Clints Well AZ – Little Bitty Living

Today we moved up the mountain to Clints Well Campground. The elevation here is about 1500′ higher than Payson, so it’s correspondingly colder….like lows in the mid-20’s! I decided I could handle it; I really love it here and didn’t want to miss staying here. I was even resigned to having to drive about 30 miles to get cell and wifi signals! But I was very pleasantly surprised to have a good wifi signal here!! Verizon must have added a new tower since last April. Thank you, Verizon!! Even the phone has a decent signal here, so it’s way better than Payson.

The Happy Jack post office is in Clints Well for some reason, and it’s the smallest post office in the U.S. It’s housed in a little metal storage building, about 10 x 16′. I stopped to mail a card and they don’t even have a drop box for mail! I guess you have to go when they are open.

I was also very surprised to find the campground nearly full. There are only 7 or 8 sites here but I was here for two weeks in late April last year and never saw it this crowded. I got a good site with full sun in the afternoon, though I’m parked very close and parallel to the road. When someone leaves I might change sites.

I really love camping in the towering Ponderosa pines. We’re likely to have elk and deer visitors too.

Our campsite at Clints Well Campground

If you are following other blogs by people who are in Arizona, have you noticed that they all are boasting pretty photos of desert flowers in bloom? I haven’t had a site with pretty flowers yet!! Back in Pine I went looking and only found two dandelion plants in bloom, and I don’t think they count. Sigh.

I’m very excited that after a lot of planning and scheming, I’m going to be able to meet up with my friend Jeanne later this month! She’ll be headed to AZ and I’ll be headed back to NC so we’re going to meet in New Mexico for 5 or 6 days and explore Taos, Santa Fe and Albuquerque together. I’ll have to break my rule and camp in a PAY campsite, but it’s just $10 a night and includes electric hookups, and is between Santa Fe and Taos. There are some nice free sites up near Taos but due to the elevation, they don’t open up until May and we are meeting up on April 20-26. I started researching good restaurants and where to get the best ice cream, etc……the important stuff! It looks like almost all the restaurants are Southwest or Mexican food. Hmm. I’m not a fan but I may have to learn to like it. To make up for it, there’s a “Chocolate Trail” in Santa Fe that looks very very interesting! ALso Bandelier National Monument and a place called Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument. It’s filled with fantastic wind and water-sculpted rocks. I won’t say what *I* think they look like but they’re supposed to look like tents.

tent rocks

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I’ve moved to a beautiful little campground in the Coconino National Forest (free, too!), Clints Well CG. It is just 1/2 mile outside of Clints Well on Lake Mary Rd (Hwy. 3), though it’s not much of a town….gas station, mini-mart, post office and little restaurant. The post office is housed in an 8×10 metal storage building!!! That’s a first.

DSCN2470

There are 7 sites in the campground, in the Ponderosa pines. There’s a camp host there in summertime and he keeps the vault toilets well stocked and immaculately clean. They even have fly strips and good-smelly thingies inside! I think all the sites have a mix of sun & shade, so it’s good for solar energy, though I do move my panel around a bit from morning to afternoon sun. Here’s a couple views. The first two are of the gigantic tree the forest service guys felled this morning!

Nancy Brooks, another A-frame camper, joined me on Sunday until today. We had a nice time yakking and one day we went to Payson via the very long way around! I saw a sign that said “Mogollon Rim” so we took that little dirt road to see what was up there. Well it turns out, it was 20+ miles on that little one-lane dirt road before we got to the Rim, but it was stunning!

And as a matter of fact, I’m parked at that same overlook right now, it’s the closest place I can get a wifi signal for my ATT mobile hotspot! It’s another 8 miles further to get back to the paved Hwy. 87, and when we got out to there we saw a sign that said “Payson 28 miles”. We’d gone almost 30 miles on a teeny dirt road that would have been only 5 miles via Hwy. 87! Oh well, it was a gorgeous drive through the Coconino National Forest, beautiful Ponderosa pines with lots of beautiful dispersed campsites all along that road (FR141) And as I always say when I get lost, “It’s a nice day for a drive”. We saw one wild turkey (don’t they usually go in groups?!) and a coyote along the way.

I’d be tempted to move to one of the dispersed sites except I like having a picnic table for a change! And I’m getting a good Verizon signal there. (no ATT signal at all in Clints Well) Here are a couple of the dispersed sites on FR 141, less than 1/2 mile from Hwy. 87:

I am staying at Clints Well until the 25th or 26th, when I meet up with my best camping buddy from NC, Jeanne Lloyd. We meet back up with Deb & Bernii around May 1, back in Kingman.