What it is
Usery Mountain Regional Park is a Maricopa County park of 3,648 acres at the foot of Pass Mountain, on the northeast edge of Mesa where the city stops and the Tonto National Forest begins, about 40 minutes from Old Town. It has been in the county system since 1961, the same program and the same decade that produced McDowell Mountain Regional Park on the far side of Scottsdale, and it has the same furniture: a $10 gate, a nature center, picnic ramadas, an archery range, a developed campground, and a trail system that runs from flat desert loops to a mountain.
The mountain is the point. Pass Mountain stands over the park’s east side, and the Wind Cave Trail climbs its west face, roughly a mile and a half of steady, switchbacking ascent, to a shallow alcove at 2,840 feet. Water seeps through the rock there and keeps a hanging garden of rock daisies growing from the ceiling; the cave is cool, the view runs across the whole East Valley to the Superstitions and Weavers Needle, and the trail is the most popular in the park because it is one of the best short destination hikes in the metro. The Pass Mountain Trail loops the mountain for the longer day. The Merkl and Blevins trails below are the flat walks.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale’s own trails, for all the Preserve’s thirty thousand acres, are short on summits with a reward at the top that a family can reach in an hour, and the Wind Cave is exactly that. Our best hikes note ranks the Scottsdale options; this is the one just outside them. And because the campground here is the closest decent car camping to the city, with the Superstitions for a sunrise. On a Salt River day it is the cool-season half: the river in the morning, Usery Pass Road over the hill, the cave in the afternoon.
The practical version
Loop 202 to Ellsworth Road, north to the gate; or Usery Pass Road south from Bush Highway after the river. $10 a car. Wind Cave by seven in the cool months, two hours round trip, water and a hat. Camping reserved ahead through the county, especially for winter weekends. Nature center for the kids and the map.
When to go
October through April is the season, and the Wind Cave at seven on a January morning, with the cave in shade and the valley below in sun, is the best hour in the park. Weekends in the cool months fill the trailhead lot by nine; go early or on a weekday. March brings wildflowers along the Merkl and Blevins loops and brittlebush on the slopes. Summer is dawn only, the gate opens at five for a reason, and the summer sunrise hiking rules apply to the Wind Cave in full: it is an exposed west face that holds the afternoon heat. The campground is a cool-season affair, with winter weekends booked well ahead.
What to do
- The Wind Cave Trail. The hike. Steady up, cool cave, hanging gardens, view, steady down. Two hours.
- Past the cave. A steep, unmaintained use-path continues to the Pass Mountain ridge for the summit view east; for experienced hikers only, and not in heat.
- The Pass Mountain Trail. The long loop around the mountain, several hours of real desert with the Goldfields and the Superstitions on the back side; bikes allowed on much of it.
- The flat loops. Merkl and Blevins, for small children, strollers with big wheels and anyone who wants the saguaros without the climb.
- Camp. A night under Pass Mountain with the Superstitions at sunrise, the best cheap night out within an hour of Scottsdale.
- Archery and the nature center. The range takes walk-ins with their own gear; the nature center has the exhibits, the maps and the rangers.
With kids
The flat loops and the nature center for the small ones, the Wind Cave for anyone over about seven who has done a hill before, the campground for all of them. The cave is a destination a child understands, and the daisies growing from the ceiling are the kind of thing they remember.
Nearby
Over Usery Pass to the north: Coon Bluff and the wild horses, Salt River Tubing in summer, and Saguaro Lake beyond. East: the Superstitions and Lost Dutchman State Park, covered in our day trips note.
The story
The pass that gives the park its name was the wagon road between Mesa and the Salt River, and a rancher named Usery worked the country along it in the late nineteenth century; the name stuck to the pass, the road, the mountain range and eventually the park. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Maricopa County, watching Phoenix spread, set out to acquire the mountain land around the Valley before the subdivisions reached it, and over a few years assembled the regional park system that is now one of the largest in the country: McDowell Mountain, Usery Mountain, White Tank, Estrella, Lake Pleasant and the rest. Usery came into the system in 1961, and the county built it out through the following decades with a campground, picnic areas and trails, and the Wind Cave Trail became its signature.
The Wind Cave itself is a geological accident. Pass Mountain is volcanic rock and the alcove is a weathered pocket in a band of it, where water moving through the rock seeps out along the roof and keeps the hanging garden of rock daisies alive through the summer. It is not a cave in any serious sense, a few yards deep and open to the sky, but it is cool, it is a destination, and it has made the trail the park’s signature for sixty years. Mesa grew to the park’s boundary in the 2000s, and Usery became what McDowell Mountain is for North Scottsdale: the desert park at the end of the street.
The Scottsdale connection
Usery and McDowell Mountain are the two eastern parks of the same county system, built in the same years for the same reason, and an annual county pass covers both. Scottsdale hikers know McDowell for its mountain-bike loops and its emptiness; Usery is the one with the summit. The Salt River, which runs between the two parks on its way to the Arizona Canal and the Scottsdale Waterfront, is the thread: our Salt River note has the river, and this is where to spend the afternoon after it.
Getting there
From Old Town, the Loop 101 south to the Loop 202 east (Red Mountain Freeway), exit Ellsworth Road and go north about five miles; Ellsworth becomes Usery Pass Road and the park gate is on the right. About 40 minutes with no traffic. From the Salt River sites on Bush Highway, Usery Pass Road climbs south over the pass to the park in about ten minutes. From North Scottsdale, Shea Boulevard east to the Beeline, south to Bush Highway, then Usery Pass Road south; about 45 minutes.