Best Tent Camping: Arizona. Kirstin Olmon Phillips

      Saguaros keep watch from the hills above Canyon Lake as you paddle out to The Point (see campground 22).

INTRODUCTION

       HOW TO USE THIS GUIDEBOOK

      Menasha Ridge Press welcomes you to Best Tent Camping: Arizona. Whether you’re new to camping or you’ve been sleeping in your portable shelter over decades of outdoor adventures, please review the following information. It explains how we have worked with the author to organize this book and how you can make the best use of it.

       CHOOSING THE TOP 50

      Because we’ve written this book with car campers in mind, we’ve chosen to include only campgrounds that you can drive to, with the exception of one boat-access-only campground. Another book entirely could be written about the best backpacking camps in Arizona, but we haven’t included any of those here. Rather, we’ve included only official public campgrounds, striving for an equal balance of the developed and undeveloped. One of us must have her shower every day and the other would be perfectly happy to hang out in the woods for weeks, so we think we represent both ends of the spectrum.

      When we told other campers we were writing this book, smiles would cross their faces as they thought about their personal favorite places to pitch a tent. More often than not, if they chose to share their secret with us (knowing that we might reveal it to the public), they knew of a great location on public land with no more amenities than a fire ring and a great view.

      A startlingly high proportion of Arizona is public land, belonging to the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), the Bureau of Land Management, or the State of Arizona, and most of this is open to dispersed camping: choose your own spot off the road or trail, maybe where someone else has camped or maybe not, with no fee, no facilities, no trash—strictly pack in/pack out. The wilderness is at your doorstep, and you may be all alone.

      Again, we leave it to you to discover Arizona’s backcountry on your own. USFS rangers tell us that many campers just want to know where they can camp for free and don’t care about amenities or ambience. While such campers aren’t our target audience, we have included a number of free campgrounds and a few dispersed camping areas.

      We narrowed our choices among Arizona’s many great campgrounds based on a number of factors. We divided the state into regions and looked for campgrounds that made an effort to give tent campers something special, whether it be walk-in sites that have great lake views, tent-only sections separated from the RVs, or other possibilities such as tenting on the beach. In some regions we found too many great options, but we did our best to distill them to the ones we felt would be best for tenters.

      We looked for smaller campgrounds—the smaller the campground, the less likely a 30-foot fifth wheel will be your neighbor. Of course, the pioneer spirit is still alive and well in the West, and that means there’s no road so long or so rough that someone won’t drag a trailer down it. You may find the modern equivalent of a Conestoga wagon almost anywhere, complete with a satellite dish and a patch of Astroturf by the door.

      Alas, there are some areas of the state that we really wanted to include but couldn’t: Lake Mead, Lake Powell, Lake Havasu, Canyon de Chelly, and the Colorado Corridor, among others. As special as these places are, the campgrounds within them either violated every criterion in this book’s subtitle or simply didn’t have designated camping that met our standards. (Waterfall-studded Havasu Canyon actually offers fantastic tent camping, but because that destination is accessible only by helicopter or an 11-mile hike or horse/mule ride, it didn’t make the cut.) Tenters looking for solitude in these areas might want to rent a boat and camp on the shoreline or find a dispersed spot in the surrounding wilderness.

      Finally, note that while the various managing agencies work hard to keep their websites and print information accurate and up to date, in updating this edition we found that a few campgrounds from the first edition were closed. It’s always a good idea to call the park or ranger district before you go for news on current conditions and unexpected events such as fires and floods.

      We hope that Best Tent Camping: Arizona will take the legwork out of choosing the campground that’s right for you!

       THE RATING SYSTEM

      As with all books in the Best Tent Camping series, the authors personally experienced dozens of campgrounds and campsites to select the top 50 locations in Arizona. Within that universe of 50 sites, the author then ranked each one according to the six categories described below.

      Each campground is superlative in its own way. For example, a site may be rated only one star in one category but perhaps five stars in another category. Our rating system allows you to choose your destination based on the attributes that are most important to you. Although these ratings are subjective, they’re still excellent guidelines for finding the perfect camping experience for you and your companions.

      Below and following we describe the criteria for each of the attributes in our five-star rating system:

	The site is ideal in that category.
	The site is exemplary in that category.
	The site is very good in that category.
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