What is Wagon Wheel Campground?
East of the farming community of Lukachukai, Navajo Route 13 leaves the red-rock valley floor and climbs into the Lukachukai Mountains, the northern arm of the Chuskas, on its way over Buffalo Pass to Red Valley and Shiprock. About six miles up, where the road crosses Lukachukai Creek at roughly 7,480 feet, there is a clearing in the ponderosas with a few stone fire rings and picnic tables. The USGS map names it Wagon Wheel Campground; the Navajo Nation EPA, which samples the creek here, calls it a picnic area. It is both and neither: a place where Lukachukai families have picnicked, gathered wood and camped for generations, with shade, running water in the creek, and no toilets, tap, trash service or host.
It is pretty. The creek is small and clear, the pines are big, and the pass above opens onto one of the great views of the Four Corners, east across Red Valley to Shiprock and the Carrizos. Dirt spurs near the pass lead to Big Lake (Wide Lake) and the Many Skulls trail, and the NavajoYES mountain-bike route over the Chuskas passes the Buffalo Pass picnic area a mile or two above.
What you get is a shaded creek crossing at the bottom of a spectacular grade, a legal place to stop for lunch, and, with a permit and a self-contained camp, a legal place to sleep. What you do not get is a single facility, a reservation, a sign that says campground, or the sense that you are the intended guest; this is a community picnic ground first.
How to camp Wagon Wheel right
Buy the permit before you leave home. A Navajo Nation camping permit from Navajo Nation Parks & Recreation is required to spend the night anywhere on the Nation outside the tribal parks; it is listed at $15 per person per night and sold online and at 928-871-6647 on weekdays. Nobody collects at the site, and the Nation treats camping without one as trespassing. Carry a printed copy; there is no cell signal in the creek bottom.
Get there. About 6 hours 20 minutes from Old Town, all paved. 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 30 miles along the North Rim of Canyon de Chelly to Tsaile, Indian Route 12 north about 12 miles to Lukachukai, and Route 13 east up the mountain. Wagon Wheel is on the right at the creek crossing a few miles before the grade steepens. Fill the tank in Chinle; Lukachukai has a small store. The Navajo Nation keeps daylight time, an hour ahead of Scottsdale in summer.
Pick the season. Late May through October. Route 13 over the pass is steep and often closed by snow and ice in winter, and the Nation does not maintain it often then. Weekdays in June or late September, when the aspens on the pass turn, are the time; weekends and holidays belong to the local families.
Water and toilets. None provided. Filter and treat the creek if you must; it runs through grazing land. Bring drinking water and a portable toilet, and pack out everything.
Camp small and quiet. A tent or a truck camper in an existing spot, a fire only in an existing ring when no restrictions are posted, and no cutting of live wood. Leave the tables for the families who picnic here. Ask before photographing people, homes or sheep camps.
Rules and wildlife. No alcohol, firearms or fireworks on the Navajo Nation. This is black bear country; keep food in the vehicle. Dogs on leash and away from livestock.
The walking. Dirt spurs near the pass lead to Big Lake and the Many Skulls trail; the NavajoYES route guide maps them and asks hikers to carry a backcountry permit and stay on existing roads and tracks.
Skip it if the creek is busy or you want a real bed. Go for the drive over Buffalo Pass and camp at the Buffalo Pass area two miles up, or fall back to Tsaile Lake, Cottonwood Campground in Chinle, or the hogans and host at Spider Rock on the South Rim.
A creek crossing the valley kept for itself
The Chuskas were supplying timber to other people a thousand years ago. Tree-ring dates on roof beams at Chaco Canyon, on the San Juan Basin to the east, show ponderosa cut in these mountains and carried to the great houses as early as 974, which makes the range one of the oldest documented logging grounds on the continent. The Diné who came after the Puebloans made the mountains the eastern edge of their homeland and the valley at their foot a farming place; the marshy bottoms below the creek gave the community its name, Lukachukai, “a field of white reeds.” Sheep went up the drainages into the pines each summer, and the clearing at the creek crossing was a camp on that route long before it had a name on a map.
The 19th century broke the pattern and then restored it. Kit Carson’s 1864 campaign through Canyon de Chelly, 40 miles south, and the Long Walk that followed emptied the Navajo valleys; the Treaty of 1868 brought the people home to a reservation whose core included the Chuskas, and the chapters along the mountains, Lukachukai among them, grew from that return. The valley got a trading post, a mission church and a boarding school in the decades after, and it stayed a place that outsiders passed through on the way to somewhere else.
The 20th century came as uranium. Navajos knew the yellow outcrops on the mesas; in 1949 the ore was identified and from 1949 to 1968 a series of companies mined uranium and vanadium around Cove, on the far side of the range from Wagon Wheel, with Navajo miners who were told little about the dust. When the companies left, the open adits and waste piles stayed, and the Lukachukai Mountains have carried that legacy since; in March 2024 the EPA placed the Lukachukai Mountains Mining District, spanning the Cove, Lukachukai and Round Rock chapters, on the Superfund National Priorities List. The Navajo Nation EPA’s water-quality station on Lukachukai Creek at the Wagon Wheel picnic area is part of the monitoring that followed, and it is the reason the federal database knows this clearing exists.
The road is the newest layer. Route 13 climbed out of Lukachukai as a wagon track and then a dirt grade that was closed much of the winter and frightening the rest of the year, which is why the pass was a destination for local picnics and almost nobody else. The Nation paved the whole route over Buffalo Pass to Red Valley and on to Shiprock in 1999, opening a 45-mile shortcut between Canyon de Chelly and the San Juan Basin, and the creek crossing at Wagon Wheel became the last flat, shaded stop before the 14-percent grade. The pavement brought the camping apps, which put a campground pin on a picnic ground; it did not bring a toilet, a tap, a sign or a host, and the Lukachukai Chapter has shown no sign of wanting any of them. The NavajoYES route guide, written with the chapters’ cooperation, is the first published attempt to tell visitors how to use this mountain, and its first rule is the permit.
Why it matters
Wagon Wheel is a reminder that most of the “campgrounds” on the Navajo Nation are community places first, and that the Nation’s rules exist to protect them from the kind of attention that closed Grand Falls. It explains the Chuskas in miniature: a thousand-year timber source, a homeland emptied and restored, a uranium district on the Superfund list, and a paved road that made a picnic ground into a waypoint. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is modest: a fine lunch stop on the way over Buffalo Pass and a legal bed with a permit and a self-contained camp, but go in knowing you are a guest at someone else’s creek, and plan to sleep higher or at Chinle if the families are using it.