What is the Barnhardt Trail?
The Mazatzals are the long, dark range that fills the view west of the Beeline between Sunflower and Payson, and almost nobody goes into them. The Barnhardt Trail #43 is the exception, the one trail that regularly gets hikers from the Valley. From a dirt lot at about 4,200 feet, it climbs the north wall of Barnhardt Canyon on long switchbacks, rounds into the canyon’s upper reaches past a red-rock side gorge, and reaches the Mazatzal Divide Trail, which is also the Arizona Trail, at roughly 6,000 feet after about 6 miles. The canyon is deep and genuinely rugged, and the far-off feeling arrives fast.
About 2.5 miles up, a side canyon drops in from the right carrying, after rain or snowmelt, a waterfall over red rock into pools below the trail. It is the hike’s reward and not a perennial one; many people go to the falls and back, about 6 miles total, and call it a day. In June 2004 the lightning-started Willow Fire burned nearly 200,000 acres here. The chaparral has returned, the junipers mostly have not, and the standing dead ponderosas on the upper trail mark where the forest used to begin. It is a hike for strong walkers who want a real mountain canyon with no fee and no crowd, and for backpackers heading onto the divide; it is not a hike for anyone who needs shade or a guaranteed creek.
What you get is the best canyon in a quarter-million acres of wilderness, 90 minutes from Old Town, with running water in a good spring. What you do not get is a toilet, a tap, a paved road, or the pines the old guidebooks promise.
How to hike Barnhardt right
Pay nothing, follow the wilderness rules. No fee, no Tonto Pass, no permit for day hiking or backpacking. Groups of 15 or fewer, no bikes, no motors, no drones.
Get there. Take Shea Boulevard east to SR 87 and follow the Beeline north past Sunflower and Rye for about an hour and a quarter. About 12 to 14 miles south of Payson, a signed turn for Forest Road 419 and the Barnhardt Trailhead is on the left (west). FR 419 is about 5 miles of rutted one-lane dirt that sedans manage in dry weather and that high-clearance vehicles enjoy; allow 15 to 20 minutes. The trailhead is a large dirt lot at the road’s end, with the Barnhardt sign at the west edge and the Y Bar Trail leaving from the same lot. Figure 90 minutes from Old Town. The lot fills on spring weekends when the falls are running and is empty otherwise; after rain or snow, the road and the lot are mud.
Pick the week, not just the season. October through May, with March and April the best for the falls. Time it for the week after a good March storm or during April snowmelt; the rest of the year the side canyon is a dry slot and the hike loses its best hour. Snow sits on the upper mile from December into February. From June into September the lower canyon is hot and exposed, and monsoon storms flash the side canyons; the flash-flood rules apply wherever the trail crosses a drainage.
Water. No toilet, no water at the trailhead. Water on the trail is seasonal and must be treated; carry three liters for the full hike, more in April sun, because the fire left little shade on the upper half.
Start by seven and climb the switchbacks. The first two miles are the steepest and face east into the morning sun, so the climb is cooler than the map suggests, and the switchbacks are well built. Where the creek splits, go left up the switchbacks to see the falls. Above them the trail rounds into the upper canyon and the standing dead pines begin; the Mazatzal Divide junction has campsites and, north along the divide, Chilson Spring.
Wildlife. Black bears are common in the Mazatzals; keep food packed and give them room. Mountain lions live here too, and so do rattlesnakes from March on.
Dogs. Allowed, under control. Horses are a poor fit for the rocky grade.
Skip it if the waterfall is a rumor this year and you want water you can count on: Horton Creek above Payson runs all year. For a Mazatzal summit instead of a canyon, Mount Peeley and Mount Ord are shorter drives; for a lower, warmer winter walk, Ballantine is on the same highway. If you want the Mazatzals, this is the door.
The range the Valley drives past
The Mazatzals have been avoided for a long time. The name itself is uncertain; the best guess is Nahuatl, “place of the deer,” carried north by someone in the Spanish period, and the local pronunciation, “Ma-tuh-ZEL,” has drifted as far from the spelling as the Rim’s has. The people who knew the range as home were the Yavapai and the Tonto Apache, who hunted and farmed from the Verde to the Rim and used the canyons on both sides as refuges. George Crook’s campaigns of 1871 to 1875 ended that, and the survivors were marched to San Carlos in 1875. Ranchers took up the creeks after them, and the canyon names on the map, Barnhardt among them, are theirs. We could not find a published account of who Barnhardt was; the Forest Service, Arizona Highways and the trail association all use the name without explaining it.
The federal government arrived for the water, not the scenery. The Tonto Forest Reserve was proclaimed on October 3, 1905, to protect the Salt and Verde watersheds above the Roosevelt Dam then under construction, and it became the Tonto National Forest in 1907 with the Mazatzals inside it. What happened next was early. On May 27, 1938, the Chief of the Forest Service set aside the Mazatzal Primitive Area, and in 1940 reclassified it under the agency’s own wilderness rules, a quarter century before Congress passed a law for the idea. When the Wilderness Act came on September 3, 1964, the Mazatzal was one of the original units, at 205,346 acres. The Arizona Wilderness Act of August 28, 1984, grew it to 250,517 acres and made the Verde along its western edge Arizona’s first Wild and Scenic River. Today it is about 252,000 acres with roughly 240 miles of trail, from 2,100 feet at Sheep Bridge on the river to 7,903 feet on Mazatzal Peak, and the Mazatzal Divide Trail runs 29 miles down its spine.
Barnhardt Canyon was the obvious way in from the Beeline side, and the trail up it was built the Forest Service way, with long, even switchbacks that still make the 1,800-foot climb feel engineered. For most of the twentieth century the upper canyon was ponderosa and the hike ended in real forest. Then, in June 2004, lightning started the Willow Fire, which burned for weeks across nearly 200,000 acres of the range, roughly 120,000 of them inside the wilderness, more than half of it. The chaparral came back within a few years. The junipers, which do not resprout, largely did not, and the ponderosas on the upper Barnhardt stand dead where they burned. The Sunflower Fire of 2012 took the south end of the range up to Mount Peeley. What you see from the switchbacks is a mountain range two decades into recovery, with the canyon walls, the water and the quiet unchanged.
The trail’s other life began in 2011. The Arizona Trail, proposed by a Flagstaff teacher in 1985 and built by volunteers from 1994, was declared complete on December 16, 2011, and its Passage 23 runs the full 24 miles of the Mazatzal Divide Trail from Mount Peeley north. Barnhardt is the easiest resupply and bail-out route on that passage, which is why you meet thru-hikers at the junction in March and April. In October 2018 volunteers renovated Chilson and Hopi springs along the divide, the only reliable water for a day’s walk in either direction. The Forest Service does not publish a count of Barnhardt hikers, and the empty lot on most days suggests it does not need to.
Why it matters
The Mazatzals are the mountains every Scottsdale driver has looked at for an hour on the way to Payson and never entered, and the Barnhardt Trail is the one honest way to change that. The range tells the story of how Arizona’s wild country was kept: a watershed reserve in 1905, a primitive area set aside by foresters in 1938 before any law required it, an original 1964 wilderness, and a 2004 fire that showed how fast a century of forest can go. For a visitor the verdict is conditional. In a wet March, with the falls running, this is one of the two or three best day hikes within 90 minutes of Old Town; in a dry year it is a long, hot, handsome climb to a burned ridge. Watch the storms, go the week after one, start by seven and carry three liters.