What it is
Black Mountain is the peak that stands alone between Cave Creek and Carefree, dark against the lighter desert, visible from Pinnacle Peak and from every patio on Cave Creek Road. Its summit is 3,398 feet above sea level and sits just inside the Town of Carefree, whose highest point it is. The Black Mountain Trail climbs it from the Cave Creek side: about 1.2 miles from a trailhead at roughly 2,195 feet, straight up the western slope with hardly a switchback, on a path that goes from packed dirt to loose rock to a scramble over summit boulders. Call it 1,200 feet of gain. A fit hiker is up in an hour and down in forty-five minutes, and the view from the top is the whole of the Desert Foothills: Cave Creek’s strip at your feet, Carefree’s sundial and the granite piles of The Boulders to the east, Elephant Mountain and the Tonto National Forest to the north, the McDowells and Pinnacle Peak to the south, and the Valley’s grid fading toward South Mountain.
The trailhead is the catch. It is at the end of a residential street off Cave Creek Road, School House Road, with a handful of designated parking spaces, houses on either side, and private land flanking the trail. A brown Black Mountain Trail sign marks the one legal route up; an unmarked road to the right leads onto someone’s property. Park only where it is signed, go only where the sign points, and the neighbors will go on tolerating the rest of us.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has summits: Thompson Peak is higher and longer, Pinnacle Peak is prettier and easier, Tom’s Thumb is the famous one. None of them gives you two towns laid out below you like a map, and none of them is this empty. Black Mountain is Camelback’s effort without Camelback’s queue, in a landscape where the nearest stucco is a long way off, and it is the one Desert Foothills hike that fits before breakfast on the strip.
The practical version
Forty minutes from Old Town, a two-minute drive off Cave Creek Road. No fee, no facilities, no water, no shade. Two hours round trip. October through April at first light; summer only before sunrise. Dogs on leash. Then Big Earl’s or Harold’s for breakfast, five minutes away.
When to go
Dawn, November through March. The climb faces west and south and takes the sun early; a seven o’clock start on a January morning is cool to the top and warm coming down, which is the right way round. October and April work with an earlier start. Summer means a headlamp start at five and down by seven, under the summer sunrise rules; the mountain holds heat and there is nowhere to hide from it.
Weekdays solve the parking problem. On a cool-season weekend the designated spaces fill by mid-morning and latecomers end up circling a residential street; go Tuesday, or go at seven.
The climb, in three parts
- The approach. From the designated parking, walk up the paved street to its dead end and the brown trail sign. Ignore the unmarked road to the right. The first stretch is a steady grade on decent footing through dense desert: saguaro, palo verde, jojoba, the odd crucifixion thorn.
- The middle. The grade steepens and stays steep. There are no switchbacks worth the name; the trail simply goes up the slope, rocky and eroded in places, with a few short sections where hands are useful. This is where the elevation is made.
- The summit. The last quarter mile is the loosest and steepest, ending in a boulder scramble. Walk past the first high point to the eastern boulders for the straight-down view into Carefree. On a clear winter morning you can see the Four Peaks to the east and the Bradshaws to the north.
Descending is harder on the knees than ascending was on the lungs; poles help on the loose upper section.
With kids, and the neighborhood
Children over about eight who like to scramble do well; younger ones struggle on the loose rock, and strollers are out of the question. Carry a liter of water per person even in winter. Afterward, the strip in our Cave Creek guide is five minutes west for breakfast, and Carefree, with its sundial, gardens and coffee, is five minutes east; the mountain sits exactly between them, which is the point of climbing it.
The story
Black Mountain’s dark rock stands out against the lighter hills around it, and it has been the landmark of this part of the desert for as long as people have crossed it. The Stoneman Military Trail, the route General George Stoneman investigated in 1865 along an older Native trail through the McDowell and Black Mountain country, passed below it; our Stoneman Military Road page follows its Scottsdale stretch. The Cave Creek Mining District was organized in the hills to the north in 1873, and the stage station that became the town was on the creek below the mountain’s west flank.
The two towns grew up on either side of it. Cave Creek, the mining and ranching camp, spread along the creek to the west. Carefree was laid out on the east side in the late 1950s as a planned community of large lots and curving streets named Easy Street and Ho Hum Road, and when it drew its boundaries it took in the summit, which is why the highest point in Carefree is reached from a street in Cave Creek. The summit area is known as the Black Mountain Summit Preserve, while private land covers much of the lower slopes, which is the source of the parking and trespass tensions at the trailhead and the reason the brown sign matters.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s summit culture, Camelback and the Preserve peaks, runs on volume: shuttles, full lots and a trail crew. Black Mountain is the opposite end of the same impulse, a hard local climb maintained by use and goodwill, with no city behind it. Our best hikes list stops at the city line; this is the peak that would be on it if the line were drawn five miles farther north, and from the top you can see every summit that is.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north to the Carefree Highway, west two miles to Cave Creek Road, north through town and past the center of the strip, then right on School House Road; the designated trail parking is a short way along on the right, with a brown Black Mountain Trail sign at the dead end of the street beyond. Forty minutes from Old Town, twenty from the Pinnacle Peak resorts. Arrive early, park only where signed, and leave nothing visible in the car.