What it means
The Tonto is Tonto National Forest, and for Scottsdale it is the wild country next door. Drive north on Scottsdale Road or east on Rio Verde Drive and the city eventually stops at a line on the map; past it, almost everything to the Mogollon Rim is federal land. The word covers a huge range of terrain, saguaro desert at about 1,400 feet up to ponderosa pine near 7,400, but in Valley usage it mostly means the near end: the lakes, the rivers and the desert you can reach before lunch.
“We’re taking the boat out to the Tonto” means Saguaro Lake or Bartlett Lake. “Tubing on the Salt” happens in the Tonto. The Salt River wild horses live there, Four Peaks and the Superstitions sit inside it, and so does the stretch of the Verde where locals cool their feet. You will also hear the word as a noun for a permit: “Did you get a Tonto?” means a Tonto Pass.
The river trips are in the Salt River tubing and wild horses guide, and the longer drives are in day trips from Scottsdale. This page is about the word.
Where you’ll meet it
Lake and river plans from March through September, Forest Service fire restrictions in early summer, the Rio Verde Foothills, the stargazing guide, and the Tonto Pass sticker on a dashboard.
Where the word came from
The forest borrowed its name from the land at its center. The Tonto Basin, the valley at the forest’s core, was the historic heart of the territory of the Tonto Apache, and when the federal government created the Tonto Forest Reserve on October 3, 1905, the basin gave it its name. The reserve became Tonto National Forest on March 4, 1907, and absorbed neighboring forests in later decades.
The word itself is Spanish, meaning loose, silly or foolish, and how it attached to a people is disputed. One account traces it to the Western Apache name for the group, Koun’nde, “wild rough people,” which Spanish speakers rendered as Tonto. KJZZ’s look at the question collected others: a Chiricahua phrase meaning roughly “those you don’t understand,” perhaps because the Tonto Apache intermarried with the neighboring Yavapai and spoke differently; or an outsider’s judgment that anyone living in such rough country must be foolish. The honest answer is that the record does not settle it. What is clear is that the name was applied to the people by others, not chosen by them.
For Scottsdale the important date is later. On August 1, 1984, the last of the city’s great annexations took effect, adding about 36 square miles and carrying the city limit north to the forest boundary. Since then Scottsdale has been a city that ends at a national forest.
What it is not
It is not Tonto National Monument, the National Park Service site protecting Salado cliff dwellings near Roosevelt Lake, and it is not Tonto Natural Bridge, the state park near Payson. It also has nothing to do with the Lone Ranger’s sidekick, whatever your uncle says.
The fine print
The Tonto covers about 2,873,200 acres, the largest of Arizona’s six national forests and the ninth largest in the country, and it is one of the most visited “urban” forests in the United States because a metro of millions sits on its southern edge. It is run by the Forest Service from headquarters in Phoenix, with a ranger district office in Scottsdale among others.
It holds eight federal wilderness areas, including the Four Peaks, Mazatzal and Superstition wildernesses, and part of the Verde’s Wild and Scenic River corridor. Its six reservoirs are the Valley’s water supply as much as its playground: Roosevelt, Apache, Canyon and Saguaro on the Salt, and Horseshoe and Bartlett on the Verde, all operated by the Salt River Project.
Fire is part of the record. The Bush Fire, which started on June 13, 2020, burned about 193,455 acres in the Tonto Basin area and became the fifth-largest fire in Arizona history; investigators found it was human-caused. Early-summer fire restrictions, and closures when conditions are extreme, are routine.