What is Willow Springs Lake?
Willow Springs is one of the Rim Lakes, the string of small reservoirs the Arizona Game and Fish Department built along the top of the Mogollon Rim in the 1950s and 1960s so that Phoenix could have trout. This one dates to 1966, or 1967 by the department’s own account, covers about 150 surface acres with an average depth of about 60 feet, and sits at 7,600 feet in ponderosa pine, which means that on an August afternoon when Scottsdale is 108 it is about 80 here. The lake is a long, forked basin with a paved boat ramp on the west shore, a single vault toilet, a dirt lot and two picnic ramadas. That is the whole facility. It is half a mile from SR 260 on pavement, 2 hours 15 minutes from Old Town, and free.
What it has going for it is the fishing and the quiet. Motors are capped at 10 horsepower, so the lake belongs to kayaks, canoes and small aluminum boats, and Game and Fish stocks it with rainbow trout, and since 2015 with tiger trout, a sterile brown-brook hybrid that hits hard, from spring into fall. Bass and sunfish that somebody dumped in years ago reproduce on their own. Woods Canyon Lake ten minutes west gets the crowds, the store and the rental boats. Willow Springs gets the people who brought their own.
What you get is cold water, cool air, trout and a paved road to the ramp. What you do not get is a beach, a store, drinking water, shoreline camping or a trail around the lake; the shores are rock and timber, and the campground is a mile back down the road.
How to fish Willow Springs right
Nothing to pay but the license. No day-use or launch fee. You need an Arizona fishing license to fish, and the standard six-trout limit applies, with tiger trout counting toward it. Camping fees apply only at Sinkhole.
Get there. Take Loop 101 or Loop 202 to SR 87, the Beeline, and ride it 90 minutes to Payson. In Payson turn east on SR 260 and climb for about 30 miles, past Christopher Creek and up the Rim face, to the top. Just past the Rim Visitor Information Station and the Woods Canyon turnoff, watch for the signed Willow Springs Lake Road (FR 149) on the left near milepost 283. The lake is half a mile up a paved road, with Sinkhole Campground on the way. Figure about 2 hours 15 minutes from Old Town with no traffic, and add 20 minutes for a Friday afternoon in July. The nearest gas and groceries are in Forest Lakes, about four miles east on SR 260, and Woods Canyon Lake has a store in season.
Launch early. The ramp lot is not big. On a summer weekend it is full by late morning and cars line the road back toward the campground; by noon the wind comes up and paddling turns into work. Weekdays you will have it nearly to yourself.
Pick the season. The road and lake close with lasting snow, usually November through April. May and June are clear and cold; July into September is monsoon season, with afternoon thunderstorms on schedule, so be off the water by one o’clock. September and early October are the best weeks of the year. Pack a jacket in any month.
Fish where the truck can reach. The west and north shores are where the stocking truck gets to, so that is where the easy trout are in the week after a stocking; the deeper water off the dam fishes better in July and August when the fish go down to about ten feet. The bass live in the rocky arms.
Water and toilets. One vault toilet, no drinking water, no trash service. Bring everything, and take it back down.
Camp a mile away. No dispersed camping within half a mile of the lake; the Forest Service enforces it. The answer is Sinkhole Campground a mile away, with 26 sites and water, or Canyon Point five miles east if you want showers.
Dogs. Fine on a leash, and they love it here. Keep them out of the ramp area when boats are launching.
Skip it if you want a store, rental boats, a shoreline trail or a beach. Woods Canyon Lake ten minutes west has all of them and the crowd that comes with them; Bear Canyon Lake is the one for people who want even fewer people and can handle dirt.
A lake that drains the wrong way, built so a desert could have trout
The top of the Mogollon Rim is a slab of pine forest at 7,500 feet that tips north, away from the Valley, toward the Little Colorado. Willow Springs Canyon, like its neighbors, carries snowmelt north to Chevelon Creek and on to Winslow. For the Western Apache this country was summer range; for the Army, in the 1870s, it was the line of General Crook’s road along the Rim edge, now FR 300, a few miles south of the lake. Nobody dammed anything up here for a century because there was nothing to irrigate and nobody to sell power to.
What the Rim had was cold water and a growing city two hours away that wanted to catch trout. In the 1950s and 1960s the Arizona Game and Fish Department set out to build what nature had not: a string of small reservoirs along the Rim top, Woods Canyon, Bear Canyon, Black Canyon, Chevelon, Knoll and Willow Springs, each plugging a canyon with an earthen dam, each stocked from a truck. They are recreation lakes in the purest sense; none of them stores water for a farm or a faucet. Willow Springs was dammed in 1966, or 1967 by the department’s own account, with an 80-foot dam that the National Inventory of Dams lists as completed in 1970, which likely reflects when the paperwork closed rather than when the lake filled. It has no permanent inflow. It fills on snowmelt alone and holds its level because the canyon is deep and the dam is high, which is why it averages about 60 feet deep and stays cold enough for trout all summer when shallower lakes warm up.
The forest around it has had closer calls than the lake. In June and July 2002 the Rodeo-Chediski Fire burned across the Rim country to the east and south, the largest wildfire in Arizona history to that point, closing SR 260 and emptying Forest Lakes and Heber; the Rim lakes stayed open, and the pines around Willow Springs survived where those a few miles east did not. The fishery changed in quieter ways. Somebody dumped bass and sunfish into the lake, and they took, so a trout lake now has a self-sustaining warm-water fishery in its rocky arms. In 2015 Game and Fish added tiger trout, a sterile hybrid of brown and brook trout that cannot breed and fights harder than a rainbow, and Willow Springs became one of the first Arizona lakes to get them.
What has not changed is the facility, and that is deliberate. The Forest Service built a paved ramp, a toilet and two ramadas and stopped; the store, the rentals and the shoreline trail went to Woods Canyon next door, and the campground went a mile down the road at Sinkhole, with a half-mile no-camping buffer around the water to keep the shore from being trampled. The 10-horsepower limit, which applies to all the Rim lakes, keeps the wake boats out. Willow Springs is a 1960s idea of a fishing lake, left mostly as built, and it works.
Why it matters
Willow Springs explains the Rim lakes, which are not reservoirs in the Arizona sense at all. No one drinks from them or waters a field; a state agency built them so a desert city could drive two hours and catch a trout, and sixty years later that is still exactly what they do. This one is the plainest and the easiest, paved to the ramp, free, quiet by rule, with the campground kept a mile away so the shore stays whole. For a Scottsdale visitor it is the Rim lake to start with: launch at seven, fish the west shore, be off the water before the wind, and drive down the hill before the storm.