Coconino National Forest

51 camps mapped · 26 free · 12 fee · 13 unpriced · tap a dot for its page

Scroll or pinch to zoom · drag to pan · tap a dot for its page

camp (tap to open) forest road town

Camp here — Coconino National Forest

51 camps mapped in this forest, 26 of them free. Tap one for its topo and aerial, the weather, the water, and how far you will be from fuel and a shower.

See all 51 on the live map →

Where dispersed camping is listed — Coconino National Forest

The Forest Service lists dispersed camping as an activity at these 8 places. That is the agency saying it is allowed somewhere in the area — not a campsite we have mapped, and not a spot we can put a pin on. Read their page, then check the district for the rules that apply on the day.

Childs Dispersed Camping Area
In 1908 the Arizona Power Company began construction of the Childs Power Plant. For more than 90 years, the water of Fossil Creek had been diverted by a system of pipes and flumes from its natural course to power the turbines of…
the Forest Service page for it →
Cinder Hills Off Highway Vehicle Area
The Cinder Hills is a scenic recreation area enjoyed by many off-highway vehicle enthusiasts. Its numerous volcanic cinder cones and craters surrounded by a ponderosa pine forest environment gives the area its unique value. Due…
the Forest Service page for it →
Flagstaff Ranger District
The Flagstaff Ranger District encompasses 849,249 acres of National Forest lands around the Flagstaff area, from Mormon Lake and Anderson Mesa to north of the San Francisco Peaks. At 12,633 feet, the San Francisco Peaks is not…
the Forest Service page for it →
Jack's Canyon Camping and Climbing Area
Situated in a beautiful canyon where water has carved the rock, Jack’s Canyon offers vertical to wildly overhanging routes on compact stone. The majority of the climbing is characterized by steep highly pocketed…
the Forest Service page for it →
Mogollon Rim Ranger District
At 506,840 acres, the Mogollon Rim Ranger District is a rugged escarpment that forms the southern limit of the Colorado Plateau. It extends across the entire forest and provides excellent views within Plateau Country and Desert…
the Forest Service page for it →
Red Rock Ranger District
The Red Rock Ranger District includes 487,519 acres of magnificent splendor. The colorful collection of buttes, pinnacles, mesas, and canyons surrounding Sedona is famous the world around for its red rock vistas. Over the years,…
the Forest Service page for it →
Verde Ranger District
Located near the geographic center of Arizona, the Verde Ranger District is accessible to visitors from all over the state. Drop a fishing line into the Verde River at one of eight day-use access points or put your canoe in at…
the Forest Service page for it →
Wing Mountain Dispersed Camping
Looking for a camping spot in the woods with easy access to some of the Flagstaff area's fantastic trails and recreation opportunities along US 180? The Wing Mountain area southwest of the San Francisco Peaks offers fantastic…
the Forest Service page for it →

Where the camps cluster

The place

Coconino National Forest wraps around Flagstaff in northern Arizona, roughly two million acres spread across three ranger districts -- Flagstaff, Mogollon Rim, and Red Rock -- and it may be the most split-personality forest in the system, in the best way. Most of it is high plateau, averaging around 7,000 feet, carpeted in ponderosa pine: this is the largest continuous stand of ponderosa in North America, open and park-like, the kind of country you can see through for a quarter mile. Above that, the San Francisco Peaks -- the wrecked remains of a stratovolcano -- climb through spruce and fir to Arizona's only alpine tundra above about 11,000 feet, topping out on Humphreys Peak. Below and south, the plateau ends abruptly at the Mogollon Rim, an escarpment running nearly 400 miles across central Arizona, and the land falls away into canyon country: Oak Creek Canyon, the red rock buttes and mesas around Sedona, and eventually the Verde River at around 2,600 feet. Flagstaff sits high enough to be genuinely snowy -- roughly 22 inches of precipitation a year including about 100 inches of snowfall -- while the Red Rock district an hour south is chaparral and juniper. Same forest. Plan for both.

History

People have been living in this country for a very long time. The Sinagua occupied the ground from around 500 to 1425 CE, from the Little Colorado near Flagstaff down into the Verde Valley -- the name is not theirs, it was coined in 1939 by archaeologist Harold S. Colton from 'Sierra Sin Agua,' the mountains 'without water' that Spanish explorers named for peaks so big they seemed like they ought to have rivers, and didn't. Two of the largest cliff dwellings of the Red Rock country, occupied roughly AD 1150 to 1350, sit on the forest today as the Palatki and Honanki heritage sites; the Smithsonian's Jesse Walter Fewkes described them at the turn of the last century and gave them Hopi names -- Palatki, 'Red House,' and Honanki, 'Badger House.' The Sinagua are ancestors of the Hopi. Around AD 1085 the ground itself intervened: the eruption that built Sunset Crater laid ash and lapilli over more than 2,100 square kilometers and forced the temporary abandonment of Sinagua settlements. The federal chapter starts in 1898, when President McKinley set aside the San Francisco Mountain Forest Reserve; Theodore Roosevelt redesignated it the Coconino National Forest on July 2, 1908, folding in pieces of the surrounding reserves. 'Coconino' is the Hopi word for the Havasupai and Yavapai people. That same year, the Flagstaff lumbermen Timothy and Michael Riordan asked Gifford Pinchot -- the first Chief of the Forest Service -- to figure out why their ponderosa wasn't growing back after logging. The answer was a two-room cabin at Fort Valley staffed by one man, Gustaf Pearson, which opened in August 1908 as the first Forest Service research station in the country. American forest science started here.

Wildlife & plants

The Forest Service counts more than 500 vertebrate species on the Coconino -- roughly 300 birds, close to 100 mammals, and 16 native fish -- which is what happens when a single forest covers desert scrub, pine plateau, and tundra. Nine of Arizona's ten big game species live here: black bear, bighorn sheep, elk, javelina, turkey, mountain lion, and both mule and white-tailed deer. (The tenth is buffalo, and it isn't here.) The bird numbers are the standout. Anderson Mesa is designated a globally significant Important Bird Area, the forest holds more than 200 Mexican spotted owl nesting areas, and the largest concentration of bald eagles ever documented in Arizona -- 120 birds -- was recorded near Mormon Lake. It's also serious bat country: 24 of Arizona's 28 bat species. Anglers get about 27 sport fish species, with Apache trout, desert sucker, and roundtail chub among the natives; Fossil Creek is the rare stream that still carries eight native fish species and no non-natives at all. Sixty species carry special status here, nineteen of them federally endangered or candidate species. Three animals that used to live on this forest -- Mexican gray wolf, grizzly bear, and jaguar -- no longer do.

Notable features

Ten wilderness areas fall wholly or partly on the forest. Red Rock-Secret Mountain (43,950 acres) protects the rosy cliffs and buttes above Sedona and is one of Arizona's most accessible wildernesses; Kachina Peaks (18,960 acres) covers the volcanic high country and Humphreys Peak, ground held sacred by northern Arizona tribes; Sycamore Canyon (58,448 acres) guards what the Forest Service calls Arizona's second-largest canyon. Add Fossil Springs, Kendrick Mountain (Kendrick Peak, 10,418 feet), Munds Mountain, Strawberry Crater, West Clear Creek, Wet Beaver, and a share of the 252,500-acre Mazatzal -- one of the original 1964 wildernesses, shared with the Tonto. Oak Creek Canyon is the forest's headline drive: about 12 miles long, 800 to 2,000 feet deep, with State Route 89A dropping in on a set of hairpins off the Rim and running the canyon bottom into Sedona past Slide Rock State Park. Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona together are the second most-visited attraction in Arizona, behind only the Grand Canyon, and it shows in the parking lots -- Sedona-area fee sites on the forest require a Red Rock Pass or an America the Beautiful interagency pass, including the lots at Palatki and Honanki. North of Flagstaff, Lava River Cave is Arizona's longest lava tube at about a mile; Mormon Lake, at roughly 12 square miles when full, is the largest natural lake in the state; and the Cinder Hills OHV area gives the motorized crowd a place to play in black volcanic cinders.

camps mapped

free to camp

2.0M

acres inside boundary

states

Unverified

confirm before you go

Acreage is the area inside this forest’s administrative boundary (U.S. Forest Service), which takes in private land as well. National Forest System land inside it is usually less.

Coconino is the forest that refuses to pick a personality -- Sedona's red rock buttes, the largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest in North America, a volcanic field of more than 600 cones and craters, and the only alpine tundra in Arizona, all inside one boundary. It runs from about 2,600 feet on the Verde River to just over 12,600 feet on Humphreys Peak, the highest ground in the state, and you can ski in the morning and stand in slickrock canyon country the same afternoon.

Open the full live map ▸

the whole network, filtered to this forest

Cool to know

Every astronaut who walked on the Moon trained near Flagstaff. The USGS moved its Astrogeology program here in 1962, and between July and October 1967 blasted 47 craters into the cinder flats northeast of town -- a 10-acre replica of Mare Tranquillitatis, on the ground USGS now identifies with the forest's Cinder Hills OHV area. Apollo 15's crew were the first to train on the crater fields; Apollo 17's were the last, in 1972.
The volcanoes aren't finished. The San Francisco Volcanic Field covers about 1,800 square miles and holds over 600 volcanic features ranging from nearly 6 million years old to less than 1,000. Sunset Crater, the youngest, erupted roughly 950 years ago, and USGS scientists expect the field will erupt again. (Sunset Crater itself is a National Park Service monument, proclaimed in 1930, not forest land.)
Lava River Cave is a mile of hollow lava that froze mid-drain. Molten rock from an eruption near Hart Prairie 650,000 to 700,000 years ago crusted over on the outside while the inside kept running, and the tube emptied -- probably within hours. Lumbermen working for the Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Company found it around 1915. It holds 35 to 45 degrees year-round and grows ice in summer, so bring a jacket and more than one light source.
Flagstaff was the world's first International Dark-Sky City, designated October 24, 2001. That's not a tourism slogan -- it's the town protecting Lowell Observatory, where Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto in 1930. Camp on the plateau on a moonless night and you'll see why they bothered.

Camps are sourced from public U.S. Forest Service recreation data and have not been personally visited. Roads shown are Forest Service passenger-car routes (maintenance level 3–5) and may be seasonal or gated. Always confirm access, fees and fire rules with the ranger district before you go. Found a fee where we show free? Tell us on the contact page.