Forest Road 124 runs through the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest near Heber-Overgaard in Navajo County — a ponderosa pine corridor at 6,500 feet that we have returned to more times than almost anywhere else on the bucket list. Five visits across nine years. Group camps, solo family trips, monsoon season mushroom, wild horse encounters at a waterhole, an ancient pottery shard found while digging for clay, and on the September 2025 return leg of our Northern Arizona and Southern Utah loop — a downed tree on the road and the horses that had been shot.

This is a place that keeps delivering something new.

The Road and the Forest

FR 124 passes through a forest shaped by two forces — the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire and the decades of recovery since. At 489,000 acres, Rodeo-Chediski was Arizona's second largest wildfire at the time it burned. The evidence is still visible on FR 124 — standing silver snags and open areas where the forest burned hot enough to kill everything. The recovery surrounding those scars is equally visible — young ponderosa coming up, wildflowers in the clearings, and the dense mushroom growth that flourishes in the post-fire organic soil every monsoon season.

The living forest sections are exactly what you want from an Apache-Sitgreaves camping destination — tall ponderosa with a grassy understory, open meadows, and the quality of quiet that comes from being genuinely far from any city.

Wild Horses

The wild horses of FR 124 are the wildlife encounter that sets this location apart from most Apache-Sitgreaves dispersed camping areas. A feral herd uses the road corridor and surrounding meadows — we have seen them on every visit across nine years. The most remarkable encounter came on our August 2022 visit when we watched horses at a waterhole — close enough to see individual animals clearly, in no hurry to move on. On the September 2025 return from Utah we encountered the horses again on the same road — and also found evidence of horses that had been shot, a deeply disturbing discovery documented in its own AZ Places blog post.

Our Visits

October 8–15, 2016 — Group Camp (Sheepdog), Alexis, Luca, and Rachel

A large group camp with our Sheepdog outdoor community — a week in the forest focused on skill building and community. Camp cooking, knot tying, solar cooking demonstrations, and nightly potlucks where everyone brought something to share. Wild horses appeared during the stay — the first FR 124 horse encounter for our group, and not the last. The combination of ponderosa forest, the skills focus, and the group energy made this one of the finer group camping experiences on the AZ Places record.

March 11–17, 2018 — Group Camp (Sheepdog), Luca and Rachel

A return Sheepdog group camp with a full week in the forest and a structured program of classes — bread making, pit turkey, shelter making, emergency preparedness planning, and more. A trampoline appeared in camp for the kids — the kind of detail that distinguishes a serious group camp from a casual one. More potlucks. More hikes. More horses. The pit turkey is worth documenting separately — cooking an entire turkey in a hole in the ground is one of the more satisfying camp cooking achievements we have been part of.

March 8–11, 2020 — Group Camp (Sheepdog), Luca, Anderson, Matthew, and Rachel

The last group camp before COVID changed everything about how outdoor gatherings worked. Luca and Anderson slept in hammocks — the hammock camp setup that produces the best sleep in the forest when the trees cooperate. A potluck with the group. The timing — March 2020 — gives this visit a particular weight in retrospect.

August 12–15, 2022 — Luca, Matthew, and Rachel

The most eventful FR 124 visit in nine years — and one of the most remarkable single camping trips on the entire AZ Places record.

The most memorable wildlife encounter came on a hike through the large clearing with the dry wash running through it. We heard cries from somewhere across the clearing — the kind of sound that makes you stop and listen. Binoculars out. Across the wash, a fox — pursued by a deer in full chase. The deer was not playing. We watched the whole thing unfold from a distance, the binoculars bringing the action close enough to read what was happening. The fox eventually broke off and the deer returned to the wash — which gave us a location to investigate. We walked to where the deer had gone and found the fawn in the wash bed. Dead. The deer had been defending her fawn and the fox had been too close — the chase we witnessed was the aftermath of something that had already happened. The kind of wildlife moment that reminds you that the forest is not a nature documentary. It is a working ecosystem where things happen that don't follow a script.

The mushrooms were extraordinary. Post-monsoon FR 124 in August produces a mushroom display unlike anything in the lower desert — dozens of species fruiting simultaneously across the forest floor. We documented them extensively. The photos from this trip are some of the most visually striking in the AZ Places collection.

Indian Paintbrush in bloom. Wildflowers across the meadow clearings. Wild horses at the waterhole — close, calm, unhurried.

And then the pottery. Luca decided to gather clay from a draw near camp — he wanted to make a vessel, fire it at the campfire in the evening. He started digging. And found a piece of ancient pottery. The one spot in the forest where he chose to dig for clay to make pottery — he found pottery. The fragment appears to be ancestral — consistent with the pre-contact occupation of this region of the Colorado Plateau.

Luca made his vessel from the clay. Fired it at the campfire that evening. The draw had been used for exactly this purpose before.

We set up the Clam shade tent over the kitchen when the afternoon build suggested rain was coming. The rain came. The kitchen stayed dry. The evening was one of the better camp evenings we have had anywhere on the list.

Tadpoles in the draw — documented on video. The temporary water pools that monsoon rain creates in the forest draws support a surprisingly dense biology for water that may only exist for weeks.

September 5, 2024 — Solo Night Camp, Canyon De Chelly Transit

A one-night camp on FR 124 on the way to Canyon De Chelly National Monument — and another one-night camp on the return leg. Two brief stops that delivered more than a transit camp usually does.

Wild horses at the waterhole — the horses that show up on this road every visit, reliable as the pines. Cows came into camp — working rangeland behavior that FR 124 delivers with some regularity. Mushrooms again in the forest — the late summer and monsoon season fruiting that makes this corridor consistently rewarding for that kind of observation.

On a hike during one of the stops we found an old bed frame in the ground — partially buried, the metal rusted and integrated into the forest floor. Another piece of the human history embedded in this stretch of forest. Someone camped here, or lived near here, long enough to bring a bed. The forest has been absorbing it ever since.

September 9–10, 2025 — Return Leg, Northern Arizona / Southern Utah Loop

The return drive from our five-day northern Arizona and southern Utah loop brought us through FR 124, FR 146, and Rim Road 300 to AZ-260 — a stretch of the old Rim Road we had not driven before.

The wildflowers on this visit were exceptional — yellow, blue, and orange blooms across the meadow clearings in the September light. A different version of FR 124 from the monsoon green of August 2022 or the early spring of the March visits. The fall transition had begun and the wildflower display caught the best of what that shift produces.

And then the horses that had been shot.

The full account is in the AZ Places blog post — Horses Are Being Shot in the Apache-Sitgreaves — And We Witnessed It Firsthand. The horses on FR 124 are not guaranteed to be there every time. Some of them are gone for reasons that have nothing to do with nature.

We also had to stop to remove a downed tree from the road — cleared it and moved on. The kind of task that comes with driving forest roads and that the drive home from Utah deserved at least one of.

Mushrooms — A Note

The August monsoon season mushroom display on FR 124 is significant enough to mention specifically. Post-fire forest plus monsoon moisture equals exceptional mushroom fruiting — multiple species, large concentrations, and the photographic opportunities that make this one of the more visually distinctive FR 124 experiences. We documented but did not harvest — identification before consumption is essential and we have not confirmed the edible species present. The photos from August 2022 are in the gallery.

Rodeo-Chediski Fire — A Note

The 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire burned across 489,000 acres of the Apache-Sitgreaves and Tonto National Forests — the largest wildfire in Arizona history at the time. The FR 124 corridor passed through portions of the fire perimeter. Twenty-plus years of recovery have produced a patchwork landscape of open burn areas, young forest regeneration, and mature surviving ponderosa that creates a more varied and visually interesting terrain than unburned monoculture forest would deliver. The fire is part of what makes this area what it is now.

#BearSprings #SunnyPark #FR124 #HeberOvergaard #ApacheSitgreaves #WildHorses #RodeoChediski #DispersedCamping #ArizonaCamping #AZPlaces #NavajoCo #PonderosaPine #ForestCamping #ArizonaWildlife #FreeCamping