What is Valentine Ridge Campground?
Below the Mogollon Rim, where the Young Road leaves SR 260 and heads south toward Pleasant Valley, the country is ponderosa pine and oak cut by a few creeks that run all year. Canyon Creek is the famous one, a spring-fed trout stream with a state hatchery at its head. Valentine Ridge sits on a bench above it at 6,700 feet: about ten sites with tables and fire rings under the pines, a vault toilet, and nothing else. The Forest Service lists it as a dispersed camping area now rather than a campground, which tells you what to expect from the maintenance, and it charges nothing.
It is a fishing and biking camp. The 9-mile all-terrain bicycle loop that starts here is one of the few signed mountain bike routes in this part of the forest, and Canyon Creek is a few minutes away by road. Compared with the campgrounds on the Rim Road 1,000 feet above, Valentine Ridge is warmer, quieter and emptier, and you can usually get a site on a July Saturday, which is not something you can say about Christopher Creek.
What you get is a free night in the pines with a vault toilet, a trout stream down the road and almost nobody around. What you do not get is water, trash service, a host, a site count the Forest Service will stand behind, or a creek at your tent.
How to camp it right
Pay nothing, claim a spot. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit, no pass of any kind. There is no host and no sign-in; pick a defined site with a table and ring rather than making a new one.
Get there. Shea Boulevard or Loop 101 to SR 87 north to Payson, about an hour and a half on the Beeline. Turn east on SR 260 and drive 33 miles through Star Valley, Kohls Ranch and Christopher Creek, then turn right onto the Young Road (FR 512). It is unpaved from here: about 5 miles south to FR 188, then left and 2 miles to the camp. About two hours and thirty minutes from Old Town. The Forest Service says the roads are fine for passenger cars; after heavy snow you want four-wheel drive or chains. The last water and groceries are in Payson or at the store in Christopher Creek.
Rigs. Trailers under 16 feet. The pullouts are small and the sites are angled; this is a tent and truck camp.
Pick the season. May through October. Winter nights hit the teens and the roads can close. July and August afternoons bring thunderstorms, which pass; fire restrictions often ban campfires in late spring, so check the Tonto’s status before you count on one.
Water and trash. None of either. Bring your water, pack out your trash, and treat anything from the creek.
Bear-proof the camp. The Forest Service specifically asks you to here, and the clawed trash cans back it up. Food, coolers and anything that smells go in the vehicle at night; cook away from the tent. The site’s wildlife guide covers the elk you are more likely to see and the black bear you are less likely to.
Fish by the rules. Canyon Creek has special regulations: four trout above the OW Bridge, catch and release from the bridge to the Fort Apache Reservation boundary, artificial flies and lures only with single barbless hooks. An Arizona license is required, and the reservation water below the boundary needs a tribal permit. The stretch below the hatchery is one of the best small trout streams in the state.
Ride the loop. The signed 9-mile all-terrain bicycle loop leaves from camp through the pines and oak; it is intermediate, rocky in places and empty.
Dogs. On leash.
Skip it if you want water, a creek at your feet or a developed loop. Upper Canyon Creek is the fee campground on the creek itself; Colcord Ridge is the comparable free camp on the Rim side of SR 260; Reynolds Creek is the equivalent down the Young Road in the Sierra Ancha. If you have a full day, the Young Road continues through Young as SR 288 all the way to Roosevelt Lake, a slow gravel loop home.
The quiet ridge above a violent valley
Canyon Creek named a people before it named a fishery. The Canyon Creek band of the Cibecue Apache farmed its headwaters, and the reservation boundary a few miles downstream, where the special fishing regulations end and tribal permits begin, still follows that geography. The band’s best-known leader was Nock-ay-det-klinne, a medicine man whose dances to raise the dead alarmed the Indian agency; on August 30, 1881, troops from Fort Apache arrested him on Cibecue Creek and killed him in the fight that followed, losing seven or eight soldiers of their own. Apaches struck the fort two days later, and the uprising sent Geronimo and Juh off the reservation for two more years.
The valley below the ridge was not peaceful for the newcomers either. The Pleasant Valley War, the feud between the cattle-raising Grahams and the sheep-bringing Tewksburys, ran from 1882 to 1892 and killed an estimated 35 to 50 people, the deadliest range war in Arizona. The worst year was 1887: a Navajo herder of the Tewksburys shot on the Rim in February, William Graham killed in August, John Tewksbury Jr. and William Jacobs ambushed in September, and on the heels of that a Prescott posse under Sheriff Mulvenon that shot John Graham and Charles Blevins at the Perkins Store in what is now Young. The last killing was Tom Graham’s, shot in the back in Tempe on August 2, 1892. Zane Grey turned it into To the Last Man in 1921, and the graves are in the Young cemetery at the bottom of the road you drive in on.
Federal management arrived with the Tonto Forest Reserve on October 3, 1905, and the Pleasant Valley Ranger District, run from Young and now administered from Payson, inherited the ridge and the creek. The trout came later. Arizona Game and Fish built a hatchery at the springs that head Canyon Creek, the department’s page does not give the year and this guide does not guess, and the creek below it became a managed rainbow fishery whose rules, the OW Bridge line, the barbless hooks, the catch-and-release reach, are the department’s rather than the forest’s. Valentine Ridge, the nearest public camp to that water that is not private ranch or reservation, grew up as a fishing camp and later gained the signed bicycle loop that is its other reason to exist. The forest’s pages do not say when the tables and toilet went in, or why it is called Valentine; neither does any source this guide could stand behind.
Isolation lasted longer here than almost anywhere in Arizona. Young got outside electric power for the first time in 1965, a cell tower only in 2008, and the northern three miles of SR 288 were not paved until 2010. The region’s defining modern event was fire: the Rodeo-Chediski Fire, two blazes that started on the reservation on June 18 and 20, 2002, one set by a seasonal firefighter hoping for work and one by a stranded rider signaling a helicopter, merged on June 23 and burned 468,638 acres along the Rim before they were controlled on July 7, destroying more than 400 homes. The pines on Valentine Ridge stood at its edge and survived.
The Forest Service’s quiet reclassification of the place from campground to dispersed camping area is the most recent change, and it tells you what is coming: no fee, no water, no host, and maintenance when there is money for it.
Why it matters
Valentine Ridge is where the Rim’s two Arizonas meet: the managed, stocked, regulated trout stream of the Game and Fish Department and the free, unstaffed, slowly deteriorating camp of a Forest Service with more land than budget. It is also the back door to the valley where Arizona’s bloodiest range war was fought and to a reservation boundary drawn around the band of a man the Army killed in 1881. None of that is signed. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: if you fish or ride, and you want a free July night in the pines without the Rim Road’s crowds, drive the gravel, lock up the cooler, and go to bed early; the creek is best at first light.