What is the Apache Springs Trailhead?
The Sonoita side of the Santa Ritas is grassland that rolls up into oak and juniper before the range gets serious, and the Arizona Trail crosses it on the gentlest ground of its first hundred miles. The Apache Spring Trailhead is where the trail meets Gardner Canyon Road: a large gravel lot at 5,229 feet with a loop wide enough for horse trailers, a signboard, and nothing else. The Forest Service lists it as the end of Passage 4 and the start of Passage 5, Santa Rita Mountains, which runs about 16.6 miles north to Oak Tree Canyon through canyons, ridgelines and long views of Mount Wrightson’s granite summit. Two short connectors, the Elata Trail #162 and the Kentucky Camp Connector #163, also leave from here.
The day hike almost everyone does is north to Kentucky Camp, about 3.7 miles each way. The camp was built in 1904 as headquarters for the Santa Rita Water and Mining Company, a hydraulic gold scheme that collapsed within a few years; the Forest Service and volunteers restored its adobe buildings, and the trail runs through the yard past a potable water tap and a toilet. It is the only reliable water on the passage and the obvious turnaround. Black bears live in these hills, and the Santa Ritas have produced several confirmed jaguar sightings in the past 15 years, which is a thing to know rather than a thing to worry about.
What you get is a free start to the best grassland walk in southern Arizona, with a ruin and a tap at the far end. What you do not get is anything at the lot: no toilet, no water, no shade, and 5.5 miles of dirt between you and the highway.
How to hike it right
No fee, no permit. Open 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. year-round. No Coronado pass is required here, and none is sold.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east past Tucson to exit 281, then south on SR 83 through the oaks and grass toward Sonoita. About 4 miles before Sonoita, turn west on Gardner Canyon Road (Forest Road 92). The dirt road winds 5.5 miles past ranch gates and side tracks, with a couple of shallow creek crossings, to the trailhead on the right. About 185 minutes from Old Town. The road is fine for most cars when dry; past the trailhead it gets much rockier as it climbs toward Cave Canyon, and that stretch wants high clearance. Primitive campsites line the side roads; the Gardner Canyon dispersed camping guide covers them.
Go north, to Kentucky Camp. It is a 7.5-mile round trip with modest climbing, the water tap means you can carry less, and the old adobe headquarters is a better lunch spot than any rock on the trail. Passage 4 south toward Temporal Gulch is a longer, drier, steeper proposition. Watch for mountain bikers on the descent into the camp.
Pick the season. October through April is the window, with the oak grassland at its best in fall; late October through November, with the oaks dropping acorns and the grass gold, is the sweet spot, and March after a wet winter is a close second. Summer is hot by mid-morning and the afternoon lightning on these open ridges is real. The road crossings run after monsoon storms. The dispersed campsites along the road fill with hunters on fall weekends, so arrive before nine if you want quiet.
Water. None at the trailhead. Carry what you need for the day; fill at Kentucky Camp if you are going on. Stock ponds along the passage are for cattle and must be treated; check the Arizona Trail water report before a backpack.
Dogs, horses, bikes. All allowed on the trail, dogs on leash, e-bikes included. The passage is open range; expect cattle on the trail, keep the dog close around stock tanks, and close every gate you open.
Wildlife. Black bears are common. If you see a big cat track in the dust, believe it; the Santa Ritas have produced jaguar sightings. Neither is a reason to stay home.
Skip it if you want a short stroll with facilities; Cieneguita at Las Cienegas is closer to the highway. For a developed campground in the same range, Bog Springs in Madera Canyon is on the far side; Parker Canyon Lake is 40 minutes south. The other Arizona Trail trailhead on this site, Kelvin, is the Gila River crossing far to the north. Sonoita’s tasting rooms, 10 minutes back on SR 83, are the reason to linger; the Arizona wine entry explains why the grass here grows grapes.
A gold scheme that left a water tap
The Santa Rita foothills belonged to the Sobaipuri O’odham of the Santa Cruz valley, who gathered acorns and hunted the oak grassland, and from the 1700s to the Chiricahua Apache, who camped at its springs and raided the Spanish and Mexican ranches below. The spring and the trailhead carry the Apache name. The country was open range when the Americans came, and it stayed that way until someone found gold.
That happened in 1874, in the gulches on the east slope of the range a few miles north of the trailhead, and the Greaterville district became one of southern Arizona’s richest placer fields, with a camp of several hundred people washing gravel in the gulches when the summer rains gave them water. Water was the problem. The placers were rich but the creeks ran only a few weeks a year, and by 1886 the easy gravel was gone and most of the miners with it.
The scheme that produced Kentucky Camp was an answer to that problem. In 1902 a California mining engineer named James Stetson proposed building a reservoir in the mountains to catch the runoff and feed a ten-month supply of water through pipes to the old placers, where it would be used to wash the hillsides hydraulically. George McAneny and a group of Tucson investors formed the Santa Rita Water and Mining Company and built its headquarters in Kentucky Gulch: five adobe buildings that served as office, residence and shop for the company’s men from 1902 to 1906. By mid-1904 the water system was finished and the hydraulic mining began. In 1905, the day before he was to meet the stockholders, Stetson fell to his death from a window of the Santa Rita Hotel in Tucson. The surviving partner’s health and money failed, the gold did not pay, and by 1912 the camp was abandoned. A cattle outfit used the buildings as a ranch headquarters until the 1960s, when the land was sold to ANAMAX Mining.
The Forest Service got it back in 1989 through a land exchange and added it to the Coronado National Forest. From 1991 volunteers in the agency’s Passport in Time program and the Friends of Kentucky Camp began stabilizing and restoring the adobe buildings, work that is still going, and the Kentucky Camp Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 22, 1995. One cabin is rented to visitors. The water tap in the yard is the last working piece of a company founded to move water, which is the kind of irony the Arizona Trail specializes in.
The trail is why the lot exists. Dale Shewalter, a Flagstaff teacher, proposed a path the length of Arizona in 1985; the Arizona Trail Association formed in 1994; Congress named it a National Scenic Trail on March 30, 2009, and the last gap closed on December 16, 2011. Passage 5 was routed through Kentucky Camp’s yard because the tap was there, and the Forest Service built the Apache Spring lot where the trail crosses Gardner Canyon Road so that horse trailers could turn around. The grassland has one more recent chapter: since the 2010s the Santa Ritas have produced several confirmed jaguar sightings, the northernmost in the country, which is a fact to carry on the trail rather than a worry.
Why it matters
The Apache Springs Trailhead explains the quiet half of the Santa Ritas. Madera Canyon on the west side gets the birders and the pavement; the Sonoita side got a gold rush that ran out of water, a company that ran out of luck and a cattle ranch that ran out of time, and what is left is 16 miles of oak grassland with a restored ghost camp in the middle and a national trail running through it. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: it is a three-hour drive for a 7.5-mile walk, and worth it in late October with a stop in Sonoita after; go north from the lot, carry your own water out and drink the camp’s on the way back.