
The White River’s forks drain the high country around Mount Baldy, and the land they cross is the homeland of the White Mountain Apache, who farmed the river valleys and hunted these pines long before anyone counted board feet. In 1870 the Army founded Camp Apache, later Fort Apache, on the White River at the suggestion of White Mountain leaders, and in 1871 General George Crook began enlisting White Mountain men as scouts. Crook afterward helped the tribe keep a large part of its homeland as a reservation, which is why this campground, unlike most in the White Mountains, is run by a tribe rather than the Forest Service.
The meadow where McNary now stands was Cluff Cienega in 1879 and 1880, when a Mormon bishop named Benjamin Cluff cut hay there for the fort. In 1919 the settlement was named Cooley, for Corydon Cooley, the Show Low hotelier. Then came the timber. In 1924 the Cady Lumber Company, having cut out its forests in Louisiana, moved its mill, its machinery and hundreds of workers and their families by train from McNary, Louisiana, to Cooley, and won federal permission to rename the town McNary for marketing purposes. Logging roads spread south across the reservation toward the North Fork; the road you drive to Upper Log is one of them. The company became Southwest Lumber Mills and later Southwest Forest Industries, and the mill ran until a fire closed it in 1979. McNary today has fewer than 500 people.
The tribe built its own institutions alongside. It adopted a constitution under the Indian Reorganization Act and elected its first tribal council in 1936, and by the 1950s it was treating recreation as a business. In 1955, alarmed at the decline of the native Apache trout, it closed the reservation to fishing, the first step in a recovery effort that lasted seven decades. By 1959 its recreation enterprise was leasing cabin lots at Hawley Lake, six miles down the road from Upper Log, and the permit system you buy into at the Hon-Dah store is the descendant of that enterprise.
The trout recovery paid off in September 2024, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the Apache trout from the endangered species list, the first sport fish ever recovered and delisted. The tribe started that recovery and its streams were central to it. The trout you catch at Upper Log are mostly stocked rainbows, but the reason you can fish this river at all, on tribal terms, is the same.
Why it matters
Upper Log is a small campground that carries a lot of Arizona history: an Apache homeland kept partly through the Army’s own scouts, a Louisiana lumber company that renamed a town after itself, a mill that ran for half a century and burned, and a tribe that turned its forests and streams into a recreation business and saved its native trout along the way. Camping here means camping under the tribe’s rules, on the tribe’s permit, and that is the point. For a Scottsdale camper it is a cool, quiet stream camp four hours away that rarely fills, the best value on the reservation for anyone who brings water and buys the permit before turning off the highway. Pair it with the day trips through the White Mountains and the Rim country on the way home.