What it is
Around the year 1050, people whose relatives were digging canals in what is now south Scottsdale climbed a hill of dark diorite above Camp Creek, 14 miles north of where Carefree would be, and built a village with a wall around it. About forty rooms, in blocks and an oval enclosure, on a hilltop roughly 300 by 100 feet, with room for a hundred people and a view of every approach. They stayed about 150 years and left around 1200. That is most of what is known. Soldiers of the 5th Cavalry out of Fort McDowell came across the walls in 1867 on patrol; a ranch, the Sears-Kay, later took in the land and lent the ruin its name; the Forest Service stabilized the walls, partly rebuilt a few, and laid a one-mile loop trail with interpretive signs up and over the site. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995.
Sears-Kay is one of the Hohokam hilltop compounds that appeared across central Arizona in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when a culture that had farmed the open Valley for centuries started building on high ground behind walls. Why is the standing argument of Southwestern archaeology. The signs here do not pretend to settle it.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale sits on top of the Hohokam and shows you almost nothing. The canals are under the streets, the villages are under the subdivisions, and the rock art in the Preserve is deliberately unmarked, for reasons our rock art note explains. Sears-Kay is the one site within an hour where you can walk through the rooms, read the signs, and stand where they stood. The hour-long loop pairs with a creek picnic at Seven Springs, six miles farther up the same road, or with a Carefree lunch on the way back. It is free, and it is a real thing.
The practical version
Cave Creek Road north through Carefree; it becomes Forest Road 24 and the turnoff is signed at about mile 14, all of it paved. Day use six in the morning to ten at night, no fee, three ramadas, vault toilets, parking for eight, no water. Fifty-five minutes from Old Town. Bring water and a hat; a 2020 fire took most of the shade.
When to go
October through April, early. The hill is at 3,400 feet, high enough that winter mornings are cold and spring is two weeks behind the Valley, and the loop is exposed, more so since the September 2020 wildfire burned most of the vegetation around the site. March adds wildflowers along FR 24 and on the slope; December and January add the clearest air for the view south, which on a good morning reaches South Mountain. Avoid summer afternoons: there is no shade on the hilltop and the ramadas are at the bottom. Monsoon storms in late summer make the whole road a bad idea.
The loop
- The fork. A short way from the lot the trail splits. Take the left branch, which climbs about 150 feet to a saddle; the right branch is the gentler return.
- The compound wall and the room blocks. On top, the signs walk you through a row of three rectangular rooms, a longer room, and the oval enclosure, with lines and piles of stone marking buildings the Forest Service left as they were. Some walls are a course or two of foundation; some were rebuilt to shoulder height so you can see the plan.
- The Mystery Room. The one room without square corners. The signs suggest an earlier structure the village was built around, and leave it there.
- The view. South to the Valley, north to the grassland and the Seven Springs country the village likely moved toward when the thin soil here gave out. Saguaros grow on the slopes near their upper limit; the bedrock is coarse dark diorite.
- Down the other branch to the ramadas, which are the lunch spot if you are not going on to the creek.
Pairings
Sears-Kay sits at mile 14 of a road that continues to the Bronco trailhead at 15 and, after nine miles of gravel, to Seven Springs and the creek; the two together are the north Valley’s best half day outside the Preserve. Coming back, Carefree is 20 minutes for lunch and Cave Creek 25 for a saloon. Our agave fields note describes the dry-farming the Sears-Kay people probably practiced on the slopes you have just walked.
With kids
A mile with a climb, real ruins, and signs written for a general reader: good for children of about eight and up who can be trusted not to climb the walls. The ramadas and grills at the bottom make it a picnic.
The story
The Hohokam are the Valley’s first farmers and its first engineers, the culture that from roughly the fourth century to the fifteenth dug hundreds of miles of canals off the Salt and Gila, built platform mounds and ballcourts at villages like the one under Pueblo Grande, and traded shell and parrots across the Southwest. Sears-Kay belongs to a particular moment in that story. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as the big Valley villages were reorganizing around platform mounds, smaller groups moved into the uplands north of the Valley and built walled compounds on hilltops: Sears-Kay above Camp Creek, others along Cave Creek and the New River. Whether the walls were defense, status, or a way of marking a community in new country is argued; what is clear is that these were farmers, growing corn, beans, squash and agave on the creek bottoms and slopes below, and that within 150 years most of them had gone. The explanation the signs favor for Sears-Kay is agricultural: thin soil, a dry run of years, and better ground a few miles north at the springs that give Seven Springs its name. By 1450 the Hohokam as archaeologists define them had dispersed; the O’odham of today’s Salt River and Gila River communities are their descendants.
The site slept for six centuries, known to the Tonto Apache who claimed the country and not to anyone else, until a 5th Cavalry patrol from Fort McDowell, the Army post on the Verde to the south, rode past the walls in 1867. The Sears-Kay Ranch followed on the land, and the ruin kept the ranch’s name through a century of grazing and souvenir hunting until the Forest Service stabilized it, built the trail and signs, and in November 1995 saw it listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale is a Hohokam site that paved itself. The canals under the south of the city, traced in our canals note, were dug by the same culture in the same centuries that Sears-Kay was lived in, and the agave fields on the bajadas of the McDowells, the subject of our agave note, are the same dry-farming these hill people practiced. The city’s own Hohokam remains are protected by being unmarked or unexcavated; Sears-Kay, in the national forest, is where the Forest Service decided to show its work. For a visitor who has read the Scottsdale notes, this is the field trip.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north to Carefree Highway, where it becomes Tom Darlington Drive, then right on Cave Creek Road; or Pima Road north from the 101 to Cave Creek Road and east. Through Carefree, Cave Creek Road turns north and becomes Forest Road 24, signed Seven Springs Road; stay on it past the Bartlett Dam Road junction and the Cave Creek Ranger Station, through the ranchland, and the Sears-Kay sign is on the right at about 14 miles with a short paved spur to the lot. Fifty-five minutes from Old Town with no traffic, 35 from Pinnacle Peak. No trailers, no water, no fee; the ranger station at the Bartlett Dam Road junction is the last restroom with a door.