What is the Ballantine Trail?
Just before the Beeline climbs into the hills at Sunflower, a dirt lot on the right marks the Ballantine Trailhead, at about 2,250 feet, where two trails leave the highway for the granite foothills of the Mazatzals. Pine Creek Loop Trail #280 makes a 7.75-mile circuit, climbing to a saddle and dropping back on a steep, loose leg of decomposed granite. From that saddle, Ballantine Trail #283 sets off east and up, and about 3 miles from the car it reaches Boulder Flat, a high basin of golden grass and enormous rounded boulders where most people eat lunch and turn around. Beyond, the trail climbs toward Pine Mountain and the Mazatzal Wilderness, about 10 miles end to end for the few who shuttle it.
In June 2020 the Bush Fire started along this stretch of highway and burned 193,455 acres, the largest fire in Arizona that year and one of the largest in its history. It took the junipers and the shade. It also opened the slopes, and in wet springs the poppies, lupine and brittlebush between the second mile and the flat are as good as any bloom within an hour of the Valley. The views of Four Peaks on the descent were always good; now nothing blocks them.
What you get is a free, close, cool-season hike with a real climb and, in a good March, the best flowers on the Beeline. What you do not get is shade, water, a toilet, a trail sign you can see from the highway, or a car you should leave anything in.
How to hike Ballantine right
No fee, no pass. No Tonto Pass, no permit. The lot is dirt, unfenced, fine for any car, and right on the highway; it gets broken into occasionally, so leave nothing visible.
Get there. Take Shea Boulevard east to SR 87 and head north. The trailhead is on the east (right) side about 25 miles north of Mesa, set back from the highway behind a short dirt entrance just before the Sunflower turnoff; the sign is small and the turn comes fast at 65 mph. Figure 55 minutes from Old Town. The lot fills on wildflower weekends but turns over fast, and the Pine Creek Loop’s south leg starts from the same lot.
Pick the week. November through April, and the second half of March after a wet winter for the flowers; a weekday if you can. The whole route faces south and west with no cover since the fire; it is a dawn hike in May and October and dangerous in summer. The summer rules apply from mid-May.
Water and facilities. None. No toilet, no shade, no water on the trail. Carry at least two liters per person for the Boulder Flat hike, three in warm weather, and the dog’s share on top.
Go counterclockwise. Climb the gentler north leg of the loop, follow the Ballantine to Boulder Flat for lunch among the boulders, and come down the steep, loose south leg with Four Peaks in front of you the whole way. The Forest Service singles out that southern leg for its grade and its decomposed granite; poles help on the way down. Past the flat the Ballantine is faint and the fire made it fainter; the full trail to the Cline trailhead is a long, lonely shuttle day.
Horses. Allowed, groups of 15 or fewer. Hikers yield.
Dogs. On leash, with their own water; there is no shade in the burn to rest them in.
Skip it if you want trees and a creek. Barnhardt is 35 minutes farther up the same road; Sycamore Creek is the next pull-off north with water in it some years; Mount Ord is the drive-up view. If you want the flowers and the view with the least driving, this is the one.
A trailhead on a road that used to be the problem
The granite hills between Sycamore Creek and the Mazatzal crest were Yavapai country, with Tonto Apache to the east, and in the 1860s and 1870s the Army’s base against both was Camp McDowell on the Verde, 20 miles south of the trailhead. What drew Americans up here after the removals was not grass but mercury. In October 1911 E.H. Bowman, prospecting for gold, found cinnabar in the hills above the creek, and the Sunflower, Pine Mountain and Rattlesnake mines went on to produce 95 percent of Arizona’s mercury, a small industry that lasted into the 1980s. The settlement that grew at the ranger’s camp took the name of the old Sunflower ranch. Sheepmen drove their flocks through on the Heber-Reno driveway each spring and fall, watering at Bushnell Tank, which the Forest Service and the sheep outfits built together.
The Forest Service made Sunflower a place. By 1915 visitors to the Tonto were told its rangers could be found there, but it stayed a raw camp until the 1930s, when Civilian Conservation Corps crews under Captain Harold Booth built the Sunflower Ranger Station in 1933; it is on the National Register now. The CCC also built trails, and the Pine Creek and Ballantine routes into the foothills date in their modern form from that era of Forest Service trail-building, though we could not find a construction date for either. Whoever Ballantine was, the trail, the trailhead and the cabin site up toward Pine Mountain carry the name; no source we found gives a first name or a date.
The road made the trailhead. In the 1930s Harvey Bush of Mesa promoted a route to Payson over the Mazatzals that took his name, a slow road that made Sunflower a day’s effort from the Valley. In the 1950s a cutoff between Mesa and the Saguaro Lake turnoff shaved 15 minutes off the Bush Highway and was nicknamed the Beeline; the name spread to the whole route, and a dirt pull-off below Sunflower, where the trails came down to the highway, became the Ballantine Trailhead. The state four-laned the Beeline from Mesa to Payson between 1989 and 2001, which cut the drive from Scottsdale to under an hour and left the trailhead with a fast turn off a 65-mile-an-hour road and a lot no bigger than it was. A 1970 flood from the remains of Tropical Storm Norma had already destroyed the Sycamore Creek bridge north of here and killed a state patrolman, which is one reason the new highway is built so high.
Then the fires. In 2012 the Sunflower Fire, started by an incendiary shotgun shell at a bachelor-party campout, burned about 18,000 acres in the hills above the trail. On June 13, 2020, the Bush Fire started along SR 87 and ran north and east through the Mazatzals and onto the west side of the Four Peaks, burning 193,455 acres before it was contained on July 6; Sunflower was evacuated on June 16, and the fire took every juniper and most of the shrub cover on the Ballantine and Pine Creek trails. The Forest Service lists no closure now. What came back first was grass and annuals, which is why the burn blooms, and the brush is following, which is why the bloom will fade over the next decade as the slopes close in again.
Why it matters
Ballantine explains the Beeline. The road was a mining and ranger track, then a promoter’s shortcut, then a four-lane highway that put the Mazatzals an hour from Scottsdale, and the trailhead is the dirt lot that never changed while the road did. The fire explains the rest of the central Arizona foothills: the junipers are gone, the grass and the poppies have the slopes for now, and the views are better than they were. For a visitor the verdict is simple: it is the closest real Mazatzal hike to Old Town, free, and at its best for about three weeks a year. Watch the winter rain, pick a weekday in the second half of March, and go counterclockwise.