What it means
The Superstitions are the mountains at the end of the Valley. Drive east on any freeway long enough and the suburbs of Mesa and Apache Junction run straight into a wall of dark, fluted volcanic cliff: that is Superstition Mountain, the western anchor of a range that rolls on, roadless, for miles behind it. Locals use the plural for the whole thing, the skyline, the wilderness and the stories, and the more casual shorten it to “the Supes.”
From Scottsdale the range is a distant presence rather than a neighbor. It sits on the far southeastern horizon, past Red Mountain and the Salt River, with Four Peaks standing to its north. You notice it most at dawn from the high trails of the McDowells, when the cliffs catch the first light and the thin spike of Weavers Needle shows behind the main ridge. “You can see the Superstitions from up there” is a standard selling point for the Sunrise and Thompson Peak climbs.
The trip itself, drive times and the cool-season rule are in the day trips guide. This page is about the name.
Where you’ll meet it
Winter hiking plans, the desert tours guide, the Apache Trail, summit views in the best hikes guide, and every treasure-hunting story told at a Valley bar.
Where the word came from
The mountain had names long before this one. The Akimel O’odham, whom settlers called Pima, an older outside name, knew it as kakatak tamai, Crooked-Top Mountain, according to the Superstition historian Tom Kollenborn. In Yavapai it is Wi:kchsawa.
The English name is a settler’s misreading. In the late 1860s, farmers in the Salt River Valley were growing hay for the Army at Fort McDowell, and they heard O’odham stories about the mountain: strange sounds, people who vanished, deaths no one could explain. The farmers concluded that their neighbors were superstitious about the place, and the label stuck to the mountain rather than to the people. “Superstition Mountains” appears on a map by 1872, and the singular “Superstition Mountain” by 1874. It is, in other words, a name that records what outsiders thought of the O’odham more than anything about the rock.
The romantic Spanish names you will sometimes see, Sierra de la Espuma or Monte de Espuma, “foam mountain,” have a thinner pedigree. They show up on twentieth-century maps, a 1927 map among them, and nobody has produced a colonial document using them.
Weavers Needle has a cleaner story. The thousand-foot spire of eroded volcanic tuff, visible from much of the range, is named for Pauline Weaver, the trapper and guide, and it appears on a War Department map by 1853.
What it is not
The Superstitions are not Four Peaks, the four-notched mountain farther north on the same eastern skyline, and they are not the McDowells, Scottsdale’s own range. Superstition Mountain, singular, is the big western cliff; the Superstitions, plural, are the whole range behind it.
The fine print
The legend that made the range famous belongs to Jacob Waltz, a German immigrant prospector, born in 1810, who died in Phoenix on October 25, 1891. The story says he found a rich lode in the Superstitions and described its location on his deathbed to Julia Thomas, the boarding-house keeper who had cared for him. Several mines have been claimed as the real Lost Dutchman; none has been verified, and one view holds that Waltz’s gold came from high-grading at the Vulture Mine near Wickenburg. The Needle’s shadow is supposed to point to the vein. Hundreds of searchers have looked.
The land is protected now. The Superstition Wilderness was established in 1964 and expanded to about 160,200 acres in 1984, inside the Tonto National Forest, which strictly limits prospecting. Its highest point is Mound Mountain, 6,266 feet, far to the east; the summits of Superstition Mountain itself are just over 5,000 feet.
The numbers people quote vary. Kollenborn gives 5,074 feet for the highest point on Superstition Mountain; federal survey figures run closer to 5,057. Either way, the cliff rises about 3,000 feet above the valley floor, which is why it dominates the view from the east side of the metro.