What is Workman Creek Falls?
The Sierra Ancha is the dark, cliff-banded range east of Roosevelt Lake, and Workman Creek is the stream that drains its western face below Aztec Peak. About two and a half miles up the creek from SR 288, the water pours off a limestone ledge in a single drop of roughly 200 feet, by far the tallest waterfall in central Arizona you can drive to. Forest Road 487 climbs beside the creek and crosses it at the brink, so the view from the top is a few steps from your car and the view of the whole fall is a short walk back down the road. It is free, there is no pass, and the drive from Old Town is about two hours and forty-five minutes.
The Forest Service runs the brink as the Falls Day Use Area, the third of several recreation sites strung along FR 487, at 5,900 feet. There is nothing there but a pullout: no toilet, no water, no fee. Below it the road passes dispersed camping areas along the creek, and above it the road climbs into ponderosa pine with more free sites before ending about 2 miles on at the Aztec Peak fire lookout, near 7,700 feet. In a wet spring the whole canyon runs with side streams and the falls are deafening; in a dry September they are a damp stain on the rock.
What you get is a big waterfall for the price of a gravel road, and free pine camping above it for anyone with clearance. What you do not get is a trail to the base, a toilet, water, trash service, a fence at the edge, or a guarantee that the creek will be running when you arrive.
How to do Workman Creek right
Nothing to pay. Free, no pass. The Falls Day Use Area is day use only; camping is allowed at the other FR 487 sites, with a 14-day limit and trailers under 16 feet. No Tonto Pass is needed on this side of the forest.
Get there. Shea Boulevard to SR 87 north about 60 miles, then SR 188 southeast about 35 miles past Roosevelt Dam to the SR 288 junction. Turn north on SR 288 and drive about 22 miles, paved at first and then graded gravel, to the signed FR 487 turnoff on the right, just past the Workman Creek bridge. The falls are about 2.5 miles up FR 487, a graded road a careful car manages when dry. About two hours and forty-five minutes from Old Town. Past the falls the road turns steep and rocky; the Forest Service calls for high clearance there and four-wheel drive or chains after any rain or snow. Last fuel and groceries are in Punkin Center or Globe.
Time it to the snow. The falls peak from late January to early April, and the week after a warm spell following a wet winter is the one. They run again briefly after big monsoon storms. By late summer in a dry year the 200-foot curtain is a trickle, and the camping, not the water, is the reason to drive up.
Respect the edge. The top of the falls is unfenced limestone polished slick by the water. People have been hurt here. Stay back from the lip, keep children in hand and dogs on a short leash, and do not try to climb down beside the drop; there is no trail to the base, and the view of the whole fall is from the road below, not from the edge.
Water and toilets. Neither, anywhere on FR 487. The nearest vault is at the Reynolds Creek group camp, 2 miles north on SR 288. Pack out everything, and filter or treat creek water.
Camp above or below. The creekside spots below the falls are easy to reach and busier; the pine flats above are quieter and cooler and need the clearance the Forest Service warns about. Fires in existing rings only, dead and down wood only, and none at all once the Tonto’s restrictions arrive, usually in June.
Mines, bears, floods. Old uranium mines dot the Workman Creek area; do not enter them. Bears are common; keep food in vehicles. Monsoon storms from July through September can flood the creek and the road crossings quickly, and the flash flood rules apply.
Dogs. On leash, short at the top. Elk and mountain lions use the canyon.
Skip it if the road is wet or you want a trail. In mud or snow FR 487 is not a passenger-car road anywhere. For a waterfall with a real hike and a swimming hole, Water Wheel Falls near Payson is paved to the lot; for the blue water, Fossil Creek is the other direction and needs a permit. For a toilet and a table on the same highway, Rose Creek and the uncertain Sawmill Flat are minutes away.
The creek that was a laboratory and then a uranium rush
The Sierra Ancha stands on granite 1.4 billion years old, with ledges of quartzite and limestone stacked on top of it, and the shelf Workman Creek pours over is one of those ledges. The range’s name is Spanish for “broad range”; the Western Apache call it Dził Nteel, “wide flat mountain,” and held it until the 1870s. Before them, between about 1280 and 1350, farmers whose ruins show both Salado and Mogollon traits built cliff dwellings into the alcoves of the range’s deep canyons and abandoned them within three generations. Who exactly they were is still argued. Where Workman Creek got its name is not recorded in any source I could find, and I have not guessed.
The Forest Service made the creek a laboratory. In the 1930s it designated the Sierra Ancha Experimental Forest on these slopes, with the Workman Creek watersheds as its study area for a question the whole Southwest wanted answered: how much water a forest yields, and whether cutting or thinning it yields more. Gauging flumes, weather stations and treatment plots went in along the creek, and researchers measured every storm for decades; the Salt River Valley’s water managers, downstream at Roosevelt, were among the readers. The Aztec Peak fire lookout, at the top of FR 487, watched the range from above through the same years. Some of the old study roads are the roads you camp along.
Then the ground turned out to be radioactive. In 1950 prospectors working the Sierra Ancha with Geiger counters detected above-normal readings along Workman Creek, and the uranium boom that was remaking the Colorado Plateau came to the Tonto. Development was slow, because the deposits were spotty and the country was hard to reach, and actual mining did not begin until 1954. In 1955 an ore-buying station opened in Globe to take the Workman Creek ore, and for two years trucks hauled it down the road you drive in on. The ore was low-grade and the economics never worked; by 1957 production had stopped and the station had closed. The county’s own history notes that the Creekside and Cascade camping areas along the creek may have begun as ore-staging yards. Exploration drilling, sampling and road-building came back off and on through the 1980s and never led to a reopening. The adits and shafts are still there, unstable and in places flooded, in rock that carries natural uranium, and the Forest Service and Gila County both tell you not to go in.
What is left is the simplest kind of recreation site. The Forest Service runs the brink of the falls as a day-use pullout with no facilities and lets people camp free along the road above and below, under the standard 14-day rule, with the lookout road beyond as the test of a vehicle. The Tonto does not publish a date for the day-use designation, and nothing on the ground suggests one. The falls themselves have not changed since the Salado farmers heard them; the creek runs on snowmelt in a wet winter and shrinks to a trickle in a dry fall, which is the only schedule that matters here.
Why it matters
Workman Creek is central Arizona’s tallest easy waterfall, and it is also a short history of what the state has wanted from its mountains: water, measured here plot by plot for the Valley’s benefit; uranium, chased and abandoned in seven years; and now a free place to look and sleep. For a Scottsdale visitor the rule is timing. Go in March after a wet winter, when the fall is loud from the road, stay back from the slick lip, camp in the pines above if your truck can take it, and leave the mines to the bats. In a dry September, drive on to Young and come back another year.