Cottonwood Campground Permit

Cottonwood Campground is the corridor's north-side halfway house: 6.8 miles below the North Kaibab Trailhead at 4,080 feet, with an emergency phone, toilets, picnic tables, pack poles and metal food storage cans. The park calls it a small campground and publishes no site count. There is no ranger station here - the nearest is at Manzanita Rest Area, 1.4 miles up-trail. Recreation.gov sells a standard division, a large group division and a stock/Arizona Trail site.

Access is seasonal at the top rather than the bottom. North Rim roads and services close December 1 and Highway 67 stays shut until May 15, so the trailhead is simply unreachable by vehicle for half the year, and last-minute in-person permits for this campground exist only between May 15 and October 31.

Then there is the closure that changes everything. From 11:59 pm on October 15, 2026 the park closes the North Kaibab Trail from the Redwall Bridge - about 2.5 miles north of Manzanita - to the northern end of Cottonwood Campground, and states plainly that traditional rim-to-rim hiking will not be possible beginning October 16, 2026, through approximately February 2027. Recreation.gov has already created a Cottonwood division accessed from the South Rim to handle it.

Water is the other thing to get right. The park's mileage table gives Cottonwood a mid-May to mid-October window for the tap, but that is what the campground is plumbed for, not what is running. Water here comes off the Transcanyon Waterline, and the park publishes a live per-location status on its Key Hiking Messages page because, in its own words, these statuses are current but can change suddenly due to breaks in the waterline. On August 9, 2026 that page read water OFF due to pipeline break at Cottonwood, at Manzanita and at Bright Angel Campground, and all water off on the North Rim itself. Its own North Kaibab handout puts it bluntly: potable water stations should be considered a gift and not relied upon.