What is Blue Wash Trailhead?
North of the town of Cave Creek, where Cave Creek Road becomes Forest Road 24 and heads for Seven Springs, the Tonto National Forest begins without much ceremony. Blue Wash cuts across it a few miles in, a sandy drainage walled with stone that looks stacked by hand, and the Blue Wash Trail follows it downhill about 1.4 miles to Camp Creek. Where the two meet, Camp Creek drops over a sheer slickrock wall in three tiers into a small grotto with a pool, the only shade on the whole route. That is Camp Creek Falls, and from January through April in a normal year it runs strongly enough to hear before you see it.
The trailhead itself is nothing: a gravel pullout for perhaps eight cars, no sign, no toilet, no fee. The trail is unsigned and mostly sand, with cholla and palo verde on the banks, horse tracks in the bottom, and an easy grade that is deceptive because every foot of it must be climbed back out. The 2.8-mile round trip gains about 400 feet, all on the return. A second approach from Bartlett Dam Road reaches the falls from the south at about 8 miles round trip, with elevations between roughly 2,640 and 3,200 feet, for people who want a longer, quieter day.
It is the best waterfall walk this close to Scottsdale for the effort, and it suits families, first-timers and anyone with a dog and a free winter morning. What you get is a real desert creek with a real fall, about 45 minutes from Old Town. What you do not get is reliability: the falls are seasonal, often dry by June, and on a wet February weekend everyone north of the 101 knows they are running.
How to hike Blue Wash right
Get there. Take Pima Road north from Loop 101 about 13 miles to Cave Creek Road, turn right and follow it through the town of Cave Creek. About 4.1 miles from the junction you pass Bartlett Dam Road; 2.4 miles later, about 6.5 miles total, a sign on the right reads Blue Wash No. 1 and a gravel pullout opens on the left. Park there; the trail begins near the cottonwoods across the road. Call it 45 minutes from Old Town. The pullout holds perhaps eight cars, and on a wet winter weekend the overflow parks on the highway shoulder by mid-morning. For the south approach, turn onto Bartlett Dam Road and drive 2.8 miles to a trailhead on the left.
Pay nothing, bring everything. There is no fee and no Tonto Pass. There is also no toilet, no water and no trash service; pack everything out.
Follow the wash. There are no signs. Walk the wash downhill, go left at the T junction where it widens, and stay left as the canyon narrows to the falls. The last stretch has a couple of creek crossings when Camp Creek is up, and water shoes help. Allow about two hours with time at the grotto.
Pick the season, then the day. December through April, and the week after any good rain. Flow is strongest in the morning and drops through the day; by June it is usually a trickle or dry. The canyon faces the sun and the sand reflects it, so the summer rules apply from May: a dawn walk in May and October, and nothing in summer. Start by eight on a weekend; by ten in February the grotto has a crowd and the pool has a dog in it.
Water. Carry more than a three-mile hike seems to need. Camp Creek is not drinkable, the walk in is downhill in soft sand, and the climb out comes in the heat of the day.
Stay out when it storms. The entire trail is a wash. When storms are forecast, especially in monsoon season, do not go in; the flash-flood rules apply exactly here, and the monsoon field manual explains why a blue sky overhead means nothing.
Wildlife and dogs. Rattlesnakes, Gila monsters and bees are all reported along the wash in spring. Give them room. Dogs are welcome on leash, and the leash matters: horses use the trail regularly and spook easily.
Skip it if the falls are dry or the pullout is full. For a bigger day in the same country, Spur Cross Ranch is ten minutes back toward town and has its own seasonal creek; Seven Springs is up the road where the pavement ends, with a CCC campground and a creek that runs in spring; and Cave Creek Regional Park has restrooms, a nature center and marked loops.
A creek between the cavalry road and the burn
Long before the pullout, Cave Creek and its side drainages were farmland. Hohokam people settled along the creek, by local accounts from about A.D. 700, and left the house sites, rock art and terraces that now sit inside Spur Cross a few miles downstream. By the time Americans arrived, the broken country between the Verde and the Agua Fria, Blue Wash and Camp Creek included, was held by Tonto Apache and Yavapai bands who hunted and gathered across it.
The Army came first. Around 1870 a military road linked Fort McDowell on the Verde with Fort Whipple at Prescott, and Cave Creek became a stop on it, settled by soldiers from McDowell. The road was a campaign route, and in 1873 cavalry from McDowell fought Tonto bands in the hills along the creek. The same year, prospectors from the Bradshaws found gold, and the Cave Creek Mining District was organized; small mines worked the hills around the town into the 1940s. Ranchers ran cattle up the drainages in between, which is why so much of this country is laced with old two-tracks and stock tanks.
In 1905 the federal government drew the Tonto Forest Reserve, and the desert north of the mining camp became forest land that no homesteader could claim. That decision is the reason Blue Wash is still open country while the land south of it filled with houses. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps built the campgrounds up the road at Seven Springs and the Cave Creek group site, and on the Verde to the east the Bureau of Reclamation built Bartlett Dam between 1936 and 1939, which is how the south approach to these falls got a road. Somewhere along the way the Forest Service also let a small tract of summer cabins grow up on Camp Creek under recreation-residence permits; the date that tract was laid out is not in any record this guide could find.
On June 21, 2005, lightning started the Cave Creek Complex Fire a few miles northeast of Carefree. It burned for weeks and covered more than 240,000 acres (the Forest Service’s final count was 248,310), at the time one of the largest fires in Arizona history. It ran through the saguaro desert that was never meant to burn, closed FR 24, and took 11 residences at Camp Creek. Much of what you walk through on Blue Wash is that burn twenty years on: the grass that carried it, the saguaros that did not survive it, the brush coming back on the slopes.
The cabins never really recovered. In 2011 the Forest Service signed a decision to remove the Camp Creek recreation residences whose permits had been revoked or terminated and return the lots to a natural state, while keeping the historic structures that stood on them. Meanwhile Cave Creek itself, incorporated in 1986, bought Spur Cross with the county and state in 2000 to keep its own creek open. The waterfall at the bottom of Blue Wash has no plaque and no plan; it is simply a public creek on public land, reachable because a 1905 map line put it there.
Why it matters
Blue Wash is a compact lesson in how the desert north of Scottsdale works. Water collects in the washes and runs only when it rains, so the waterfall is a winter event and the trail is a flood channel the rest of the time. The land is open because a forest reserve was drawn around it in 1905, and the plants are what they are because a lightning fire in 2005 burned a desert that had evolved without fire. The cavalry road, the gold camp and the cabin tract all came and mostly went. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: go in the week after a winter storm, go early, carry water, and you will have the easiest real waterfall within an hour of Old Town.