What is Baker Butte Lookout?
The Mogollon Rim is a 200-mile cliff, and its highest point is a wooded hump a mile east of SR 87 that most people drive past without noticing. Baker Butte tops out at about 8,074 feet, the roof of the Rim and the line between Coconino and Gila counties, and because it stands a little above everything around it the Forest Service has kept a fire lookout here since 1921. The present tower went up in 1937: a 30-foot Aermotor steel frame with wooden stairs and a 12-by-12-foot cab, a catwalk added in 2009, and a small residence below it with lilacs planted in the 1980s. It went onto the National Historic Lookout Register in 2006.
For more than twenty years one lookout, Shirley Payne, staffed it each summer, kept a horse in a corral at the base, and wrote a book about the seasons. Staffing has been less regular lately as cameras take over some detection, so the cab may be shuttered when you arrive. When a lookout is on duty and willing, you can climb, and the catwalk sees from the San Francisco Peaks to the Mazatzals.
The summit itself is trees. What you get is the tower when it is open and the walk when it is not: a gated road climbing about 0.4 miles in loops through Gambel oak, Douglas fir and big ponderosa, with ferns and wild strawberries at the edges, at an elevation where June feels like April. What you do not get is a view from the ground, a toilet, water, or a guarantee that anyone is home. It is a 20-minute side trip, best folded into a Rim Road day.
How to visit Baker Butte right
Pay nothing, bring everything. There is no fee, no toilet, no water and no trash can. Strawberry has the last restroom and store, so stop there on the way up.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, through Payson, Pine and Strawberry and up the long grade onto the Rim. About 29 miles north of Payson, two miles past where SR 260 from Camp Verde joins, Forest Road 300, the Rim Road, leaves on the right, signed for the General Crook Trail, with Baker Lake, usually a soggy meadow, at the junction. Drive 1.2 miles of good gravel east to the General Crook Trail parking area, where FR 300B leaves on the left behind a gate marked road closed. Park there. Figure about 135 minutes from Old Town.
Walk the spur. The gate keeps cars out, not feet. The road climbs about 0.4 miles and a few hundred feet in long loops to the tower. It is steeper than it looks and you are above 7,700 feet, so flatlanders will breathe. If the Rim Road gate at the highway is still locked in spring, walk from Baker Lake instead: about 3 miles round trip and roughly 650 feet of total gain.
Ask before you climb. Go up the tower only when a lookout is on duty and says yes. If the shutters are open, call up and ask. Sign the register, do not touch the instruments, and do not lean on the catwalk rail with a child in your arms. Never climb an unattended tower.
Pick the season. May through October in practice; the FR 300 gate at SR 87 closes with snow from about November into April, so call the Mogollon Rim Ranger District before an early trip. June and late September to mid-October are best. July and August afternoons bring monsoon lightning, and the top of a steel tower on the highest point of the Rim is exactly where you do not want to be at 2 p.m. Both forests put fire restrictions on the Rim most summers.
Dogs. Allowed on leash on the road and at the base; not up the tower.
Skip it if you came for the view and the cab is closed: you will have seen a tower from below. Make it part of a Rim Road day instead. Kehl Springs and its open edge are six miles east, the free pullouts along FR 300 have the view Baker Butte hides, and Tonto Natural Bridge below Pine is the better stop on a hot day with kids.
The high point the Army road went past
Before it was a fire lookout, the top of the Rim around Baker Butte was summer country for the Tonto Apache and the Yavapai, who came up from the Verde and the Tonto Basin into the pines to hunt deer and gather acorns from the same Gambel oak that lines the spur road today. Their descendants are the Tonto Apache Tribe in Payson and the Yavapai-Apache Nation at Camp Verde, both within an hour of the tower.
The first road up here was a weapon. In 1871 General George Crook rode west from Fort Apache to lay out a supply route to Fort Verde and Fort Whipple, and found that the only practical line hugged the Rim edge, where the canyons to the north had not yet cut deep. Soldiers from both forts started building in 1872, pack trains used the road by 1873, and the first wagon train crossed in September 1874, with stones or tree blazes marking each mile. The road ran right past Baker Butte, and the parking area where you leave the car still carries Crook’s name. In February 1875 the Army closed the Camp Verde reservation below the Rim and marched some 1,500 Yavapai and Apache people about 180 miles to San Carlos, an event the Yavapai-Apache Nation still marks each year as Exodus Day. The people who had used this ridge for centuries were gone from it within a year of the wagons arriving.
The Rim became national forest land in the early 1900s, and the Forest Service went looking for high points. Baker Butte was the obvious one: a few feet above everything for miles, with sightlines down into the Tonto Basin and north across the plateau. A lookout cabin went up in 1921. In 1928 the Forest Service built the Rim Road, FR 300, along the escarpment, and the old Crook road, after 46 years of military and then civilian use, fell out of service; the Rim Road still runs past the foot of the butte, and the modern General Crook Trail hiking route follows what is left of the wagon road.
The tower you see is from 1937, the Depression-era building boom that put steel lookouts on peaks across the West. It is an Aermotor, the Chicago windmill company’s standard kit, with a 30-foot frame and a 12-by-12 cab, and it replaced the cabin on the same spot. For most of the twentieth century it was simply a workplace: a lookout in the cab from May to October and a residence below. The National Historic Lookout Register listed it in 2006, and a catwalk went around the cab in 2009.
Lately the job has changed around the tower. Remote cameras now handle part of the detection the Coconino once did entirely by eye, and staffing has become irregular; some seasons the cab is open on weekdays, some not. In 2025 the forest scoped a proposal from the Blue Ridge Fire District to bolt a radio repeater to the tower for firefighter communications, which says something about why the structure stays: the highest point on the Rim is still the best place to put an antenna, whether or not anyone is up there with binoculars.
Why it matters
Baker Butte is a compact lesson in how the Rim was taken and then managed. The same edge that made a practical Army road in 1872 made a practical fire-watch point in 1921 and a practical radio site in 2025, and each use left a mark you can still see from the parking area. It also explains the Rim Road you drive to every campground east of here: it replaced an Army road, decades before anyone drove it for fun. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple. It is a short, steep, free walk to a historic tower that may or may not be open, worth 45 minutes on the way to Kehl Springs or the Rim lakes, and not worth a two-hour drive on its own.