What is Broadway Cave?
Superstition Mountain’s west face is pocked with alcoves where softer layers of volcanic tuff have weathered out from under harder ones, and Broadway Cave is the biggest one you can walk to: roughly 20 feet high and 30 feet wide, a few hundred feet below the cliffs, facing straight west over Apache Junction and the whole East Valley. The hike has two halves that do not match. The first 1.4 miles follow the Jacob’s Crosscut Trail #58, a nearly flat, rocky path along the base of the mountain through brittlebush and saguaro, the same trail that eventually runs 4.5 miles north into Lost Dutchman State Park. At a large cairn an unofficial but obvious trail turns uphill and gains about 500 feet in a third of a mile on steep, loose switchbacks to the cave mouth.
Round trip is about 3.8 miles with 800 to 950 feet of gain depending on whose watch you trust, and it takes most people two to three hours. The cave has a flat floor, a good lip to sit on, a tunnel at the back dug by a treasure hunter, a century of soot and more graffiti than it deserves. The view is why you came: at sunset the Valley lights up below and the cliffs above go orange and then purple, and it is the best place in the Superstitions to watch that happen without a state park gate.
What you get is a free, short, dramatic hike at the exact seam where a city of 38,000 meets a wilderness of 160,000 acres. What you do not get is a toilet, a tap, a shade tree, a sign at the turnoff or a parking lot that fits the number of people who have read about it.
How to hike it right
Pay nothing, plan around parking. There is no Tonto Pass and no state park fee here, which is the whole reason the trailhead is popular. The cost is the lot: about eight cars, at the dead end of a residential street. Pinal County tickets and tows cars on the curve and the curbs near the lot; the dirt shoulders farther down the hill are the only legal overflow. On a winter weekend the lot is full by mid-morning and again before sunset. Park nose-out, because the turnaround is tight.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east. Exit Mountain View Road in Apache Junction, go north about 2 miles, and turn right on W. Broadway Avenue, which is signed but easy to miss; if you reach Superstition View Drive you are past it. Follow Broadway east to its end at the small Forest Service lot. About 45 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. Jacob’s Crosscut starts just over the fence.
Pick the season. October through April. The slope faces west and takes full afternoon sun, which is what makes the sunset good and what makes it dangerous from late April through September. From May on this is not a hike at all; see the summer rules and the excessive heat warning entry for why a west-facing 500-foot scramble at 5 p.m. in June is the wrong idea.
Water. None at all, anywhere. Carry a liter per person for the round trip, two for a warm afternoon. There is no shade on the flat and none on the climb.
Find the spur. The turnoff is a cairn, not a sign, at about 1.4 miles, where the mountain’s base starts to curve north. If the trail is bending north along the base with no climbing in sight, you have walked past it and are on your way to Lost Dutchman. The switchbacks above are loose on the way down, and a headlamp is part of the kit for any evening hike here.
Time the sunset. Leave the lot about 90 minutes before sunset, be in the cave as the light goes orange, and start down while there is still enough light to read the loose rock on the switchbacks; finish the flat mile by headlamp. Sit on the lip rather than in the back, where the soot and the glass are.
Dogs. Allowed on leash. Good on the flat, questionable on the scree; a dog that pulls on the descent will take you with it.
Skip it if the lot is full or the group is not up to loose rock. The Hieroglyphic Trail in Gold Canyon and the Wave Cave are the nearest free alternatives in the same range, and the Wind Cave at Usery is the version with a real trailhead, toilets and a county fee.
The cave the Dutchman dug a hole in
The mountain was a landmark before it was a legend. The Yavapai called it Wi:kchsawa, and Western Apache tradition has it that somewhere in the range is a hole to the lower world, from which the winds that raise dust storms over the Valley escape. The O’odham, whose Hohokam ancestors farmed the Salt and Gila bottomlands below, have their own ties to the ground Apache Junction now covers. The Spanish, when they came, called the range the Sierra de la Espuma, the foam mountain, for the pale rock along its crest.
The story that put a tunnel in the back of Broadway Cave is younger. Jacob Waltz, a German miner who had worked at the Vulture Mine near Wickenburg, died in Phoenix in 1891, and the account that grew up afterward had him telling his landlady, a boarding-house keeper named Julia Thomas, where his gold lay somewhere in these mountains. The mine has never been found. The holes have multiplied. The alcove at the top of this hike has a hand-dug prospect in its rear wall and the soot of a century of campfires on its ceiling, and the trail you walk along the base of the mountain carries the Dutchman’s first name, Jacob’s Crosscut.
The federal government arrived almost at the same time as the treasure hunters. The Tonto Forest Reserve was proclaimed on October 3, 1905, to protect the watershed of the Roosevelt Dam then under construction, and became the Tonto National Forest in 1907. In 1939 the Forest Service set aside the heart of the range as the Superstition Wilderness, 159,757 acres in the current count; the cliffs above the cave are inside the line and the flat trail below is outside it, which is why the Crosscut can be as rocky and braided as it is.
For most of the twentieth century the west face was open desert at the end of dirt roads, and the hike to the cave was something locals did without a trailhead. Two things changed that. The Bureau of Land Management developed the mountain’s northwest foot as a day-use site in 1972, tried to sell the land to the state for $2.50 an acre in 1975, failed, and after Congress amended the Recreation and Public Purposes Act handed it over for nothing; Lost Dutchman State Park opened in 1977 with a fee gate. And Apache Junction, a village of 2,390 people in the 1970 census, incorporated on November 24, 1978, and grew to 38,499 by 2020, pushing Broadway Avenue east until it ended at the forest fence. The free trailhead at the end of that street is the accident of those two facts: a Forest Service lot where a city street ran out, a few miles from a state park that charges.
Nothing has been built here since, and nothing is planned. The lot still holds eight cars, the county still tows, and the neighborhood’s tolerance for headlamps and slammed doors at 7 p.m. is the only management plan the trailhead has.
Why it matters
Broadway Cave explains the edge condition that defines the East Valley: a wilderness of 160,000 acres that begins at a curb. The same mountain has a state park with a gate on one side and a dead-end street with no sign on the other, and which one you use is a choice about money and crowds, not scenery. The cave itself is a small lesson in Arizona geology, soft tuff weathering out from under hard, and a larger one in Arizona mythology, a hole dug by someone who believed a dying man’s story. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: in winter, on a weekday, 90 minutes before sunset, this is the best cheap view in the Superstitions. On a Saturday at noon it is a parking problem with a hike attached.