What is Woods Canyon Lake?
The Rim lakes are a string of small reservoirs the Forest Service and Arizona Game and Fish built in the 1950s and 1960s in the canyons just back from the edge of the Mogollon Rim, where the ponderosa forest sits at 7,500 feet and July afternoons top out in the 80s. Woods Canyon is the first one in from SR 260 and the one with everything: 55 acres of cold water in a steep, pine-walled canyon at 7,510 feet, a paved road to the shore, a store and marina that rents boats and kayaks and sells licenses, tackle, groceries and firewood, a boat ramp, a fee picnic area at Rocky Point, and three campgrounds within a mile. The lake is electric motors only, so the loudest thing on the water is a kid with a paddle.
It is stocked with rainbow trout regularly all season, holds a few big browns, and has a six-fish limit. A loop trail of just under 4 miles circles the shore. From the store, the paved Meadow Trail runs 1.6 miles to the Woods Canyon Vista overlook on the Rim edge, where it meets the Rim Lakes Vista Trail, 4.3 miles along the lip from near the highway to Mogollon Campground.
What you get is the easiest mountain lake in Arizona for a family: pavement to the water, a boat for rent, a toilet, a store and a campsite a short walk away, 20 degrees cooler than Scottsdale. What you do not get is solitude, a swimming beach or a gas motor. The East Valley knows all this, and on a July weekend it is as busy as any place in the national forest.
How to do Woods Canyon Lake right
Pay the day-use fee, or book a site. Day use is $10 per vehicle at the fee lots, self-serve. Camping: Spillway on the shore is $36 (26 sites, trailers to 16 feet), Aspen $35 (136 sites), Crook $25 for singles and $330 for its two group loops, all on recreation.gov. Rim and Mogollon on FR 300 are the $18 alternatives, first come. Summer weekends at Aspen book out the day the window opens.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, 75 miles to Payson. Turn east on SR 260 and drive about 31 miles, up the long grade to the top of the Rim. Across from the Mogollon Rim Visitor Center, turn left on Forest Road 300. After about 4 to 5 paved miles, turn right on Forest Road 105, signed for Woods Canyon Lake (the Aspen Campground entrance is a mile down on the left, the store and lake at the end). Figure about 140 minutes from Old Town. All paved.
Beat the lot. Parking is the pinch. The store lot is free for customers and small; the $10 day-use lots fill by mid-morning on summer weekends, and an overflow lot on the hill above the lake takes the rest. Be at the lake before eight on a weekend or come midweek.
Rent the boat early. The store rents rowboats, electric-motor boats and kayaks and sells licenses; take yours out for the first hours of the morning, when the trout are up and the wind is down, and return it before the afternoon storm. Only electric motors are allowed on the water; gas is prohibited. There is no swimming area, the water is cold and the shore is muddy, so the boat is the way onto the lake.
Pick the season, watch the sky. Roughly May to mid-October; FR 300 is gated by snow in winter and usually reopens in April. June and September are best, and the week after Labor Day is the quiet one. From early July to mid-September thunderstorms build most afternoons, and being on open water or the Rim edge in one is a bad idea; the Forest Service calls this one of the most lightning-struck areas in the country. The monsoon manual has the pattern; be off the lake by one. Bring a jacket every month, including July.
Water, toilets, food. Potable water at the lake and the campgrounds. Vault toilets at the lake and campgrounds, accessible at the store lot. Showers are 10 miles east at Canyon Point. Elk walk through the campgrounds at dusk and bears work the loops, so food goes in the vehicle.
Walk to the edge. The paved Meadow Trail from the store to the Woods Canyon Vista overlook is the walk for small kids or grandparents: 1.6 miles each way, flat, ending at a 2,000-foot drop. The lake loop is a lazy two hours.
Dogs. Leashed and attended. They will get in the lake.
Skip it if you want quiet water. Willow Springs Lake, the next lake east, allows small gas motors and has no store, and is emptier for it; the dispersed sites along FR 300 are free. Otherwise accept that the store lot is a scene and the lake is still worth it.
A dam on Chevelon Creek, on the Army’s old road
The top of the Rim was Apache country before it was anyone’s recreation area. The White Mountain and Tonto Apache ranged across these pine flats in summer, and the Fort Apache Reservation still runs along the southern edge of the forest. In the 1870s General George Crook’s Army cut a supply trail along the very edge of the Rim to link Fort Whipple at Prescott, Fort Verde and Fort Apache, a route chosen for its water and its views of anyone below; Forest Road 300, the Rim Road you drive in on, follows its line, and the white chevron blazes of the General Crook Trail still mark the trees beside it.
The Rim’s last battle happened a few miles from the lake. On July 17, 1882, troops of the 3rd and 6th Cavalry under Captain Adna Chaffee, reinforced overnight by four companies from Fort Apache, caught about 60 White Mountain Apache warriors led by Na-tio-tish in a gorge of East Clear Creek about seven miles north of General Springs, the water hole on the Crook Trail. Na-tio-tish and between 16 and 27 of his men were killed, the Army lost two, and the survivors slipped away in a storm. Big Dry Wash is counted as the last major battle between the Army and the Apache, though the Geronimo campaign went on for four more years to the south.
For seventy years after that the Rim top was cattle, logging and a dirt Army road. The lakes are a product of the postwar boom. Arizona Game and Fish, spending license money on a Valley that was growing faster than its fishing holes, began damming the canyons just behind the Rim edge to make trout water within a half-day’s drive of Phoenix. Woods Canyon was the first and the easiest. The department built an earthen dam about 43 feet high and 408 feet long across Chevelon Creek where it runs through Woods Canyon, completed in 1956 and holding about 1,232 acre-feet; the Forest Service dates the lake’s opening as a 50-acre fishing lake to 1958. It is the first reservoir on Chevelon Creek, upstream of the bigger and much harder to reach Chevelon Canyon Lake, and it was built for recreation and nothing else. Willow Springs, Bear Canyon, Knoll and Black Canyon lakes followed in the canyons to the east, and the Forest Service grouped them as the Rim Lakes Recreation Area.
The campgrounds, the store concession and the pavement came in the decades after, as the lake became the Rim’s family destination; the Forest Service does not publish dates for them, and we have not found any. The electric-only rule, which keeps the lake quiet, and the paved Meadow Trail to the Rim edge, which makes it the one Rim lake a stroller can see from, are the later refinements of a place that was always meant to be easy.
The forest around it came close to burning. The Rodeo-Chediski Fire, started in two places on the Fort Apache Reservation on June 18, 2002, merged into the largest fire in Arizona history to that point, more than 460,000 acres, and forced some 30,000 people out of Show Low, Pinetop-Lakeside and Heber-Overgaard, the last of them 20 miles east of here on SR 260. The fire was held before it reached the Rim lakes, which is why the ponderosa along the Woods Canyon shore is still 150 years old and not 24.
Why it matters
Woods Canyon Lake is the Rim in miniature: an Army road, a last battle, and then a postwar state agency deciding that the best use of a canyon above Phoenix was cold water and trout. It explains why there are lakes at all on top of a limestone escarpment that has no natural ones, and why every one of them is small, electric-only or motor-limited, and ringed with campgrounds built for station wagons. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is plain: this is the lake to bring the kids and the grandparents to, with a rented rowboat at seven in the morning and the paved walk to the Rim edge after lunch, and the lake to avoid on a July Saturday after nine. Come in June or in the week after Labor Day and it is as good as a mountain lake two hours from Old Town can be.