What is the Apache Wash Trailhead?
The Phoenix Sonoran Preserve is the city’s answer to the McDowell Sonoran Preserve across the line in Scottsdale: more than 9,600 acres of saguaro-covered hills and wide washes north of the Loop 101, protected since the late 1990s, with 36 miles of trail built to the same high standard as Brown’s Ranch. The Apache Wash Trailhead on Sonoran Desert Drive is the heart of the north unit. From a paved lot with vault toilets and a shade structure, trails radiate into a basin ringed by low mountains: Apache Vista (0.5 miles, 153 feet) to an overlook, Ridgeback (1.5 miles, 224 feet) along the hills to the east, the Apache Wash Loop (5.6 miles, 200 feet) around the whole valley, and the long easy connectors Cliff Walk, Badger Brawl and Esplanade (2.9 to 3.4 miles each) that let you string together a half day without repeating a step.
Two other trailheads complete the preserve. Desert Hills at 705 W. Carefree Hwy. is the start of the Ocotillo (6.3 miles) and Sidewinder (7.0 miles) trails, the longest and most technical in the system, built for mountain bikers. Desert Vista at 1900 W. Desert Vista Tr., south of the Loop 303, serves the Dixie Mountain loop and summit and Union Peak. All of it is free, all of it is signed, and almost none of it is crowded.
What you get is a Valley desert preserve with the McDowells’ trail quality and a fraction of the people, 35 minutes from Old Town, with a short summit, a long loop and the best beginner singletrack in the metro. What you do not get is water, real elevation, shade past the ramada, or a trailhead building; this is the plain version.
How to hike it right
Pay nothing, mind the gate. Free, no reservation. The lot is open 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. and the gate closes; the trails stay open until 11, so plan to be back at the car before seven or park outside.
Get there. Take Scottsdale Road or the Loop 101 west to Cave Creek Road, go north about seven miles to Sonoran Desert Drive, and turn west; the Apache Wash lot is about two miles along on the left. Alternatively take Loop 101 west to I-17 north, exit at Sonoran Desert Drive and head east. Either way it is about 35 minutes from Old Town. The lot holds a lot of cars and horse trailers and fills only on the finest winter Saturday mornings. The road itself is a parkway with a paved multi-use path, the Skip Rimsza Paseo, running alongside.
Pick the route. The two-hour sampler is Ridgeback out to the Apache Vista spur and back along the Apache Wash Trail, about five miles with one short climb and the best view of the north Valley from the overlook. On a mountain bike, ride the Apache Wash Loop clockwise and add Badger Brawl, which is fast, flowing and almost never has anyone on it. The easiest options, Apache Vista, the 0.4-mile Apache Wash Trail and the paved paseo, work for strollers and wheelchairs.
Pick the season. October through April is the hike. The lot is high and open and the wind can be brutal in February, so bring a layer. From May through September this is a first-light outing done by nine; the summer rules apply, and there is no shade beyond the ramada.
Water. None at the trailhead or anywhere in the preserve. Carry two liters a person for the loop in cool weather and more from April on; fill up at the Fry’s at Cave Creek Road and Carefree Highway on the way in.
Shared trails. Every trail here is multi-use. Bikes are frequent and fast on Ridgeback and the loop; horses are common on weekend mornings, because the stables along Cave Creek Road use these trails. Yield, step aside, say hello.
Dogs. On leash, and the city warns specifically about chain-fruit cholla along the trails. Dogs are banned on all Phoenix trails at 100 degrees or above.
Skip it if you want a climb. The hills here are low; for a real summit in the same drive, Daisy Mountain is 15 minutes north, and Deem Hills across I-17 has the sharper, rockier ridge. For a county park with a campground in the same desert, Cave Creek Regional Park is 15 minutes east. For the Scottsdale version of the same morning, the hikes beyond Gateway guide has the list.
The preserve Phoenix planned before the houses got there
The basin Apache Wash drains was Hohokam country first, farmed where the washes spread and dotted with sherds and grinding slicks on the bajadas, and Akimel O’odham hunting ground after. For most of the twentieth century it was cattle range and state trust land, grazed from a few ranches along Cave Creek Road and the New River, with Phoenix’s city limits 20 miles south and the Carefree Highway the edge of anything. The city’s experience with its first preserve, the Phoenix Mountains, had been the opposite order: houses first, then a scramble in the 1970s to save the peaks between them. North Phoenix was a chance to do it the other way around.
The planning started before the subdivisions. In 1994, as the city annexed and zoned its way toward the Carefree Highway, Parks and Recreation published a Desert Preserve Preliminary Plan for the land between I-17 and Cave Creek Road, and then commissioned something more serious. On February 17, 1998 the City Council adopted the Sonoran Preserve Master Plan, written by James Burke and Joseph Ewan with Arizona State University’s Herberger Center, built on an ecological inventory of the hills and washes and a round of citizen meetings. Its argument was that a desert preserve should follow the washes and the ridgelines, not the lot lines, and that the city should buy the land before the developers set the price. Scottsdale’s voters had approved their first preserve sales tax in 1995; Phoenix needed its own money.
It got it from the ballot. Phoenix voters passed the Parks and Preserve Initiative sales tax in 1999 and renewed it in 2008, and that fund has bought the trust-land parcels one auction at a time and paid for every trailhead in the preserve. The acreage grew to more than 9,600, the plan’s full ambition was larger, and the Loop 303 and Sonoran Desert Drive came through the middle of it as the houses arrived at Norterra and Desert Ridge. The compromise is visible from the Ridgeback: rooftops to the south and east, open desert to the north toward the Tonto.
The trails came last and fast. From 2009 the city’s crews built 36 miles of new trail across the preserve to the same machine-cut, well-drained standard Scottsdale had set at Brown’s Ranch, with Apache Wash as the north unit’s hub and Desert Vista and Desert Hills as the other doors; in 2014 the city announced 18 more miles for the fall. Sonoran Desert Drive, a parkway with the paved Skip Rimsza Paseo alongside, named for the mayor who signed the 1998 plan, opened the basin from both I-17 and Cave Creek Road, and the paved lot with its vault toilets and ramada is what a Phoenix trailhead looks like when the money goes into trail rather than building.
What has changed lately is use. Mountain bikers found Badger Brawl and Sidewinder, the Cave Creek Road stables made the loop a weekend horse route, and the city’s summer dog ban at 100 degrees came in as the crowds did. The lot still does not fill except on the finest winter Saturdays, which says less about the trails than about how many people in north Scottsdale have never driven west of Cave Creek Road.
Why it matters
The Phoenix Sonoran Preserve is the Valley’s proof that a city can plan a preserve before the houses arrive instead of after, and Apache Wash is where the proof is easiest to walk. It explains the 1998 master plan, the sales tax that paid for it, and why the desert between I-17 and Cave Creek Road still looks like desert from the Ridgeback while the rest of north Phoenix does not. It also shows what Scottsdale’s preserve would have looked like with plainer trailheads and a third of the acreage. For a Scottsdale hiker the verdict is simple: when Brown’s Ranch is full, this is the same trail quality and the same saguaros 35 minutes west, with parking, and the Ridgeback-to-Apache Vista sampler is the best two hours nobody in your neighborhood has done.