About this 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. 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 about 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.
The route
From the North Kaibab Trailhead at 8,241 feet the trail drops fast through Coconino Sandstone, past Supai Tunnel and the Redwall Bridge, then down the Roaring Springs drainage. Manzanita Rest Area sits 1.4 miles above camp with a toilet, shaded benches and the corridor's ranger station. Cottonwood Campground is at 4,080 feet, 6.8 miles from the trailhead by the park's mileage table, though the same handout's sidebar says 7 miles.
Below camp it is 1.6 miles to Ribbon Falls, where the bridge is gone and you have to find a place to ford the creek, and then 7.2 more miles to Bright Angel Campground and the river. That makes Cottonwood the natural first night of a north-to-south rim-to-rim, and the natural last night coming the other way.
Why it matters
Every rim-to-rim hiker passes through here, and most of the ones who enjoy it sleep here. The North Kaibab is 14 miles from trailhead to the Colorado River, with more vertical than either South Rim trail, and Cottonwood is the one designated campground in the middle of it. It is also the campground that goes away for a while: from 11:59 pm on October 15, 2026 the park closes the North Kaibab between the Redwall Bridge and the north end of Cottonwood Campground, and traditional rim-to-rim hiking stops until roughly February 2027.
