What is Butcher Jones Beach?
Saguaro Lake is the lowest of the four Salt River reservoirs, a 1,500-foot sheet of green water pinned between cliffs below the Bush Highway, and most of it belongs to powerboats. Butcher Jones is the exception. On the north shore, two miles down a side road from the highway, the Tonto National Forest keeps a gently sloping beach inside a cove where motorized boats are banned behind a buoy line, with mesquite-shaded picnic tables on the bench behind the sand and vault toilets at the lot. It is the closest thing the Valley has to a lake beach, and the Forest Service’s own page calls it one of the most-visited sites on the whole forest.
From the east end of the beach the Butcher Jones Trail #463 follows the shoreline, climbs a low saddle with a view up the lake toward the Four Peaks, and drops to the shallows of Burro Cove, about 2.5 miles one way and roughly 5 miles out and back by the Forest Service’s measure, with almost no elevation gain. In winter it is the only lakeshore walk within an hour of Scottsdale, with herons, ospreys and saguaros straight to the water’s edge. In summer nobody hikes it.
The lake’s other day-use site is Saguaro del Norte, a mile west beside the marina. It is the working end of the lake: 38 picnic units with grills, the main boat ramps (trailers under 28 feet only), ramadas and a sheriff’s aid station. Swim at Butcher Jones; launch at del Norte. What you do not get at either is drinking water, camping or shade you did not bring.
How to do Butcher Jones right
Buy the pass in town. A Tonto Daily Pass: $8 per vehicle bought ahead at a Forest Service office or a retail vendor such as a Valley gas station or Bashas’, $12 by card at the machine on site. The $80 Tonto Discovery annual pass and America the Beautiful passes are accepted at this picnic site. Motorized boats launching at del Norte add a $4 watercraft sticker. There are no reservations.
Get there. Take Shea Boulevard east to the Beeline (SR 87), go north about 12 miles past the Fort McDowell casino, then turn right onto the Bush Highway (FR 204) toward Saguaro Lake. After two miles turn left on Forest Road 166, Butcher Jones Beach Road, and follow the pavement two miles down to the lot. Figure 45 minutes from Old Town; from the East Valley, the Bush Highway up from Power Road takes about the same, past the tubing put-ins and the wild horses.
Beat the gate. The Forest Service locks the gate when the lot is full, which from April through September on a weekend can be before ten. Be there at 8, or come on a weekday, when the cove is yours. The Forest Service’s own advice is to arrive early or have a backup plan.
Swim with care. The beach shelves gradually for 30 or 40 feet and then drops, so keep small children inside the inner buoys. No lifeguard has ever worked here, and the water in May is colder than it looks. Kayakers can launch from the beach into the no-wake arm and paddle east into the quiet upper lake, which the powerboats cannot enter.
Hike it in winter. The beach is for May through October; the trail is for November through March. It is nearly flat, rocky in places and completely exposed. Walk at least to the saddle a mile out, where the view east up the lake is the best on the trail, and continue to Burro Cove only if the water is high; at low lake levels the last half mile is a mudflat.
Bring everything. No drinking water at either site, vault toilets only, and no glass, enforced by the sheriff. No overnight camping, no trailers and no OHVs at Butcher Jones; the only camping on the lake is the boat-in Bagley Flat Campground at the east end. The marina store is a five-minute drive back toward the highway for ice.
Dogs. On leash. They can swim with you; keep them away from the picnic tables.
Skip it if you want a campsite or a longer lake day. Bartlett Lake has shoreline camping and more room; Canyon Lake on the Apache Trail has the steamboat and the cliffs. For moving water instead of a reservoir, Phon D. Sutton and Pebble Beach sit on the river below the dams.
The last dam on the lower Salt
The Salt was a farming river long before it was a boating one. Hohokam canal builders took water out of it a few miles below this canyon more than a thousand years ago, and the Valley’s modern canals follow many of their lines. By the time Anglo settlers arrived the canyon country above the river was Yavapai land; the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation still holds the Verde bottom just west of the Beeline, and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community holds the river below.
The dams came in sequence, top down. Roosevelt went in upstream in 1911, one of the first projects of the 1902 Reclamation Act and the anchor of what became the Salt River Project. In the 1920s the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association added three more on the lower Salt, mainly for hydropower: Mormon Flat, Horse Mesa and, last, Stewart Mountain, built from 1928 to 1930. It is a 207-foot concrete thin arch, named for the old Stewart Ranch nearby, and its generator came online in March 1930. Power revenue from the three helped pay off the federal loan for Roosevelt. The reservoir behind it holds about 69,765 acre-feet and covers roughly 1,264 acres, the smallest of the chain and the closest to Scottsdale. The construction camp built below the dam in 1927 became the Saguaro Lake Guest Ranch, which is still there.
Recreation grew around a lake that was never built for it. The marina and the Desert Belle tour boat, running since 1964, gave the Valley its most accessible boat lake. The dam itself turned out to be the problem: by the 1980s engineers had found alkali-silica reaction in the concrete and weak bonds between the pour lifts, and judged the structure unsafe in a major earthquake. From 1988 to 1992 the Bureau of Reclamation cut a new spillway on the right abutment and drove more than 60 steel post-tensioned cables through the arch into the bedrock, thought at the time to be the first use of the method on a thin-arch dam. In 2017 the dam was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The name on the beach is older and less certain. By local telling, Butcher Jones was Dr. W.W. Jones, a frontier doctor who earned the nickname by doing surgery on his dining-room table. The story is repeated often and documented nowhere that can be checked, so take it as lore. What is documented is the lake’s recent trouble: golden algae fish kills from 2017 to 2019 and again in 2022, a reminder that a shallow, warm desert reservoir is a fragile thing even when it looks like a postcard.
Why it matters
Saguaro Lake is the end of a chain that explains how the Valley got its water and its power, and Butcher Jones is the one spot on it built for people on foot rather than people with trailers. It shows the Forest Service’s version of a public beach: a buoy line, a pass, a vault toilet and a gate that closes when the lot is full. It also shows what a reservoir can and cannot be, a swimming hole one month and a mudflat trail the next, depending on SRP’s release schedule. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: buy the pass in town, arrive by 8 in summer, swim inside the buoys, and come back in February for the walk to the saddle. It is the best swimming within an hour of Old Town and the only lakeshore hike.