About this place
The Cottonwood Point Wilderness covers 6,860 acres in Arizona, on the Arizona-Utah border. Next to it, over the line, is the 44,531-acre Canaan Mountain Wilderness in Utah, designated in 2009.
The landscape is craggy pinnacles, Navajo sandstone cliffs and deep canyons.
It joined the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1984. That system was set up by the Wilderness Act of 1964 and now runs to over 109 million acres.
Wilderness means hard walking and real solitude.
Follow the rules for the area, and leave no trace, so it stays that way.
Leave No Trace has seven principles. Plan ahead. Camp on hard ground. Take your waste out with you. Leave what you find. Keep your campfire small. Give the wildlife room. Think of the other people out there.
How you apply them changes with the country. The desert is not the Rocky Mountains.
Motors and machines are generally banned on any federal land designated as wilderness. That covers motor vehicles and off-highway vehicles, motorboats, bicycles, hang gliders, wagons, carts and portage wheels. Landing an aircraft or a helicopter counts too. So do drones.
Ask the agency if you need more on the rules. The detail matters in a wilderness, and getting it wrong carries a penalty.
The facts
- Cost
- Free to camp
- Roads around it
- Recorded as four-wheel drive
- Type
- Open area. Camp anywhere within it
- Managed by
- Bureau of Land Management
The roads around this place are not maintained for a regular car. That comes from the Bureau of Land Management, who record the kind of vehicle that uses each route. Those records cover the roads nearby. They do not cover the last stretch in to the campsite, and nobody has checked that part. Treat this as a warning. We are not promising what you will find when you get there. If you have driven it, tell us what it was like and we will say so here.
Getting there
The wilderness sits right on the edge of Colorado City, Arizona.
Coordinates 36.981677, -112.915108
Open in Google Maps Agency page
What is near here
A few more of our own spots are within reach of this one, along with some better-known places.
- Canaan Mountain Wilderness Directions
- Pipe Spring National Monument Directions
- Zion National Park Directions
- Spring Creek Canyon Wilderness Study Area Directions
- Coyote Buttes Directions
Every distance on this page is the driving distance. A short distance can still take a long time. The road may be closed for the season, covered in snow, or washed out. Many of these roads are dirt. Plan your route before you leave home. Out here there is often no phone signal to look it up on the way.
Nearest town and supplies
- Cane Beds, AZ Directions
- Colorado City, AZ Directions
Colorado City is big enough that you’d normally expect fuel and somewhere to buy food. Nobody from here has been to check, so don’t count on it if you’re running low.
Have you been here?
Fees and access change, and the records do not always keep up. If you have been, tell us what you found.
Thank you, that is recorded. It helps the next person.
Add road notes for this site
The thing we cannot get from any government record is what the drive in is actually like. If you have done it, this is the most useful thing you can leave behind. We read everything before it appears, and we print a first name with it if you give one.
Thank you. A person will read it before it goes on the page.
Where this information comes from
The description on this page is ours. The facts in it, and the fee and facility details below it, come from the Bureau of Land Management’s own records, read in August 2026.