What is the Badger Springs Trail?
The Agua Fria National Monument is 70,900 acres of grassland mesa and river canyon between Black Canyon City and Cordes Junction, set aside in January 2000 for what is on it: hundreds of archaeological sites left by people who farmed Perry Mesa and the river bottom between roughly AD 1200 and 1450, including stone-walled pueblos of dozens of rooms and a great deal of rock art. Most of it is reached by rough roads. Badger Springs is the exception, a trailhead less than a mile from the interstate.
The “trail” is Badger Springs Wash. From the gravel lot you drop into the sandy, bouldery bottom and follow it downhill about 0.8 mile, past cottonwoods and a couple of pour-offs, to where it meets the Agua Fria River in a basalt canyon. On the dark, varnished boulders at the confluence is a petroglyph panel, well preserved and easy to miss if you are watching your feet: spirals, animals, human figures. The river usually runs here through early summer, and after a wet winter the pools are real.
Up on the mesa, reached from the next exit north, is Pueblo La Plata, an 80- to 90-room village on a point above Silver Creek, with low walls, agricultural terraces and a view that explains why they built there. What you get at Badger Springs is water, rock art and a canyon for the price of an hour’s drive and no fee; what you do not get is a trail, shade, a tap or anything to do once you have reached the river except look at it and walk along it.
How to hike it right
Pay nothing, expect nothing. No permit, no pass, no gate, no hours. The lot has an accessible vault toilet and information panels and that is the full inventory of facilities in the entire monument. Carry water; filter the river if you must.
Get there. Take Loop 101 north and west to I-17, then I-17 north about 50 miles to exit 256, Badger Springs Road, just past Black Canyon City and the Sunset Point rest area. Go east on the dirt road 0.8 mile to the gravel lot. About 1 hour 5 minutes from Old Town; the dirt is maintained and fine for any car when dry. It is the shortest serious day trip north of the Valley.
Add Pueblo La Plata if you have the vehicle. Use exit 259, Bloody Basin Road: 8.3 miles east, the first five paved and the rest rough enough that the BLM recommends high clearance, then a mile north on a dirt spur to a fenced lot and a quarter-mile walk. The village is low walls and terraces, not standing rooms; the view is the architecture.
Pick the season. Year-round, but it is a low-desert canyon at 3,100 feet with no shade. October through April is the window; late winter after rain is best, when the river is running and the pools below the panel are deep enough to sit beside. By June the Agua Fria is often a string of puddles. Summer afternoons are dangerous.
Follow the wash, not a trail. There is no marked route. When the bottom braids, pick the line with footprints and keep heading downhill; the pour-offs have obvious bypasses. The petroglyphs are on the dark boulders at the confluence, mostly on the river side, and the natural tendency to look at the water walks people straight past them.
Respect the flood. The wash and the river both flash flood in monsoon storms and in winter rains, and the canyon walls leave nowhere to go. If it is raining or thunderheads are building to the north over the Bradshaws, pick another day.
Leave the rock alone. Everything here is protected by federal law. Do not touch the petroglyphs, do not chalk or climb them for a photo, do not climb walls at the pueblos, do not pocket pottery. The site’s note on desert varnish and petroglyphs explains why a fingertip does damage that a century will not undo.
Camping and dogs. Dispersed camping is allowed across the monument for up to 14 days, on numbered roads only; driving in washes is prohibited and there is no developed campground. Dogs on leash; pack out waste.
Skip it if you wanted miles or a summit. It is short and it is a wash, so it disappoints people who wanted a trail and delights people who wanted water. Pair it with the Black Canyon Trail a few exits south if you need distance, or with Sears-Kay Ruin above Cave Creek for a second hilltop village on the way home.
The mesa that was a frontier
The people who carved the boulders at the confluence were not Hohokam, or not exactly. Between about 1250 and 1450 several thousand farmers lived on the grassland mesas above the Agua Fria in stone pueblos of dozens of rooms, with agricultural terraces, racetrack-like features and an unusual quantity of rock art. Archaeologists call them the Perry Mesa Tradition and argue about where they came from and why they clustered here; the mesa sits on the edge of the Hohokam world of the Salt and Gila valleys to the south and the Sinagua and Puebloan worlds to the north, and Pueblo La Plata’s trade goods came from both. Pueblo La Plata itself held 80 to 90 rooms and was occupied from about 1200 to 1450, by the BLM’s reckoning, by a community of a few thousand across the mesa. Then, in the middle 1400s, like most of central Arizona, the mesa emptied. The Yavapai held the country afterward, and their descendants, with the Hopi and the O’odham, count these sites as ancestral.
The Agua Fria canyon was a corridor long before it was a monument. The Phoenix to Prescott stage road ran up it, and Goddard’s station at the canyon mouth served stagecoaches and soldiers in Territorial days; Jack and Trinidad Swilling, the same Swilling who dug the first Anglo canal in Phoenix, settled there in 1871, and the Cañon post office that became Black Canyon City opened in 1894. Up on the mesa the twentieth century was cattle and sheep. Basque sheep camps worked the grassland, prospectors left the small 19th-century mining features the monument still shows, and families homesteaded the creeks; the Teskey home site on Big Bug Creek, a chimney and a foundation from the 1940s, is the kind of remnant the BLM now signs.
What made it a monument was the archaeology and a president’s last year. On January 11, 2000, Bill Clinton proclaimed Agua Fria National Monument under the Antiquities Act, one of the first national monuments to be left in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management rather than handed to the Park Service, the model the BLM now calls its National Conservation Lands. The proclamation’s purpose was the Perry Mesa record: hundreds of sites, most of them unexcavated and unsigned, protected by distance and bad roads. Badger Springs, the one trailhead a mile off the interstate, became the monument’s public face almost by default.
The BLM has never had the staff to run it alone. In late 2004, with help from the agency and the Sierra Club, the Friends of the Agua Fria National Monument formed and became the volunteer force behind the trail panels, the site stewards who watch the pueblos and the cleanups along the river. By 2011 the monument was drawing more than 80,000 visitors a year, most of them to this wash. The Agua Fria’s riparian corridor is also an Audubon Important Bird Area, with more than 180 species recorded, which is why birders are the second-largest group in the Badger Springs lot after families.
What is coming is pressure. I-17 is being widened, the Valley’s edge is at Anthem, and a monument built on obscurity now has an interchange named for its trailhead.
Why it matters
Agua Fria is the place to understand that the people of ancient Arizona were not one people. A half-day here, with Badger Springs in the morning and Pueblo La Plata after lunch, puts you on the frontier between the canal-building Hohokam of the Valley and the mesa-top pueblo builders of the north, in a landscape neither group’s descendants have forgotten. It is also a lesson in how federal land is protected now: by proclamation, by a thinly staffed agency, and by volunteers. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: go after rain, between November and March, with shoes you can soak, and let a one-mile walk down a wash to running water and a wall of spirals be the whole point.