What is Windy Point Campground?
The Cerbat Mountains are the range you see northeast of Kingman from US 93 and never think about: a dry, bouldery ridge whose south end tops out at 6,983-foot Cherum Peak and carries, improbably, a band of pinyon pine and juniper along its crest. The BLM’s Kingman Field Office maintains two little camps up there. Windy Point is the one with sites laid out, a vault toilet, picnic tables, metal grills, masonry fire rings, trash cans and level parking, at about 6,100 feet with views west across the Sacramento Valley to the Black Mountains and east to the Hualapais. It costs $8 a night, nobody takes reservations, and the stay limit is 14 days. The BLM does not publish a site count; it is a handful, not a loop.
Below it to the south is Chloride, the mining camp founded in the 1860s that calls itself Arizona’s oldest continuously inhabited town. The silver is gone; the murals Roy Purcell painted on the granite above town in 1966 are not. Windy Point is the sort of camp where you watch the lights of Kingman come on 25 miles away and hear nothing but wind, which is also the sort of camp where the wind is the main event.
What you get is a cheap, empty ridgetop with hundred-mile views, an easy peak up the road and a ghost town below. What you do not get is water, a paved approach, room for a trailer or anything resembling a short drive from Scottsdale.
How to camp Windy Point right
Pay like this. $8 per night, first come, first served, 14-day limit, paid at the fee tube. There is no gate. Have Packsaddle Recreation Site, a free walk-in camp with its own vault toilet two miles back down the road, in mind as the fallback.
Get there. About 4 hours from Old Town, the last 45 minutes of it on dirt. Loop 101 west to US 60 (Grand Avenue) to Wickenburg, US 93 north about 130 miles through Wikieup to Kingman, then 18 more miles north on US 93 to the signed Big Wash Road turnoff, 1.5 miles past the paved SR 62 road to Chloride. Big Wash Road climbs 11 miles to the campground, graded but steep and rocky in stretches. You pass Packsaddle at mile 9 and the Cherum Peak Trailhead a couple of miles past Windy Point, where the road tips steeply down toward Chloride.
Bring the right vehicle. The BLM says high clearance is highly recommended and travel trailers are not recommended. In dry weather a stock SUV or pickup manages it; a low sedan will scrape; after snow or days of rain the upper road can be impassable. Treat it as a 45-minute drive, not an 11-mile one.
Pick the season. Year-round on paper; April through June and September through October in practice. At 6,100 feet it is 15 to 20 degrees cooler than Kingman, which makes May and June bearable and October excellent. Summer afternoons bring monsoon lightning to an exposed ridge, and winter can bring snow that closes the road.
Water and fire. No water at all; fill in Kingman or at the store in Chloride. Grills and rock rings at most sites. Bring your own firewood; cutting or gathering is not allowed, and the pinyon duff is not for burning. Check Kingman Field Office fire restrictions in early summer.
Pick the sheltered site. The sites on the west edge get the Black Mountains sunset and the wind the name promises. In a tent, take one tucked into the pinyons on the east side and put the car between you and the weather.
Climb Cherum Peak in the morning. About two miles of single track to the crest with 700 feet of gain, then a jeep road and a short final push to the 6,983-foot summit. On the way out, drop down the far side to Chloride for the murals and a cold drink at the saloon, then rejoin US 93 by the paved Chloride road.
Dogs. On leash. It is open range and lion country; keep them close at night.
Skip it if you want pines and a flush toilet: Hualapai Mountain Park is 40 minutes closer. For a warm winter night by water, Katherine Landing on Lake Mohave is the better bet, and Burro Creek is the stop on the way up US 93.
Sherum’s mountains and the silver below
The Cerbats belonged to the Hualapai, the “people of the tall pines,” long before they belonged to anyone’s mining district. The band that lived here, the Ha Emete Pa’a, the Cerbat Mountains band, lived in these mountains north of Beale’s Springs, and the pinyon crest was part of their country. The range’s name is usually traced to a Hualapai word for bighorn sheep, and its high point at the south end is named for a man.
That man was Sherum, or Cherum, a leader of the Cerbat band. In the 1860s traffic on the toll road between Fort Mojave and Prescott brought miners and freighters through Hualapai country and set off the Hualapai War. In January 1868 Army troops attacked Sherum’s rancheria in the Battle of Cherum Peak; the Hualapai escaped but lost twenty-one warriors, and the fight broke their military resistance. The war ended with Sherum’s surrender in 1870. In April 1874 the Hualapai were force-marched to the Colorado River reservation at La Paz, a removal the tribe remembers as its trail of tears; survivors escaped home in 1875 to find their land taken up, and the Hualapai Reservation to the northeast was created by executive order on January 4, 1883.
The silver had already arrived. Prospectors founded Chloride in 1864, named for the silver chloride in its ore, and the railroad’s arrival in Kingman in 1883 made the Cerbat mines pay. Around 1900 Chloride had about 2,000 people and its own rail spur; the Tennessee-Schuylkill, the district’s biggest producer, ran from 1898 to 1948, and a 1927 fire took half the business district. Mining faded after the Second World War, and Chloride settled into the small, half-ghost town it is now, with Roy Purcell’s 1966 murals on the boulders above it.
Recreation is the newest layer and the least documented. The BLM’s Kingman office built Big Wash Road, climbing more than 2,000 feet from US 93 to the crest, and laid out Windy Point and Packsaddle as small camps along it. We found no date for either in any source, BLM or otherwise, and will not guess one. What is clear is that they have stayed small: a toilet, a fee tube, a few tables, and a road that keeps the crowds in Kingman.
Why it matters
The Cerbats are a reminder that most of Arizona’s mountains are not famous and do not need to be. This one holds the history of northwestern Arizona in a few miles: a Hualapai band and its leader, a short war and a forced march, a silver town that boomed with the railroad and faded with the war. Windy Point puts you on top of it for eight dollars, in a pinyon woodland you would never guess was there from the highway. For a Scottsdale visitor it is only worth the four hours if you are already passing Kingman on US 93 toward Las Vegas or the Colorado River. Then it is one of the best cheap nights on the road, provided you bring water and a vehicle with clearance.