What is White Rock Campground?
In 1957 the Arizona Game and Fish Department dammed Peña Blanca Wash where it drops out of the Atascosa and Pajarito mountains, and the result is Peña Blanca Lake: nearly 50 acres of water in a grassy, oak-dotted canyon at about 4,000 feet, named for the white bluffs of volcanic tuff (peñas blancas) on the hillsides. The lake has a paved boat ramp, three fishing piers, four developed picnic areas with grills and vault toilets, and the 1.5-mile round-trip Children’s Forest Discovery Trail along the west shore to the dam. Game and Fish manages it for trophy largemouth bass and stocks rainbow trout in winter; waterfowl winter here and warblers and orioles pass through in spring and fall. Motors are limited to 10 horsepower, which keeps it a paddler’s lake.
White Rock Campground is a quarter mile southwest of the lake, up Peña Blanca Canyon under the cliffs that give it its name. It is small and simple: 13 sites under big Emory and Arizona white oaks, each with a table, fire ring and parking pad, a single vault toilet, and no water. Vehicles over 22 feet do not fit. The Forest Service says the spaces go quickly in the cool months and on holidays, and additional dispersed camping lies up Peña Blanca, Alamo and Walker canyons for those who miss out.
What you get is one of the pleasantest cheap nights in southern Arizona: oak shade, a small lake a short walk away, a paved road to the gate and a $15 fee. What you do not get is water, firewood, a reservation, room for a trailer, or fish you should eat; and you are camping twelve miles from the border, in a place the Forest Service itself flags for smuggling traffic. Midweek in November it is quiet, pretty and nearly empty.
How to camp White Rock right
Bring cash, come Friday. $15 single, $30 double, cash or check at the campground, first come, first served, 14 days. Senior and Access passes pay half. From October to April arrive Friday afternoon or you will not get a site; the Forest Service says the 13 spaces fill fast in cool months and on holidays, and Easter weekend turns the whole lake into a Nogales family reunion. The lake’s day-use lots are a separate $8 per vehicle per day or $10 per week; the $40 Coronado annual pass or an Interagency pass covers them.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east to Tucson, I-19 south 51 miles to exit 12, Ruby Road (SR 289), about 8 miles north of Nogales, then 9 miles west on paved two-lane to the lake. The campground is a short way past the lake turnoff on Forest Road 39, where the pavement is about to end. About 185 minutes from Old Town. Rio Rico, at the freeway, is the last gas and groceries. Beyond the lake Ruby Road is dirt for 25 miles; a car can reach the campground, but not much farther.
Water and wood. None at the campground or the lake, and no firewood is sold or may be gathered. Bring every drop from Rio Rico and your own wood, charcoal or stove.
Vehicles. 22 feet maximum, two per site, no hookups. Horses and pack stock are not allowed.
Fish, but think before you eat. Launch a kayak at first light from the paved ramp before the bass boats arrive; 10 horsepower is the limit and the lake is a paddler’s size. Largemouth bass, catfish and sunfish year-round, rainbow trout stocked roughly monthly from October to March, license required from age 10. Mercury may be present in the fish and the lake is not routinely tested, so consider catch and release. Swimming is at your own risk and prohibited at the ramp.
Walk the shore. The Children’s Forest trail along the west shore to the dam is 1.5 miles round trip and the place for herons; the wildlife guide covers the coatis and javelina that work the oaks at night.
Border. The Forest Service’s own page says crossing and smuggling are common here. Stay on designated routes, lock up, report anything suspicious to the Border Patrol. Most campers notice nothing beyond Border Patrol trucks.
Dogs. On leash in the campground and picnic areas.
Drive Ruby Road if you can. With high clearance, the dirt beyond the lake runs 25 miles through the Atascosas past the ghost town of Ruby to Arivaca, a 55-mile loop the Forest Service says takes two to three hours and the best drive in this corner of the state; La Siesta at the far end is the private campground with showers.
Skip it if you want water at the site, a bigger lake or a reservation. Parker Canyon Lake east of the Huachucas is the larger, cooler alternative; Bog Springs in Madera Canyon is the birders’ campground an hour north; and Cieneguita on the Las Cienegas grasslands is the free, open-sky option.
A fishing lake with a ghost town’s mercury in it
The oak canyons between the Santa Cruz and the Baboquivaris were O’odham country, the northern edge of the Pimería Alta that Spanish missionaries mapped from the 1690s on, when Kino founded the missions at Guevavi and Tumacácori a few miles east of here; Apache raiding parties crossed these hills for two centuries afterward, and the Spanish presidio that became Tubac was built to stop them. The white bluffs of volcanic tuff on the canyon walls gave the wash its name long before anyone thought to dam it.
What the lake inherited from the nineteenth century was mining. The first claim on the Montana mine, over the ridge to the west, was filed in 1877, and the camp that grew up around it was never more than fifty people until Julius Andrews opened a post office on April 11, 1912 and named it Ruby for his wife. Ruby’s fame is grim: three double murders in and around the town between 1920 and 1922 set off one of the largest manhunts in the history of the Southwest, and the first in Arizona to use an airplane. Its prosperity came later, when the Eagle-Picher Lead Company ran the Montana through the late 1920s and 1930s and the town held about 1,200 people at its mid-1930s peak. The mine closed in 1940, the post office on May 31, 1941, and the town was empty by the end of that year. The miners of the Peña Blanca and Ruby country used mercury to process their gold and silver ore, and their tailings have been washing down the canyons ever since.
The lake is a postwar idea paid for by anglers. Arizona Game and Fish planned an earthen dam across Peña Blanca Wash for 1955; setbacks pushed completion to 1957, at a cost of $125,000 drawn from hunting and fishing license sales and the federal Dingell-Johnson sport-fish fund. Filling began in early 1958, was interrupted when a heavy machine fell into the rising water and the lake had to be drained to recover it, and finished by March 18, 1958; the area opened to the public that month. A resort with a six-room motel, a restaurant, a bait shop and a store opened on the shore in 1959, lost its Forest Service permit in 1969, got it back, lost it again, reopened in 1971 under its original builder with a working sewage system, closed for good in 1996 and was torn down for safety in May 2002. The lodge’s pad is one of the picnic areas now.
Then the mercury caught up. Contractors cleaned up three mine sites in the watershed in 1999, but the metal was already in the lake bed. In 2008 the Forest Service closed and drained Peña Blanca to dredge the contaminated sediment, warning it might take years to refill; it reopened in August 2009. The fish community came back different, with the trout stocked again each winter, and a 2013 Arizona Department of Environmental Quality report found mercury levels in the fish much as they had been before the dredging, which turned attention to natural seeps along the faults. The consumption advisory stands, and will for the foreseeable future.
The campground has had a quieter life than the lake. White Rock’s 13 sites sit a quarter mile up the canyon under oaks that were there before the dam, and the Forest Service has kept them simple: tables, rings, one toilet, no water, a 22-foot limit that rules out most of what Americans now camp in. The border, nine miles south and busier than it was in 1958, is the other thing that has changed around it, and the Forest Service says so on the campground’s own page.
Why it matters
Peña Blanca is the southern Arizona pattern in one small canyon: Spanish mission country, an Anglo mining camp that left poison in the creek, a state fishing lake built with license money in the 1950s, a resort that could not keep its permit, and a cleanup that did not quite work. It explains why so many of Arizona’s small lakes come with an advisory, and why the Forest Service posts the border notice without apology. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is plain: it is three hours for a $15 oak-shaded site and a paddle on a pretty lake, excellent midweek from November to March, hopeless on Easter weekend, and the fish are for catching rather than eating. Drive Ruby Road on the way out if you have the clearance.