What it is
Cave Creek, the stream, is older than Cave Creek, the town, and it comes from here. Seven Springs is the upper reach of the creek in the Tonto National Forest, 20 miles north of Carefree, where Cave Creek Road, having run out of houses, becomes Forest Road 24 and climbs from saguaro desert into grassland and then drops into a canyon where water runs most of the year. The trees change with it: cottonwood, oak and the big white-barked Arizona sycamores that mean permanent water in this state. The Forest Service keeps a cluster of sites along the creek, picnic tables at the Cave Creek Trailhead, horse pens and trailer parking at the Bronco trailhead five miles back, and the trail itself, which follows the creek down its canyon for miles.
The road is half the experience. The pavement lasts about eleven miles past Carefree, past the Sears-Kay ruin at mile 14 and the Bronco trailhead at 15, and then nine miles of narrow all-weather gravel wind through hills with blind curves and no guardrails. An ordinary car does it in dry weather at twenty miles an hour. That pace is the point; the Valley is gone by the second curve.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
For water in the shade, which the Sonoran Desert does not offer within the city limits. The McDowell Sonoran Preserve is thirty thousand acres of magnificent dry; Seven Springs is a creek you can sit in under a sycamore, an hour from Old Town, with no entry fee and, on a weekday, almost nobody. It is the picnic for the cool months, the birding stretch for the riparian species the city lacks, and the start of the real Cave Creek Trail, a canyon walk that ends, for the ambitious, at Spur Cross above the town of Cave Creek. Honestly: this is not a destination for a resort guest with two days. It is for the third visit, the dirt-road curious, and anyone who has already done the Preserve twice.
The practical version
Cave Creek Road north through Carefree until it becomes FR 24; stay on it. Fee-free, day use at the trailheads, no water, no trash service, no signal, no glass. Check the Tonto National Forest conditions page before you leave, especially after rain. Allow an hour and five minutes each way from Old Town and a full day for the whole thing.
When to go
March and April are the months: the creek is up from the winter in the mountains above, the sycamores are leafing out, the grassland is green and the wildflowers along FR 24 can be as good as anything in the Preserve. November is the other, when the sycamores turn gold and the air is cold enough for a fire-free picnic to feel like autumn. October through February generally works, with cold water and quiet. Summer is the exception: hot, the creek shrinking to pools, and the monsoon turning the washes that cross the gravel road into real hazards; our monsoon field manual explains why a dry wash is the wrong place to be parked in August. The 2005 Cave Creek Complex fire closed the whole district for a season, and wildfire closures still happen in dry years; the Forest Service’s site pages carry the current status.
What to do
- Walk the creek downstream from the Cave Creek Trailhead. The first mile or so is flat along the bank under the trees, with crossings you can rock-hop in spring. Turn around when the canyon narrows, or do not.
- Hike the Cave Creek Trail properly. It follows the creek down its canyon for miles toward the Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area above the town of Cave Creek; done end to end it is a long day with a car at each end. Avid hikers use the Bronco trailhead, five miles back on FR 24, for the harder routes; the Forest Service rates it tougher than the Cave Creek Trailhead and gives it parking for 40 vehicles and horse trailers, six horse pens and nothing else.
- Bird the riparian strip. The cottonwood-sycamore canopy along the creek holds species the lower desert does not; spring and fall migrations are the time, and our desert wildlife guide covers what you will share the bank with.
- Stop at Sears-Kay. The Hohokam hilltop ruin at mile 14, a one-mile loop with a view south over the whole Valley, is the natural half of a Seven Springs day.
With kids
The creek walk is the best thing here for a child: shallow water, flat ground, sticks, frogs. Shoes that can get wet, a change of clothes, and a lunch at the picnic tables. The drive is the test; the gravel is twenty slow minutes each way and a carsick child does not care about sycamores.
The story
Cave Creek the stream rises in the hills of the Tonto National Forest north of here and runs south and west, through this canyon, past Spur Cross and the town that took its name, before it dries into the desert toward the Agua Fria. Seven Springs is the stretch where it is most reliably wet, which is why it has drawn everybody who ever passed through this country: the Hohokam farmers whose hilltop village at Sears-Kay, six miles back down the road, is thought to have been abandoned for better-watered ground up here around 1200; the ranchers whose cattle still graze the grassland along FR 24; and, since the Forest Service began developing the canyon for recreation in the twentieth century, the Valley families who have been driving the gravel road for a creekside picnic for generations. The 2005 Cave Creek Complex fire burned across the district and closed the road for a season; the canyon’s riparian trees survived better than the slopes above them, and the creek did not care.
The Forest Service runs the area lightly: fee-free trailheads, picnic tables, horse pens at Bronco, a stay limit of a day at the Cave Creek Trailhead and the usual rules, pack it out, no glass, bury what needs burying far from the water. There is no visitor center and no store. The Cave Creek Ranger Station, back at the Bartlett Dam Road junction, is the office.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale is the city that Cave Creek Road leaves. The road starts as a surface street in north Phoenix, becomes the main drag of the town of Cave Creek, passes Carefree at the top of Scottsdale Road, and ends here as a gravel track in a canyon, which makes Seven Springs the far end of the north Valley’s spine. The Tonto National Forest begins at the Carefree town line, and this is the nearest place in it where the forest earns the name. Our north Scottsdale hikes note stops at the Preserve’s northern trailheads; this is where you go when you have done them all and want water.
Getting there
Pima Road north from the 101 about twelve miles to Cave Creek Road, east and then north; or Scottsdale Road north to Carefree, right on Cave Creek Road. Stay on Cave Creek Road as it leaves town and becomes Forest Road 24, also signed Seven Springs Road, past the Bartlett Dam Road junction and the ranger station, past the Sears-Kay turnoff at about mile 14 and the Bronco trailhead at 15, and onto the gravel. The Cave Creek Trailhead and the picnic sites are at the end, about 20 miles from Carefree. An hour and five minutes from Old Town with no traffic and a dry road; fill the tank in Carefree, because there is nothing after it.