What is Upper Pinal Campground?
Keep climbing past the Pinal and Six Shooter campgrounds on Forest Road 651 and, just before the road reaches the radio towers on the summit of Pinal Peak, there is one more pullout in the firs with three sites, a vault toilet, tables and fire rings. That is Upper Pinal. It is the highest camp in the range, a little under the 7,848-foot summit, and the coldest: frost in May and October is normal, and a July dawn can be in the 40s. Douglas fir, white fir and aspen stand over the sites, and the view, when the trees open, runs east across the copper country around Globe.
The Forest Service does not give Upper Pinal its own listing; it manages it as part of the Pinal summit cluster, with the same no-fee, no-water, 14-day rules. Think of the three campgrounds as one destination with nineteen sites spread over half a mile: Pinal with four, Six Shooter with twelve, Upper Pinal with three. Upper Pinal is where you end up when you want the fewest neighbors and the shortest walk to the summit, which is a few minutes up the road and has a view that runs from the Superstitions to the Galiuros and the Catalinas.
What you get is a free, high, quiet camp at the top of a desert-island mountain range, in a forest that looks like Colorado and sits two and a half hours from Scottsdale. What you do not get is water, trash service, a fee station, a host, cell signal or room for anything bigger than a small truck camper. It is three sites, and on a holiday weekend three sites is nothing; drive up for the Pinals and take Upper Pinal if it is open.
How to camp Upper Pinal right
Pay nothing, reserve nothing. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit, no pass. There is no fee machine and no host. The only paperwork is the fire rule: fires only in the rings, and only when the Tonto National Forest is not under restrictions, which it often is in May and June. Check before you load the firewood.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east, through Superior and the Queen Creek tunnel to Globe, about an hour and forty minutes. From Globe, take Jess Hayes Road southeast past Besh-Ba-Gowah to FR 112 (Icehouse Canyon Road), 2 paved miles to FR 55, 2 partly paved miles to FR 651, then 10 miles of narrow, winding gravel to the summit campgrounds, with Upper Pinal the last of them. About two hours and forty minutes from Old Town. The Forest Service rates FR 651 for sedans only in dry weather, and the top mile is the roughest and the snowiest. No trailers beyond a small teardrop; the Forest Service limit at Pinal is 16 feet, and the Upper Pinal pullout is tighter.
Pick the season. May through October. The summit road is often closed by snow and ice through the winter and into spring, and the stretch above Pinal is the first to close and the last to open; call the Globe Ranger District at (928) 402-6200 before an April or November trip. July and August bring afternoon thunderstorms that turn the gravel to grease; if the sky to the southwest is building after lunch, get the car pointed downhill.
Bring the warm bag. This is the coldest camp within three hours of Scottsdale in summer. Pack layers you would laugh at in the Valley, a bag rated well below the Globe forecast, and a tarp; the firs drip for an hour after every storm.
Water. None, nor trash service. Globe is the last stop for both. Fill every jug.
Dogs and bears. Dogs on leash. Black bears live in the Pinals; keep food in the car and nothing scented in the tent.
Walk to the top. The summit road and towers are a short stroll above camp. Go at first light: the sunrise view east over Globe and Miami and south to the Galiuros is the best in the range, and the towers do not spoil it if you stand on the far side. At least two of the range’s eight trails reach the summit from below, so a long day can start here and drop through Sixshooter or Icehouse canyon and back.
Skip it if it is full or you have a trailer. Pinal and Six Shooter are a few hundred yards back down the road with sixteen more sites; Pioneer Pass is lower down on the other road from Globe with more room; Sulphide del Rey and Kellner Canyon are the lower, warmer alternatives on the same mountain. On a Valley weekend under an excessive heat warning, any of them is a 30-degree improvement.
The signal mountain over the copper camps
The Pinals are a sky island, a block of granite and schist rising from the desert south of Globe high enough to carry fir and aspen, and people have used the high ground for as long as they have lived below it. Salado farmers occupied the foothills from the 13th to the 15th century; their town of Besh-Ba-Gowah, a mile south of present-day Globe and now a city archaeological park, was lived in from about 1225 to 1400. When the Salado left in the mid-1400s, the Western Apache and the Kwevkepaya Yavapai took the range, and both named it for its pines. Spanish parties scouting north from Sonora in the 1600s translated the name as Pinal, a stand of pine trees, and left a record of a brief fight with Apache warriors in the range.
The mountain’s modern history begins with silver. In 1875 ore was struck on the San Carlos reservation east of the range, the government redrew the reservation line, and the mining camp that became Globe grew at the mountain’s foot; by 1881 it was the Gila County seat. Prospectors worked claims up the north face through the late 1870s, cutting the trail up Sixshooter Canyon, named, the story goes, for the revolvers the millworkers carried, and a cabin and sawmill stood near the mine there in the 1880s. The Gibson mine, the only one that paid, ran from 1906 to 1918 and produced nearly all the copper and silver the range ever yielded. None of it compared with the Old Dominion in Globe, and the Pinals went back to being the town’s water source and summer refuge.
The Army was here too. Signal Peak, at 7,812 feet the twin summit a few hundred yards from Pinal Peak, got its name as a heliograph station in the Apache campaigns of the 1880s, soldiers flashing mirrored sunlight across the valleys to the next station; the Forest Service notes that the saddle below it, where Pinal and Six Shooter campgrounds now sit, is that old signaling ground. The federal government set the range aside as the Pinal Mountains Forest Reserve on March 20, 1905, made it a 45,760-acre national forest on March 4, 1907, and merged it into the Tonto on January 13, 1908, where it has been ever since.
Recreation came with the Depression. Civilian Conservation Corps crews worked the Pinals through the 1930s and left the Icehouse camp at the foot of Sixshooter Canyon and the trail network that still climbs the mountain. The summit road and the three small camps near the top are plainer work of a later Forest Service, built for Globe families escaping July. The radio and television towers on both peaks arrived as Globe and the Valley wanted signal, and they are the one ugly thing on the mountain. Nothing has changed the arrangement much since: no fee, no water, a gravel road the Forest Service rates for sedans only when dry, and a mountain that closes itself with snow for half the year.
Why it matters
The Pinals explain a pattern repeated across southern Arizona: a mountain range high enough to hold a forest, surrounded by desert and a mining town, used in turn by farmers, Apaches, soldiers with mirrors, miners and finally by people with tents. Upper Pinal is the smallest and highest piece of that last chapter, three sites that cost nothing and sit colder than anywhere else you can reach from Scottsdale in an afternoon. The practical verdict: do not plan a trip around three sites. Plan a trip around the Pinals, fill the jugs in Globe, check the fire restrictions, and if the top pullout is empty when you get there, take it and walk up to the towers before the sun does.