What it is
The Hieroglyphic Trail is the Superstitions in miniature. It leaves a big gravel lot at the dead end of a street in Gold Canyon, a golf suburb at the southern foot of the range, and climbs gently for about a mile and a half across the bajada toward a notch in the mountains. The notch is Hieroglyphic Canyon, where a seasonal creek has cut a staircase of pools into dark basalt, and above the pools, on the varnished west wall, the Hohokam pecked hundreds of petroglyphs over the centuries they farmed this country: bighorn sheep, spirals, lizards, human figures, and designs nobody can read. They are petroglyphs, not hieroglyphs; the misnomer dates from early settlers and has survived every correction.
It is about three miles round trip with 650 feet of gain, and it is the hike for everyone who is not up for Peralta: families, grandparents, people who want the range’s skyline for two hours and the whole afternoon free. After a wet winter the creek runs over the slickrock and the canyon is briefly a different place.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale has petroglyph panels of its own in the Preserve and will not tell you where they are, for reasons our rock art note lays out. Here the panels are the destination, signed and on a maintained trail, and the lesson is the same: look, photograph, do not touch. It is also the gentlest way to put the Superstitions in front of a child.
The practical version
About an hour from Old Town. Free, no permit, portable toilets at the lot, no water. Ninety minutes to two hours round trip. The lot is big but shared with the Lost Goldmine Trail and full by mid-morning on winter weekends; the surrounding streets are posted and the tow trucks are real. October to April, and early.
When to go
December through March for the weather and the water. The pools fill with the winter rains and hold into spring; a weekday morning a day or two after a storm, when the creek is running and the lot is half empty, is the hike at its best. Late February and March bring poppies and brittlebush to the bajada on the way up. By May the pools are green, the trail is a griddle by nine, and our summer sunrise rules apply; by June, do something else.
Weekends in season fill the lot by nine thirty or ten. Arrive at eight or come on a Tuesday.
The walk
- The bajada (first mile). A wide, rocky trail climbing gently through saguaros and jojoba with the range ahead; the Flatiron is visible to the northwest for most of it.
- The approach to the canyon. The trail narrows and steepens a little as it bends into the drainage.
- The pools and the panels. The trail ends at the slickrock. The petroglyphs are on the dark basalt above the pools, mostly on the west side; cross the drainage and sit on the east side to see them properly in morning light.
- Beyond. A faint route continues up the canyon toward the ridge; it is a scramble for people who know the range, not an extension of this hike.
Reading the rock
The images are pecked through the desert varnish, the dark manganese coating that forms on basalt over millennia, exposing the lighter rock beneath. Our varnish and petroglyphs lexicon entry explains how they were made and why they fade. The sheep are the easiest to find; the spirals and the anthropomorphs take a minute. Do not touch, chalk, trace or climb; skin oils and footsteps do more damage than a century of rain.
With kids and dogs
This is the kids’ hike of the Superstitions: short enough, a creek at the end, lizards on the rocks and a treasure hunt for sheep on the wall. Our Scottsdale with kids note pairs it with Goldfield. Dogs on leash are fine; keep them out of the pools.
The story
The Hohokam farmed the Salt and Gila valleys with canals for a thousand years and ranged into the mountains around them for game, agave and water. Hieroglyphic Canyon had the water: a reliable seasonal spring and a staircase of natural tanks in a sheltered canyon that faced the farming settlements of the Queen Creek country below. People came here for a long time, and the panels record it in the dense, overlapping way that rock art does, with newer figures pecked over older ones and the whole wall varnished back toward darkness by centuries of weather. The images include the bighorn sheep that were hunted here, spirals that may be water or sun or calendar, lizards, and human figures, and nobody alive can translate them with confidence, which has not stopped anyone from trying.
Anglo settlers in the nineteenth century, seeing carved symbols on stone, called them hieroglyphics, and the name stuck to the canyon and then the trail. The Superstition Wilderness, designated in 1964, now protects the canyon, and the trail itself became one of the busiest in the range as Gold Canyon grew up around its trailhead. The suburb’s arrival is why the parking rules are strict: the trailhead sits at the end of a residential street, the neighbors have had enough of cars on their verges, and the lot was built large for a reason.
The Scottsdale connection
The Preserve holds hundreds of petroglyph panels from the same people, and the city keeps every location confidential, a policy our rock art note defends at length. Hieroglyphic Canyon is the public face of the same heritage, the place a Scottsdale visitor can go to see what the Preserve is protecting, and the etiquette learned here is the etiquette the Preserve asks for. The Hohokam who carved these walls are the ancestors of the O’odham and Piipaash communities on Scottsdale’s eastern border, and their descendants would rather you did not touch.
Getting there
From Old Town, the 101 south to the 202 east, the 202 to US 60 east through Mesa and Apache Junction, exit Kings Ranch Road in Gold Canyon and go north. Turn east on Baseline Avenue, north on Mohican Road, west on Valley View Drive, north on Whitetail Road and east on Cloudview Avenue, which ends at the lot; every turn is signed for the trailhead. About an hour from Old Town with no traffic. If the lot is full, do not park on the street; drive ten minutes back to US 60 and up Peralta Road, or come back another morning. Our day trips note has the rest of the Superstitions day.