What it is
Coon Bluff and Phon D Sutton are two Forest Service day-use sites a mile apart on the Lower Salt River, off Bush Highway in the Tonto National Forest, about 40 minutes from Old Town. Coon Bluff, which the Forest Service now signs as Raccoon Bluff, is a low bluff over a bend in the river with a stand of mesquite for shade, picnic tables, vault toilets and a path down to the water. Phon D Sutton, downstream, is a riverside grove with 15 tables under six ramadas, a boat and tube take-out, and the Lower Salt River Nature Trail running east through the cottonwoods and willows. Both are birding sites of real quality, both are tubing take-outs in summer, and neither is why you are here.
You are here for the horses. A herd of free-roaming horses lives along this stretch of the river, in the mesquite bosque between the highway and the water, and twice a day, at first light and at last, the bands come down through the trees to drink, to cross, and to stand belly-deep in the current eating the eelgrass off the bottom. From the bluff at Coon Bluff or the bank at Phon D Sutton, sitting still, you watch a stallion bring his band across a desert river with the Goldfield Mountains going pink behind them, from a distance they choose. It is the most memorable free thing within an hour of a Scottsdale resort, and our Salt River note has the protocol for not ruining it.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because there is nothing like it on the Scottsdale side. The city has horses in arenas and horses under saddle at the resort stables; our Western heritage note covers them. These are horses that answer to nobody, in a river, in a cottonwood gallery that looks like no part of the desert you have seen from the resort. Forty minutes, eight dollars, and an hour of sitting quietly.
The practical version
Loop 202 to Power Road, north onto Bush Highway about nine miles; Phon D Sutton Road on the left, Coon Bluff Road the next left. Tonto Pass bought in advance. Arrive forty minutes before sunset or at first light. Sit down, stay fifty feet back, never feed, and drive the highway slowly on the way out: the horses cross it in the dark.
When to go
Dawn or dusk, any month. That is the whole rule. Winter mornings are the most reliable, with the bands in the river by eight and the birders already there; spring evenings have the foals, the cottonwoods in leaf and the light; summer is tubing season and the river is loud from nine to five, but the hour before the first bus and the hour after the last are as good as ever and the water is where the horses want to be. Monsoon evenings in August, with the storm over the Superstitions and the horses in the river, are the photograph everyone is trying for. Midday, in any season, you will see a river and some tables.
How to watch
- Pick Phon D Sutton on weekends. Coon Bluff gets the cameras; the nature trail east from Phon D Sutton’s lot reaches quieter bank within ten minutes.
- Sit down. On the bank or the bluff, low, forty minutes before sunset. The horses come to the river on their own schedule and leave the same way; a standing crowd on the bank changes where they cross.
- Keep the distance. Fifty feet is the working rule and more with foals; a stallion moving a band will walk through where you are standing if you let him, so move early and sideways, never toward the water.
- Never feed. It is a crime under state law, and it teaches the horses to approach cars on the highway, which kills them.
- Bring binoculars and a long lens, and a chair, and the desert wildlife field guide for everything else: bald eagles in winter, herons and egrets year-round, vermilion flycatchers in the mesquite, and the beavers whose cuttings are along the bank.
With kids
Very good, with ground rules agreed in the car: we sit, we whisper, we do not run toward the horses. The nature trail at Phon D Sutton is flat and short, the ramadas have tables for dinner, and a child who watches a band cross the river at sunset remembers it. Tubing season adds the chaos of the take-out from nine to five; come after.
Nearby
Up Bush Highway: Salt River Tubing headquarters, Saguaro Lake Ranch for a trail ride among the same horses, and Saguaro Lake and the Desert Belle. South: Granite Reef, where the river becomes the Arizona Canal, and Usery Mountain Regional Park over Usery Pass.
The story
Horses have lived along the Lower Salt for as long as anyone can document, descendants, depending on who is telling it, of mission stock, ranch escapees or the herds of the Yavapai and Pima; the Forest Service’s position for decades was that they were stray livestock on federal land that nobody had bothered to remove. What made the stretch good for them was the dam. After Stewart Mountain closed in 1930 the Lower Salt became a cold, year-round river with a mesquite and cottonwood bosque along it, grass on the banks and eelgrass in the shallows, and the herd that had always been there became a herd that could be seen, every evening, from a picnic table.
In the summer of 2015 the Forest Service published a notice that it would round up and remove the horses as unauthorized livestock. The response was immediate, large and bipartisan: members of Arizona’s congressional delegation, the governor, tens of thousands of people who had watched the horses from Coon Bluff, and the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group, a volunteer organization that had been documenting the herd for years. The roundup was called off within weeks. In 2016 the legislature passed a law making the Salt River horses a protected herd under the state’s agriculture department and making it a crime to harass, kill or feed them, and the management group took on monitoring, emergency care and a humane fertility-control program to hold the herd’s size against the river’s capacity. It is a peculiar legal arrangement, a state-protected herd on federal land, and it works well enough that the bands still come down to the water every evening.
The Scottsdale connection
The river the horses stand in is on its way to Scottsdale. A few miles downstream at Granite Reef Dam it is diverted into the Arizona Canal, which runs through the Scottsdale Waterfront, and the city’s horse culture, the Arabian shows, the Parada del Sol, the resort stables, is the domesticated version of what is standing in the current here. Scottsdale resort concierges have sent guests to Coon Bluff at sunset for decades; the 2015 fight made the horses famous and the sites crowded, which is why the quieter bank at Phon D Sutton matters.
Getting there
From Old Town, the Loop 101 south to the Loop 202 east, exit Power Road and turn north; Power Road becomes Bush Highway at the Tonto National Forest boundary. About nine miles up, Phon D Sutton Road (Forest Road 169) is signed on the left, paved for its mile down to the river; Coon Bluff Road is the next left, about a mile farther. From North Scottsdale, Shea Boulevard east to the Beeline Highway, south to Bush Highway, then south about seven miles with the turnoffs on the right. Forty minutes either way with no traffic. Buy the Tonto Pass before the forest boundary, and on the way home at dusk drive Bush Highway at the limit or under it; the horses cross without looking, and our summer sunrise rules about dawn driving apply to dusk here.