What is Windy Hill Campground?
Windy Hill is a whole peninsula of campground. It covers a low hill that pushes into the south side of Roosevelt Lake about 6 miles southeast of the dam, and the Forest Service has filled it with 147 developed sites in loops named for the animals that walk through them: Coyote, Coati, Chipmunk and more. Every site has a steel ramada, a table and a fire ring with a grill. Restroom buildings with showers, potable water hydrants, two playgrounds and an amphitheater are spread among the loops, and a boat launch sits on the north side. A single site is $25, a double $50, and the drive from Old Town is about two hours and ten minutes.
It is a campground built for a fuller lake and a busier era, which is why it almost never fills. On a January weekend you may share a loop with three other parties. The ground is open desert at about 2,100 feet, the ramada is the only shade, and the wind that names the place arrives most afternoons off the water. The views across to the Sierra Ancha and back to the Four Peaks are the compensation, and they are good ones.
What you get is a guaranteed site, a hot shower, water at every loop and a ramp on the biggest lake in the Tonto National Forest. What you do not get is intimacy, hookups, shade beyond the steel, or a short walk to the water when the lake is down.
How to camp Windy Hill right
Reserve in winter, show up in summer. $25 a night single, $50 double, with an $8 charge per extra vehicle. From November 1 to March 15 odd-numbered sites are reservable on recreation.gov; from April through October it is all first come, first served. Senior and Access passes halve the single-site fee. Pay at the card-only fee machine inside the entrance. Camping fees cover the campground ramp; the neighboring day-use boating site needs a Tonto Pass with a watercraft sticker.
Get there. Take Shea Boulevard to SR 87, the Beeline, and go north about 60 miles to the SR 188 junction. Turn right and follow SR 188 southeast for about 33 miles along the lake, past Roosevelt Dam and the SR 88 junction, then another 4 miles to Forest Road 82. Turn left and drive 2 paved miles to the entrance. Figure about two hours and ten minutes from Old Town. Coming from the East Valley, US 60 to Globe and SR 188 north 25 miles takes about the same time. The last groceries are in Payson or Globe; the store at Roosevelt is small.
Pick the season. Open all year. October through April is the point. The Forest Service warns that June through August often tops 100 degrees and that RV air conditioners struggle; there are no hookups to run them anyway.
Pick the loop. The loops at the tip of the peninsula have water on two sides and the best sunsets over the Four Peaks, and they take the full force of the afternoon wind; stake the tent as if you mean it and put the ramada between you and the west. The loops nearest the boat launch see the most traffic and have the shortest walk to the water. Trailers under 32 feet fit most loops, under 20 in Coati.
Water and toilets. Potable water throughout. Expect flush restrooms with showers in some loops and vaults in others, and plan on the showers being closed occasionally in the off season. The nearest dump station is at Cholla, 8 miles north, free.
Check the lake level. Roosevelt swings by tens of feet between wet and dry years. The ramps work above about 2,110 feet; below that the walk from your site to the water crosses a bathtub ring of mud and tamarisk that is longer than the map suggests. The drought entry explains why a Salt River lake tracks the whole Southwest.
Use the wind. When it blows, drive ten minutes back up SR 188 to Tonto National Monument and the Salado cliff dwellings, the best half-day on the lake.
Dogs. Allowed on leash. The wildlife the loops are named for is real and will visit your cooler; javelina and coyotes come through at night.
Skip it if you want the pretty campground. Cholla is the one with the setting, and Schoolhouse at the Salt River inlet is the one for anglers; both fill on winter weekends, and when they do, Windy Hill has a site. For a smaller lake with a bigger canyon, Burnt Corral on Apache Lake is the alternative, with the Apache Trail’s dirt as the price.
The campground built for a lake that was raised
Roosevelt Lake exists because the Salt River Valley wanted a water bank, and the campground exists because the bank was enlarged. The Tonto Basin was farmed first by the Salado, who irrigated from the Salt in the 1300s and built the cliff dwellings in the hills above the lake that Tonto National Monument now protects; they were gone by the 1400s, and the basin was Western Apache and Yavapai country when the Army came through in the 1870s. The ranchers and the town of Roosevelt who followed had thirty years before the water came.
The Reclamation Service began Roosevelt Dam at the head of the Salt River canyon in 1903, the first big project under the 1902 Reclamation Act, and Theodore Roosevelt himself dedicated it on March 18, 1911: a masonry arch of hand-cut stone, 280 feet high, the tallest of its kind in the world, holding back a lake that drowned the basin’s farms and its town and became the reason Phoenix could grow. For most of the twentieth century the lake was a fishing destination at the end of the Apache Trail, with shoreline camps wherever a road reached the water and Forest Service sites that were little more than ramadas and vault toilets.
Then the dam was rebuilt. Beginning in 1989 and finishing in 1996, at a cost of $430 million, the Bureau of Reclamation encased the old masonry in concrete and raised the dam 77 feet, to 357 feet, adding roughly 20 percent to the lake’s storage and a flood pool above it to protect the Valley from the kind of runoff that had nearly overtopped the dams in 1980. The new high-water line erased every shoreline recreation site on the lake, and the agencies spent $43 million replacing them with a dozen new developments around what Arizona Highways, touring the construction in February 1997, called “New Roosevelt Lake”: paved roads, blue-roofed ramadas on every site, solar-powered restrooms with heated showers, playgrounds, launch ramps and parking. Windy Hill was the biggest of them, planned, the magazine’s guide said, for 5,000 overnight guests, which would make it the largest campground in the Forest Service system.
The crowds the planners expected never came at that scale. The lake has run full only in a handful of wet years since, the Apache Trail’s dirt kept the lake a two-hour drive from Phoenix on the paved side, and the Valley’s campers spread themselves over Cholla, Schoolhouse, Indian Point and the shoreline. Windy Hill’s 147 sites, a fraction of what the 1997 plan imagined, sit mostly empty outside holiday weekends, with ramadas, hot water and playgrounds built for a town. The Tonto put the odd-numbered sites on recreation.gov for the winter and left the rest first come, first served, because there was never a day they ran out. That is the campground’s whole character: a public works project from the last great dam-raising, overbuilt and underused, and for a camper on a January weekend when everything else on the lake is taken, exactly the right size.
Why it matters
Windy Hill is what you get when the federal government rebuilds a dam and has to put the recreation back: a campground sized for a projection, on a peninsula named for its weather. It explains Roosevelt Lake as well as the dam does, a reservoir the Valley enlarged for flood control in the 1990s and then watched drop through the drought years, with ramps that work only above 2,110 feet and campgrounds that were never full. For a Scottsdale visitor it is the sure thing on the lake: two hours and ten minutes, $25, a shower, a ramp, a site every time. Take the point if you can stake a tent, the launch loops if you want to fish from shore, and the cliff dwellings when the wind comes up.