What are the Belmont Mountains?
Driving I-10 west toward Quartzsite, the long brown ridge off to the north past Tonopah is the Belmont Mountains, about 25 miles of uplifted volcanic rock between the Hassayampa Plain and the Tonopah Desert, with the Hummingbird Springs Wilderness at its far northwest end. Almost all of it is BLM land, none of it has a trail, and nearly nobody goes. The Google Maps pin marks the southern way in: a gravel staging area at about 1,395 feet just north of where N. 395th Avenue crosses the Central Arizona Project canal, the start of a 16-mile OHV route that threads the range to the Vulture Mine Road.
The summits are the point for hikers. The range high point is Peak 3137, where surveyors set the Belmont benchmark in 1948, about 3.9 miles north of the staging area and 1,740 feet above it; the hill the maps officially call Belmont Mountain is a separate, lower bump of about 2,500 feet the same distance north. Neither has a path. The proven route climbs Peak 3137’s south-southwest ridge from an old mine shaft, loose rubble and rock outcrops with small cairns through the jumble near the top, class 2 with a little exposure; the northwest ridge cliffs out and has defeated at least one experienced peakbagger. From the north side, where a good dirt road leaves the Vulture Mine Road and gets you within a mile of the peak, the day is about 8 miles and 1,360 feet. From this staging area it is longer: 4.5 miles of jeep road to the Belmont Mine turnoff before the climbing begins, which makes a summit on foot a 10-mile-plus day unless your truck can take the rocky, washed-out track.
What you get is a range to yourself, a hard little summit, a 1920s silver mine to look at and a view from Sugarloaf’s white cliff to Saddle Mountain. What you do not get is anything built: no trail, no sign, no toilet, no water, no signal, and no help if the truck sticks.
How to hike the Belmonts right
Pay nothing, carry the right permit. None on the BLM land that holds the staging area and the range’s southern half. The OHV route’s northern half crosses State Trust Land, which requires a State Land recreation permit to leave the road or camp; carry one if you use the Vulture Mine Road approach.
Get there. Loop 101 south to I-10 west about 50 miles to exit 98, Wintersburg Road. Turn right, then left onto Indian School Road for a mile, right onto 387th Avenue north for 4 miles to where the pavement ends, left onto Northern Avenue for a mile of dirt, then right onto 395th Avenue and about 2.5 miles to the canal crossing; the staging area is just past the CAP on the right. About 95 minutes from Old Town. For the northern approach, take exit 109 at 339th Avenue to the Vulture Mine Road (355th Avenue) and follow it about 15 miles toward Wickenburg to a dirt junction heading south into the range, then 4 miles of good dirt to park within a mile of the peak.
Decide whether you are driving or walking the jeep road. A stock SUV can reach the staging area dry; past it the track to the Belmont Mine turnoff is rocky, washed out in places and has stuck two-wheel-drive trucks. Without a real 4x4, plan on walking those 4.5 miles and start at dawn. The northern approach turns the day into a half day, which is why most summit parties use it. Sedans should not leave Indian School Road.
Pick the season. November through March. The ridges face south and hold heat; by April the rock is unpleasant by ten, and from May on this is excessive-heat country with no shade anywhere.
Water. None anywhere. Three liters per person for a summit day.
Climb the right ridge. Follow the south-southwest ridge from the old shaft, not the northwest one, which cliffs out; look for small cairns in the rock jumble near the top and keep the scrambling to class 2. The view north from the benchmark takes in Sugarloaf’s white cliff and the Harquahalas; south is Saddle Mountain and the whole empty Tonopah Desert.
Mines. The Belmont and Morning Star mines and deep vertical shafts, some caged and some open, dot the north side of the range. Look, do not enter; two men have died in the Tonopah-Belmont shaft.
Camp if you like. Dispersed camping is allowed on BLM land for up to 14 days, and the clearing is flat and quiet on weekdays; weekends bring side-by-sides staging for the route. Nothing is provided.
Dogs. Allowed, and the loose rock and open shafts argue for a leash on the ridge.
Skip it if you want a desert summit with a trail; Quartz Peak is the comparison, and the White Tanks are the county-park version an hour closer. If you want this country with a wilderness boundary and a bigger peak, Hummingbird Springs is the next range over, and Saddle Mountain across I-10 is the better free camp.
A range that was mined, surveyed and left alone
The Belmonts were always country you crossed rather than lived in. The Hohokam farmed the Gila to the south and the Yavapai ranged the Hassayampa country to the north, and the dry volcanic ridge between them held no water worth a village. The first people to spend time here came for metal. After Henry Wickenburg’s Vulture strike in the 1860s, prospectors worked every range on the Hassayampa Plain, and they walked the Belmonts too, but nobody filed a claim here in that decade; the ore was not obvious.
It was found a half century later. Around 1920 three men opened a silver and lead prospect on the range’s south slope and called it the Belmont-McNeil; in 1926 a syndicate of Nevada miners bought it and renamed it the Tonopah-Belmont, borrowing the name of the enormously successful Tonopah Mine in Nevada, and the nearby railroad siding became Tonopah too. The mine’s good years were 1924 to 1930, when about 50 men worked a main shaft 500 feet deep with levels at 100, 250 and 400 feet, milling the ore on site for silver and lead with some gold and copper; one local history puts production by 1930 at about $610,000. The Depression slowed it and by the start of the Second World War it was idle. The stamp mill, foundations and tailings on the south slope, a dynamite house to the east and the grated shaft on the north side are what remain, and they are what the OHV route exists to visit. The Nevada mine of the same name had a famous fatal fire in 1911 that is sometimes attributed to this one; it did not happen here.
Surveyors came next. In 1948 the government set the Belmont benchmark on the range’s high point, the unnamed peak hikers now call Belmont Benchmark or Peak 3137, and in doing so gave the summit the only name it has. The lower hill officially labeled Belmont Mountain kept the formal name; the confusion has lasted ever since. The next intrusion was water. The Central Arizona Project, authorized in 1968 and begun in 1973, ran its canal across the Tonopah Desert at the foot of the range on its way to Phoenix, and the crossing on 395th Avenue became the natural place to leave pavement; the staging area is a byproduct of the canal road. The Palo Verde nuclear plant, the largest power producer in the country, went up on the desert to the south in the same decades.
Congress drew the only line on the range in 1990, when the Arizona Desert Wilderness Act created the 31,200-acre Hummingbird Springs Wilderness around Sugarloaf Mountain, at 3,418 feet the highest point in the Belmonts, at the range’s northwest end, bordering the Big Horn Mountains Wilderness. The same year a man fell 350 feet down a winze in the Tonopah-Belmont and died, and the state Department of Mines and Mineral Resources sealed the workings with steel grates; in 2002 another man pried the grates open and died in the tunnel, and the shafts were reinforced again. That is the whole modern history of the range: a wilderness boundary, two deaths underground, and a 16-mile jeep route.
What is coming is unclear. In 2017 investors linked to Bill Gates bought a large tract of the desert south of the range for a planned “smart city” called Belmont, which has not broken ground; if it ever does, the emptiest range within two hours of Scottsdale will have a suburb at its feet.
Why it matters
The Belmonts are what most of Arizona’s ranges were before anyone built a trail: a hard volcanic ridge with a dead mine, a benchmark and a name nobody can agree on, crossed by a canal and ignored by everyone but a few peakbaggers a year. They explain how much of the state is still BLM land with no infrastructure at all, and how the only things that ever got built in a place like this were a shaft, a survey mark and a canal. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is narrow and honest: if you have a 4x4, three liters of water, a GPS track and a taste for loose class 2 rock with nobody around, Peak 3137 from the Vulture Mine Road is a good half day between November and March. If you want a trail, a sign or a view you did not have to earn, every other range in this guide is a better choice.