What is West Fork Campground?
The Black River has two forks above their confluence south of Big Lake. The East Fork got the six developed campgrounds; the West Fork got one, and the Forest Service has let it drift toward wild. West Fork Campground is a stretch of river bottom in a narrow canyon of tall ponderosa at about 7,740 feet, with a two-stall vault toilet, some tables and rock fire rings, a few weathered Adirondack-style shelters, and no fee, no water, no trash service and no site numbers. Older guides count 70 “undefined” sites; a visitor in October 2026 called it bare-bones, with vault toilets and nothing else, flat parking under the pines and the river right beside it. Both are true. You camp where it is flat.
The river is the draw. The West Fork is smaller and less fished than the East Fork and holds rainbow, brown, brook and Apache trout, with a trail along the water in both directions. It is also, as of the 2020s, a recovery stream for the Apache trout, which means the non-native fish are on their way out and the regulations change with the work. Above the canyon the 2011 Wallow Fire burned hard, and the forest toward Big Lake is snags and new aspen; the campground’s big trees came through.
What you get is the Black River for free, with a toilet, in a canyon that holds its cold. What you do not get is a tap, a trash can, a site number, a trailer turnaround, a cell signal or a Forest Service web page that admits the place exists.
How to camp the West Fork right
Pay nothing, follow the dispersed rules. Free, first come, first served, 14-day limit. Pack in, pack out. There is no host and no fee tube; the forest’s campground table lists the place with no fee and a vault toilet, and that is the extent of its paperwork.
Get there. Shea to the Beeline, SR 260 east through Show Low to the Sunrise junction, SR 273 to Big Lake, about 4 hours 25 minutes and the last water, ice and firewood. Take Forest Road 249E south of the lake to Forest Road 68, south about 10 miles to the signed turn, then 1.5 miles along the West Fork to the camp. Allow 45 minutes and 5 hours 10 minutes in all. From Alpine, FR 249 and FR 276 to the East Fork and FR 25 across to FR 68 is similar. All of it is gravel and dirt, fine for a car when dry and nothing when wet. There is no turnaround for a trailer; guides list a 10-foot limit, which means tents, vans and truck campers.
Pick the season. Roughly May through October. June and September are best. The canyon is narrow enough that the sun arrives late and leaves early, and it is cold and damp at night in any month; an October visitor measured 40 degrees. Bring a warmer bag than the date suggests. Monsoon storms in July and August close the road for hours; if the sky builds by noon, get the car back up FR 68 before the clay turns.
Water. None. Filter the river or carry it from Big Lake. Fill every jug at the store there.
Fire and hazard trees. Restrictions are common from May into July; check the forest’s current order before you plan on a campfire. Look up before you pitch: the ridges burned in 2011 and dead trees still come down in wind. Pick a spot upstream, away from the road end.
Fish it small. The West Fork fishes smaller and wilder than the East Fork; a 3-weight, a dry-dropper and a mile’s walk from the last car will find browns and the occasional Apache trout. Carry the current regulations, because the river is a recovery stream and the rules move with the restoration work.
Dogs. Leashed or restrained.
Skip it if you want a numbered site and a spigot on the same river system. Horse Springs on the East Fork is 20 minutes away for $16; Buffalo Crossing puts the water at your tent for $14; Diamond Rock is the other East Fork option. For a developed base on the highway with a lodge next door, Hannagan Meadow is the high-elevation alternative.
The river that is being given back to its fish
The Black River’s two forks drain the White Mountains, the range the Western Apache hold sacred, and the river itself marks the northern edge of what became the Fort Apache Reservation. The fish that evolved in these cold streams is the Apache trout, a yellow-gold native found nowhere else on earth, and its story is the West Fork’s story. By the 1940s, after decades of stocking rainbow, brown and brook trout into every reachable stream for the sport fishery, the Apache trout survived in about a dozen headwater creeks, all of them on the reservation. In 1955 the White Mountain Apache Tribe, which considers the fish sacred, closed its streams to fishing to save it, a decade before the federal government had a law to do the same.
The law caught up. The Apache trout received protection under the first federal endangered species act in 1967; biologists recognized it as a species distinct from the Gila trout in 1972; and in 1975 the Fish and Wildlife Service reclassified it as threatened so that limited fishing could resume on recovered streams. Recovery work spread off the reservation onto Forest Service streams through the 1980s and 1990s: road closures, cattle fencing, hatchery stock, and fish barriers built across creeks to keep the non-natives from coming back upstream. Several of the early rock barriers failed and had to be rebuilt in concrete. On the West Fork the barrier is a Bureau of Reclamation structure just above the East Fork confluence, downstream of the campground, and Game and Fish’s plan is to manage everything above it primarily as an Apache trout recovery stream, with loach minnow, speckled dace, Sonora sucker and roundtail chub restored below the campground.
The campground itself has almost no paper history, which is a kind of history. The East Fork, with its road from Alpine and its six campgrounds, was the Forest Service’s showpiece; the West Fork, at the end of twelve miles of FR 68, got a vault toilet, some tables, a few weathered Adirondack shelters of no recorded age, and a listing in old guides of 70 undefined sites. No current Forest Service page describes it. The forest’s own campground table gives it a line: no fee, vault toilet. Visitors in the 2020s describe a dozen flat spots and a two-stall toilet. Nobody ever numbered the sites, and nobody is going to.
The fire nearly ended all of it. The Wallow Fire started on May 29, 2011, from an abandoned campfire in the Bear Wallow Wilderness south of Alpine, and by the time it was contained on July 8 it had burned 538,049 acres, the largest wildfire in Arizona’s history, past the Rodeo-Chediski. It killed thousands of Apache trout in streams across the White Mountains, incinerated riparian cover, and set the recovery back by what officials estimated at four to six years; biologists moved pure-strain fish out of streams expected to die. The ridges above the West Fork burned to snags; the canyon-bottom pines around the campground survived. The two men who left the campfire pleaded guilty in 2012 and were ordered to pay $3.7 million in restitution.
The recovery survived the fire. In 2023 and 2024 Game and Fish planned a two-phase chemical renovation of the West Fork above the barrier to remove the brown and brook trout, and on September 4, 2024, the Fish and Wildlife Service removed the Apache trout from the endangered species list, the first American sportfish ever delisted, with 30 recovered populations in Arizona. The tribe’s fisheries manager cautioned that delisting was not the end, and the West is getting hotter and drier; the fish still occupies less than a third of the 700 stream miles it once had. But a camper at the West Fork in a good year can now catch, and release, the fish that the Apache closed their rivers to save in 1955.
Why it matters
West Fork is the place on this site where the fish is the history. It explains what stocking did to Arizona’s native trout, what one tribe did about it before any federal law existed, and how long it takes to undo a century of good intentions: barriers, poison, fire, more barriers, seventy years. It also explains the Forest Service’s quiet choice to leave one Black River campground undeveloped while it built out the rest. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is five hours of driving for a free, unnumbered pine-canyon camp beside a recovering river; bring every gallon of water, a warmer bag than you think, a 3-weight and the current regulations, and leave the trailer at home.