What is Yavapai Campground?
Granite Basin is a bowl of pinyon, juniper and ponderosa at the foot of Granite Mountain, the big boulder-stacked dome you see northwest of Prescott from almost anywhere in town. Yavapai Campground sits in the bottom of the bowl at about 5,800 feet, its 21 sites threaded between granite outcrops so that most have a boulder for a wall and a pine for a roof. Each has a table, a steel fire ring and a tent pad; four accessible sites have pedestal grills. There is drinking water, two composting toilets and trash service, and nothing you would call a facility beyond that.
The appeal over Lynx Lake is scale. The whole recreation area has one five-acre lake with bass and catfish, five small day-use picnic sites, and a trail system that starts within sight of camp and climbs into the 9,799-acre Granite Mountain Wilderness, whose summit stands at 7,628 feet directly above the loop. On a weekday in May you can have the place nearly to yourself.
The Granite Mountain Hotshots, the Prescott crew that lost 19 members in the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, took their name from this mountain; the memorial state park is about 30 miles south near Yarnell. What you get here is a small, well-built campground with water, a pond and a wilderness trailhead you can walk to; what you do not get is room for a big rig, a shower, a dump station or a guaranteed site on a Prescott Friday.
How to camp it right
Reserve, and read the site notes. $18 a night for a single, $36 for a double, $5 per extra vehicle, on recreation.gov up to six months ahead. Sites 4, 16 and 21 are walk-in and first come, first served, and Friday arrivals from Prescott fill them early. The spurs were designed around the boulders, so some take a truck and trailer easily and some barely fit a Subaru; two sites are limited to 15-foot trailers and most suit rigs under 25 feet. Sites 3, 4 and 10 are the tightest. The recreation.gov notes are accurate.
Get there. About 2 hours 20 minutes from Old Town, all paved. Take Loop 101 to I-17 north, exit at Cordes Junction onto SR 69, follow it through Prescott Valley into Prescott, and go through downtown to Iron Springs Road. At the corner of Iron Springs and Williamson Valley Road, continue northwest on Iron Springs about 3 miles, then turn right on Granite Basin Road (Forest Road 374). The campground is 2.1 miles in on the left; the Metate Trailhead and the lake are farther up the same road. Spurs are paved and all back-in.
Pick the season. April 1 to October 31. May, June, September and October are the months; early and late in the season nights drop near freezing. July and August bring monsoon storms most afternoons, and the granite runs with water for an hour afterward. Late September and October, after the rains and before the gate closes, are the best weeks of the year here.
Water and fire. Drinking water at the faucets, for drinking and dishes only; no RV tank filling, no showers, no dump station, no hookups. Fire restrictions are common from late May into the monsoon; campfires in rings only, and in the wilderness above camp no campfires at all, ever.
Walk to the wilderness. The Metate Trailhead, the main gateway to Trail #261 and the Granite Mountain hike, is about a mile farther up the road, and connector trails link the campground to it, so you can leave the car at camp and skip the $5 day-use fee. Wilderness rules: groups of 15 or fewer, dogs leashed, no camping within 200 feet of the trail. Granite Mountain’s cliffs close to rock climbers for peregrine falcon nesting from roughly February 1 to July 15; the hiking trail stays open.
Fish the lake at dawn. Granite Basin Lake is a ten-minute walk, five acres, unstocked, with largemouth bass, channel catfish and sunfish, non-motorized boats only. It is at its best at first light, when the bass are feeding and the sun hits the mountain’s face. Anglers 10 and older need an Arizona license.
Dogs. On a six-foot leash, in camp and on the trails, including the wilderness.
Skip it if your rig is over 25 feet or your party wants to spread out; Hilltop in the Lynx Lake area is the bigger campground. For a day hike in town, Thumb Butte is 15 minutes away; for a second night with a creek, Lower Wolf Creek is on the other side of Prescott. If the name reminds you of Scottsdale’s own Granite Mountain Trailhead, that is a different mountain; the one here is older, bigger and has a wilderness on it.
The mountain that named a crew
The campground carries the name of the people the Army removed to make room for Prescott. The Yavapai held the granite country from the Bradshaws to the Verde when gold was found on Lynx Creek in 1863 and the territorial capital was planted in the pines the next year. The war that followed ended in the Salt River Canyon at Skeleton Cave on December 28, 1872, where the Army killed more than seventy Yavapai, and in 1875 the survivors were marched from Camp Verde to San Carlos. Those who made their way back a generation later were given a small reservation on the grounds of old Fort Whipple in Prescott, and the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe is the community that remains. The campground is their name on Forest Service ground.
The forest came early. The Prescott Forest Reserve was proclaimed on May 10, 1898, one of the first in the Southwest, to protect the watershed of a capital that had already burned once and was about to burn again; it passed to the new Forest Service in 1906, became a national forest in 1907 and absorbed the Verde forest on July 1, 1908. Granite Mountain itself, a dome of boulders covering about twelve square miles and topping out at 7,628 feet, was range and watershed and a climbers’ secret for the next three decades.
The lake is New Deal work. Between 1937 and 1939 the Civilian Conservation Corps built the dam that backs up Granite Basin Lake, a five-acre pond at the foot of the mountain, and the recreation area grew up around it: picnic sites, a road, eventually a campground. In 1984 Congress designated the Granite Mountain Wilderness, 9,799 acres of dome and chaparral rising directly above the loop, and the Metate Trailhead a mile up the road became its front door. The campground you sleep in now, with its tent pads, composting toilets and spurs fitted between the boulders, is the Forest Service’s later rebuild on the CCC footprint; the agency’s own pages do not date it, and this guide does not guess.
The mountain’s name became a national one in 2013. The Prescott Fire Department had founded a fuels crew in 2002 that became a hand crew in 2004 and a certified hotshot crew in 2008, and it named itself for the dome above this campground. In June 2013 the Doce Fire burned across Granite Mountain, and the Granite Mountain Hotshots were among the crews who held it, famously wrapping the mountain’s giant alligator juniper to save it. Two weeks later, on June 30, 2013, nineteen of the twenty died when the Yarnell Hill Fire overran them 30 miles south of here. The memorial state park near Yarnell and the scorched slopes above the Metate Trailhead are the two places in Yavapai County where that summer is still visible.
The peregrine falcons that close the cliffs each spring and the trail that stays open regardless are the present tense. Nothing is planned for the campground beyond the reservation system it already runs on.
Why it matters
Yavapai Campground is a small place that holds most of what makes Arizona’s high country complicated: a name taken from a removed people, a forest reserve created to protect a capital built on their land, a lake dug by Depression labor, a wilderness drawn around a mountain, and a fire crew that borrowed the mountain’s name and died under another one. It is also simply the best-designed small campground in the Prescott area, with water, boulders for walls and a wilderness you can walk to from the tent. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is clear: for a quiet two nights in May or October, two hours and twenty minutes up the hill, this beats Lynx Lake, and the walk from your site to Granite Mountain’s summit is the reason to come.