What it is
Salt River Tubing is the company, and the ritual. From a headquarters lot at the corner of Bush Highway and Usery Pass Road in the Tonto National Forest, about 40 minutes from Old Town, it rents inner tubes and runs a fleet of school buses up the river; you ride the bus ten or fifteen minutes to a put-in, float two to four hours back down the Lower Salt past cliffs, saguaros and cottonwoods, and get out at the take-out where another bus brings you the five minutes back to your car. It has done this every summer since 1980 under a Forest Service permit, which made 2026 its 46th season. The season runs from late April to the end of September, with September on weekends only. In 2026 a tube with the shuttle was $28.
The river is the thing that makes it work. The Lower Salt comes out of Stewart Mountain Dam cold and clear and runs at a steady, released flow through the summer, so on a 108-degree afternoon the water is cold and the float is the only comfortable place in the Valley to be outdoors at two o’clock. The scenery is better than the crowd deserves: the Goldfield cliffs, the Bulldog Cliffs, a cottonwood bosque, bald eagles in the right months and the wild horses standing in the shallows while a thousand tubes go past.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because from May to September Scottsdale offers you a pool, a mall and a nap, and the tubing run is the one cheap, outdoor, daytime thing near the city that the heat improves rather than ruins. Our Salt River note has the full protocol and our summer playbook ranks it as the summer day trip; this guide is the practical version. It is also a social event, and if you are over forty or want quiet, the answer is a weekday in late May, not a July Saturday.
The practical version
Loop 202 to Power Road, north to the lot at Usery Pass Road. Book online or pay at the window; weekends from eight, weekdays from nine, last buses mid-afternoon. Tube, cooler tube, shoes that stay on, sunscreen, a hat, no glass. Pick the full float on a weekday and the bottom half on a weekend. Watch for the take-out.
When to go
Late April and May, the first weeks of the season, have the best water and the smallest crowds; the dam is releasing well and the Valley has not yet decided it is summer. June is hot, dry and reliable. July and August are monsoon months: the mornings are fine, the afternoons can bring a storm off the Superstitions with lightning over open water, and the company pulls people off the water when one arrives; our monsoon field manual explains the two o’clock rule. September is weekends only and the water is low, warm and slow, which some people prefer. The themed weekends, Memorial Day, the Fourth, Labor Day, are the busiest days of the year and the ones to avoid unless the crowd is the point.
Weekdays are the answer. A Tuesday float in June has a quarter of the people, the same river and the same price.
How it works
- Check in. Online bookings go straight to check-in; walk-ups pay at the window. Cash renters leave a photo ID or a deposit per tube. Weekends you get a wristband.
- Choose the float. Full trip from the top, top half to the midpoint, or bottom half from the midpoint to the end; the Bridge is the calm start. Staff give the day’s times, which depend on the flow.
- Ride the bus. Ten to fifteen minutes up Bush Highway in a school bus with wet strangers, tubes stacked in the back.
- Float. Stay in the main channel, steer around fallen trees (the Forest Service’s warning about strainers is serious), and keep the cooler tube tied to a person.
- Get out. The take-out is signed and staffed; miss it and the next stop is Granite Reef and a long walk. Return the tube at the station on weekends or at headquarters on weekdays.
With kids
Four feet tall is the rule and it is firm; under-13s wear life jackets, and on high-flow days they float the bottom half only. Teenagers think it is the best day of the trip. Our Scottsdale with kids note says Butcher Jones beach for the younger ones instead.
Nearby
Coon Bluff and Phon D Sutton for the horses at dusk after the float, Saguaro Lake Ranch for a kayak instead of a tube, and Usery Mountain Regional Park over the pass for the cool-season version of the same day.
The story
People floated the Lower Salt long before anyone sold them a tube; the river below the dam was the East Valley’s swimming hole for decades before that. What the company did in 1980 was solve the logistics, the two cars and the long walk, with a shuttle bus and a permit from the Tonto National Forest, and in doing so turn a local habit into a regional institution. Through the 1980s and 1990s it became the thing Arizona State students did on the first hot weekend and the thing every Valley teenager had done by graduation, with the themed weekends, the school buses and the snack bar as fixed as the cliffs. The company changed hands in 2023; the format did not.
The river changed around it. The Forest Service built the day-use sites, imposed the glass ban that applies to the entire corridor, and in 2015 proposed removing the wild horses, which produced the public fight that ended with the horses protected by state law and the tubers sharing the water with them under rules about distance and marshmallows. The flow is set by the Salt River Project’s releases from Stewart Mountain Dam, which is why the float time changes daily and why the season tracks the dam schedule as much as the calendar.
The Scottsdale connection
The water you float on is on its way to Scottsdale. A few miles below the take-out, Granite Reef Dam diverts the river into the Arizona Canal, which runs along the Waterfront and under the Old Town bridges before it irrigates the rest of the Valley; the canal path you walked last night is the same river an afternoon later. Scottsdale’s own summer story is pools and resorts, and our getting around note will tell you the rideshare to the tubing lot is expensive and the return pickup unreliable, so this is a drive-yourself day with a sober driver.
Getting there
From Old Town, the Loop 101 south to the Loop 202 east (Red Mountain Freeway), exit Power Road and turn north; Power Road becomes Bush Highway at the forest boundary, and the headquarters lot is about seven miles up at the junction with Usery Pass Road, on the left, impossible to miss on a summer morning. From North Scottsdale, Shea Boulevard east to the Beeline Highway, south to Bush Highway, then south about nine miles. Forty minutes either way with no traffic, and parking is included in the rental; the lot fills by late morning on weekends, and the company closes the gate when it does.