What is Bronco Trailhead?
Bronco Trailhead is the first stop on the way to Seven Springs and the one most people drive past. It is a wide, open gravel lot with six horse pens, a manure bin and room for about 40 vehicles with trailers, set in the hills where Cave Creek Road has just turned to gravel. The Forest Service built it for riders, and on a winter weekend morning that is who you will find: trailers backed into the pens, a club ride saddling up.
What makes it worth a hiker’s time is Bronco Trail #245, which leaves the lot and follows Bronco Creek before climbing into the open ridges between the Cave Creek basin and the Verde. The Forest Service describes it as a harder trail than the creekside Cave Creek Trail at Seven Springs, which is accurate: less shade, more climbing, far fewer people. The Maricopa Trail, the 315-mile county loop around the Valley, runs through here too, linking Bronco toward Spur Cross and Cave Creek Regional Park in one direction and the Seven Springs country in the other. This is, in a real sense, where the trails of Scottsdale’s own McDowell Sonoran Preserve and Brown’s Ranch give way to the Tonto.
What you get is a free, uncrowded trailhead with a hard, quiet trail and a view back to the McDowells. What you do not get is water, a toilet, shade on the ridges, or a creek that runs past March.
How to hike it right
Pay nothing. This is a fee-free Tonto site; no Tonto Pass is needed here or at the Cave Creek Trailhead up the road. Only the CCC Campground at Seven Springs charges. Nothing needs a reservation.
Get there. Drive Scottsdale Road or Pima Road north to Carefree and pick up Cave Creek Road north, which becomes Forest Road 24 (Seven Springs Road) as it leaves town. The pavement runs about 12 miles past the Bartlett Dam Road junction, then the gravel starts; Bronco is about 3 miles into the gravel on the right, hard to miss because of the pens. Figure 65 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. The gravel is all-weather and fine for a sedan driven slowly, but it is narrow with blind curves, and the creek dips can run after rain. The lot never fills except during organized rides, and even then it clears by mid-morning.
Pick the season. Cool months only for hiking. The ridges are open and south-facing, and the trail sits at about 3,100 feet; by May it is a dawn walk, and in summer it belongs to the horses and the heat warnings in the summer rules. After rain the creek crossings on both the road and the trail can be impassable for a few hours; see flash flood if that is new to you.
Water and restrooms. No water. The Forest Service does not list a restroom, so do not count on one; Cave Creek Regional Park and the ranger station are the last real facilities. Fill up in Cave Creek, because there is nothing between here and the ranger station.
Walk the trail in two halves. Bronco Trail #245 starts flat and sandy along the creek, then climbs onto open ridges with no shade and views back across the Cave Creek basin to the McDowells. The junction with Trail 247, roughly 7 miles out, is the end of the trail and too far for most; the first climb onto the ridge is the natural half-day turnaround. There is no loop without a long day, and the Maricopa Trail toward Spur Cross is the more interesting long route.
Horses. Only trailers under 32 feet. Hikers yield to horses: step off the downhill side and say hello so the animal knows you are a person. Go on a weekday or expect to share the first mile with a club ride. If you want to be the one on the horse, start with horseback riding near Scottsdale.
Dogs. On leash, and close around the pens. Water for them, too, because the creek is seasonal.
Skip it if you want the creek and the sycamores. Keep driving to Seven Springs, or go to Spur Cross Ranch for a trailhead with a toilet and a ranger. If you want a hard, quiet Tonto walk with the lot to yourself, stop here.
The fire that remade the Cave Creek basin
The upper Cave Creek basin has been somebody’s hunting ground for a thousand years. The Hohokam farmers of the Cave Creek and New River valleys built the hilltop fort at Sears-Kay, a few miles south of Bronco, around 1050, and abandoned it within a century or so. After them the hills belonged to the Yavapai and the Tonto Apache, who held the country north of the Salt until the Army’s campaigns of the early 1870s removed them to San Carlos. Prospectors followed the soldiers up Cave Creek; the Cave Creek Mistress and other small mines opened in the hills east of the road, and the basin became open range, which it still is under Forest Service grazing permits.
The federal government took the land in 1905, when the Tonto National Forest was created to protect the watershed above the new Salt River dams; the whole Cave Creek country north of what is now Carefree fell inside it, and the forest’s roads, FR 24 among them, followed the old wagon tracks up the creek. Recreation came with the Depression. In 1934 a Civilian Conservation Corps camp set up five miles above Bronco and built the Seven Springs and Cave Creek recreation sites, the stone work you still see at the CCC Campground and the Cave Creek group site, and graded the road that brings you here. Bronco itself is a much later and plainer piece of work: a gravel lot, pens and a manure bin, built for the riders who were already using the creek bottom as a trail.
Then the basin burned. On June 21, 2005 lightning started what became the Cave Creek Complex Fire, which ran to between 2,000 and 10,000 acres in its first hour and burned 243,950 acres before it was done, the third-largest fire in Arizona’s history at the time, behind only Rodeo-Chediski and later Wallow. It destroyed the Cave Creek Mistress mine and injured the largest saguaro ever recorded, a 46-foot giant that later collapsed. The hills Bronco Trail climbs were in the middle of it. Two decades later the grass and brush have come back thick, which is why the ridges look green after a wet winter, but the cactus and the big trees of the drainages will take a century, and the burn scar is part of why the trail is hotter and more open than the creekside walk at Seven Springs.
The last thing to arrive was a line on a map. Maricopa County conceived the Maricopa Trail in 1997, named it in 2003, adopted the full plan on August 16, 2004 and began building new segments in 2006, stitching together county parks, canal banks and the National Trail on South Mountain into a loop around the whole Valley. Its northern leg leaves Cave Creek Regional Park, climbs through Spur Cross and crosses the Tonto to Seven Springs, and Bronco is where that leg meets a road. The county declared Phase 1 of the 315-mile loop complete in October 2018. Which means that from this gravel lot you can, in principle, walk to the edge of Scottsdale’s own preserve and on around the Valley, and a handful of people do it every winter.
Why it matters
Bronco is the hinge between two kinds of public land that Scottsdale people tend to confuse. South and west of here the trails belong to cities and the county, with maps, toilets and rules; north and east they belong to the Tonto, which is older, bigger, burned, grazed and mostly unsigned. The lot explains the difference in one glance: pens and a manure bin and nothing else, because the Forest Service builds for use, not visitors. The practical verdict for a Scottsdale hiker is simple. If you have done Seven Springs and want the same drive with no crowd and a harder walk, stop here, go in winter, carry all your water, and give the horses the trail.