I’m kind of on a mission to stay at every campground on my forest.
I mean, it makes sense. I want to know as much about my forest (the Coconino National Forest) as possible, and that means… visiting as much of my forest as possible.
When I first started, my boss was cool enough to take me on field trips across the forest, which was dope! But, given that I have weekends? Cue the camping trips!
This past weekend’s trip? Manzanita.
Two of my coworkers and I booked a site at Manzanita a few months ago. While a lot of the campgrounds on our forest offer several first-come first-served sites, I’m an anxious planner so booking things for the full confirmation and sense of security/ relief is definitely my MO.
Manzanita is open year-round and often books several months in advance! We got lucky when we booked it, because it looks like there was a weekend cancellation and we hopped on rec.gov at the right time.
(Side note: Most of our campsites are reservable at recreation.gov.)
Unfortunately, I ended up coming down with a really bad cold about a week and a half before our reservation.
It was especially shitty, too, because Ryan had about five days home between fire assignments and I was too sick to really do anything fun with him.
But, I decided to rally. It was too hard to get a campsite, it was too late to cancel, I didn’t want to lose out on the deposit and I was really sick of staying home sick and doing nothing.
So, Jane and I packed up my Jeep (and found room for Yukon!) and drove down to Oak Creek Canyon for the weekend!
Also, this was Yukon’s first camping trip! I wanted to bring him up to North Rim when we went earlier this summer, but since that trip centered around a highway trash clean-up service project, I had to leave him behind.
rec.gov reservations require a two-night minimum stay for weekends, so we drove down Friday after work.
It was a roller coaster of emotions. We’d been back-and-forth the whole day about whether to suck it up or cancel, and then when we finally decided to go for it, we had to hastily figure out what to cook during the weekend and buy groceries.
We decided to grab Chipotle Friday night before leaving so we’d have one less fire to make and one less meal to deal with, and lemme tell ya — best idea.
It started raining as soon as we got to our site, so we had to set everything up in a drizzle.
Luckily, the light rain caused us to toss the rainfly over the tent… which is good, because it ended up raining ALL night, and I slept horribly due to this cold.
Manzanita is a very small campground. It has 19 sites — a few of which are first-come, first-served, but most of which require reservations. It’s located right along a small creek. Some of the campsites literally back up to the creek, but ours was on the other side of the loop. Oh noooo, an extra few yards to walk! Tragic.
Each site allows six people, two tents and one vehicle. RVs are not allowed.
We kinda knew going into the weekend that we were both feeling under the weather and that it was going to be a chill weekend, so we didn’t plan for much aside from hammocks, campfires, books, s’mores and naps.
And, that’s what we did all day Saturday. We woke up, made breakfast over the fire (blueberry pancakes)…
… caught up on our books and napped in our hammocks…
…walked down to the creek to wade around…
…made dinner over the fire (cheesy ranch foil packet potatoes with grilled vegetables and pineapple)…
…made s’mores OF COURSE, and then…
…we set up our movie theater.
Yeeeppp. We knew we felt bad enough that we wouldn’t want to do shit during our trip, so we threw a bedsheet over our hammock straps, plugged Jane’s battery-powered projector into a Bose speaker, propped the whole mess up on a rock and laid in our tent to watch Miss Congeniality.
The next morning we woke up, made breakfast over the fire (scrambled eggs and diced potatoes), packed up our stuff and bounced.
Overall, it was as good of a weekend as I could have hoped for, given that I was coughing up BOTH lungs the entire weekend and am still dealing with back pain from a bad fall at the bouldering gym a few weeks ago.
And, Yukon did very well! I bought a 30-foot tie-out cable for him prior to our trip, and I spent the weekend switching him between trees. He was a little confused (it was his first experience on a tie-out cable) but despite getting tangled around everything every few minutes, he seemed to enjoy laying in the shade, cuddling with Jane in our tent, wading in the river and catching flies (??) in his mouth.
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If you want to book: Manzanita Campground is located in the Red Rock Ranger District of the Coconino National Forest, and is reservable through recreation.gov.
The facilities: There are four vault toilets located in one console in the campground, next to the water tap. The water started out clear, but turned yellowish after a while. Luckily, Jane and I are former Peace Corps and have, um… lackluster hygienic, health and sanitation standards. Also, the toilets smelled horrible. We thought it might have just been our site, but nope. Even across the campground by the creek, you could smell them. We got a reprieve every so often due to a change in wind direction, but I don’t think I’ll be back to this campground when the temps are as high as they were. Also, the loop around the campground is one-way, narrow, and lined with large rocks. We were stuck waiting for a car to unload for quite some time when we first arrived because we physically couldn’t get around, and they weren’t too eager to move their car for us.
The location: The location is great, in a way. While we didn’t leave the campground, we’re obviously both really familiar with Oak Creek Canyon. Manzanita is located right along 89A which is really convenient if you’re looking to hike a nearby trail or head to West Fork or Slide Rock or something. It’s not so great if you’re looking for seclusion because the traffic noise (revving engines, loud radios) was constant.
The campsites: Our campsite was… OK. It was adjacent to 89A and was awkwardly shaped. We had a table, a fire pit and a parking space. The parking space was VERY short. Luckily my two-door Jeep is compact, but anything larger would have either hit the rocks or jutted out into the one-way drive. There was definitely not enough room on our site for two tents, and our one three-plus-person tent barely fit without encroaching on a large rock compacted into the ground. A few of the other sites had grills, and seemed to have deeper parking spaces (one had a large sprinter-style van parked on it) and more accessible layouts. There were plenty of trees on our site — we had two spots for our hammocks and one spot for our makeshift movie theater — but the sites at this campground were very close together. We were next to a party of 20-30 (the same party with the immovable car), and they were LOUD. They’d booked several sites next to each other but converged on the site right next to ours, and it felt a little claustrophobic at times.
The hosts: Lydia is the nicest ever! I couldn’t access my booking information because there was limited cell service at our site, but she was gracious and was able to check me in with just my name. She stopped over multiple times to talk to us and to pet Yukon, and shared photos of her dogs as well. Sarah, who works at the campground as well as some nearby day-use areas, was incredible as well. They joined us at our site and spent a good hour talking with us about traveling and Forest Service.
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Would I be back? Definitely. I wouldn’t ever count on being able to snag a first-come first-served, but I would definitely reserve this campground again during the fall, winter or early spring, and I would only book it if I could get a creekside site.
I’ve already got my next Coconino National Forest campground booked, and I’m already excited to dig my tent back out of my storage closet in a few weeks.
Catch ya then!
