What is Casa Grande Mountain Park?
Everyone who has driven to Tucson has seen Casa Grande Mountain: the rough, dark range that I-8 and I-10 squeeze between just south of the city, radio towers on top. For decades hikers and riders made their own paths up it. In 2004 the City of Casa Grande got a National Park Service grant for a trails master plan, spent six years buying and leasing the pieces from a crowd of owners, and in April 2010 volunteers built the first official trail. AmeriCorps crews have come back every year since. The result is Casa Grande Mountain Park: more than 17 miles of marked trail on a mountain whose high point is 2,538 feet, free, open 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., and almost unknown north of the Gila.
The layout is simple. A steep service road climbs from the north trailhead about a mile and 650 feet to the radio towers near the summit. The Ridge Trail runs the crest, a 3.1-mile moderate section and a 1.4-mile difficult one with rock steps. Below the south end, the East Butte (2.7 miles) and West Butte (1.5 miles) trails and the Spine Trail roll across low hills with a couple hundred feet of gain, which is where mountain bikers log most of their miles. The view from the top is a lesson in Arizona geography: Picacho Peak, the Sierra Estrella, Table Top, the Santa Catalinas on a clear winter morning, and cotton fields to every horizon.
What you get is a lot of free, well-built trail on a mountain you will mostly have to yourself, an hour from the Valley. What you do not get is water, a restroom, shade, a paved lot, or a quiet morning on weekends, because a shooting range and a model-airplane field share the mountain’s edge.
How to hike it right
Pay nothing, mind the hours. The park is free, city-owned, and open 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day. No state or BLM permit applies, and nothing needs a reservation.
Get there. Loop 101 south to I-10 east about 45 miles toward Tucson. For the north trailhead, where Google Maps puts the park, take exit 198, Jimmie Kerr Boulevard, west to Peart Road, south under I-8 and around the curve to the base of the mountain, then east on unpaved Hanna Road to the dirt lot; the city calls this the Peart Road trailhead and everyone else calls it Hanna Road. For the south side, take exit 200, Sunland Gin Road, south past the Love’s, then west on Arica Road past the Lamb Road stop sign until the pavement ends and on to the lot at the mountain’s foot. Either is about 65 minutes from Old Town. Both lots are dirt, have a kiosk map and hold a few dozen cars; neither fills except for races.
Pick the season. October through April. The mountain tops out under 2,600 feet and the rock radiates heat; from May on it is a first-light outing and the summer sunrise rules apply in full. Watch the ground in spring, because this is rattlesnake country at exactly rattlesnake elevation.
Water and restrooms. Nothing at either trailhead or on the mountain. Two liters each, more in March. Casa Grande has gas stations at both exits.
Make the summit a loop. Start at the Hanna Road lot before sunrise, go straight up the radio tower road for the view and come down the Ridge Trail’s moderate section. The road is relentless but short, about 650 feet in a mile on loose rock; the ridge is where the trail builders put their best work. Figure an hour and a half to two hours.
Ride the buttes first. Bikers should start from Arica Road on the East Butte, West Butte and Spine trails, smooth and rolling with a couple hundred feet of gain, and save the upper ridge for a second visit; the rock steps on the 1.4-mile difficult section eat chains and knees. Bike sites log about 13 miles of singletrack including a 7.5-mile Grand Loop. Trails are shared; yield uphill and to hikers.
Dogs. Common and unrestricted beyond common sense, which here means their own water and a cool-ground start.
Noise. The Elzy Pearson shooting range and a model-aircraft field sit at the park’s edge, so a weekend morning has a soundtrack.
Skip it if you only have one Pinal County day and want the famous climb. Picacho Peak is the bigger, cabled scramble twenty minutes farther south, and San Tan Mountain is the county park with facilities on the way home. Come here for the mileage, the emptiness and a summit you will have to yourself.
The mountain the railroad town never got around to
The flats around Casa Grande Mountain were Hohokam farmland long before anyone named the mountain. The canals ran off the Gila a few miles north, and the four-story great house that gave the modern town its name, now Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, stands on that canal system in what is today Coolidge, not Casa Grande. The dark mountain between the river and the Santa Cruz flats was a landmark on the way south, and that is about all history asked of it for a very long time.
The town arrived with the rails. The Southern Pacific built across the flats during the territorial mining boom of 1879, and in January 1880 the construction camp at the end of the track, with five residents and three buildings, was called Terminus. That September the railroad’s executives renamed it Casa Grande after the ruins up the road. The early town burned to the ground in 1886 and again in 1893, the mining boom cooled, and in the 1890s the place nearly emptied. Cotton and dairy farming saved it, and Casa Grande incorporated in 1915. The mountain on its southern edge stayed what it had been: open scrubland, grazed, prospected a little, and eventually fitted with radio towers on the summit, a shooting range at its foot and a model-aircraft field, while the two interstates were built on either side of it in the 1960s and 1970s.
The trails came from the bottom up. By the 1990s hikers and mountain bikers from Casa Grande and the Valley were wearing their own routes up the service road and along the ridge, the kind of social trail system that forms wherever there is a mountain and no plan. The city decided to make a plan. In 2004 it won a grant from the National Park Service to write a Trails System Master Plan for the mountain, which sounds simple and was not: the mountain’s slopes were owned by many different parties under many different rules, and the leases, purchases and paperwork took until the spring of 2010. That April volunteers built the first official trail. The city then began applying, competitively, for AmeriCorps NCCC teams, young crews who spend weeks at a time cutting and benching trail, and has won them year after year. Most of the 17-plus miles on the mountain today were built by those crews and by local volunteers, and the city’s own history page says so plainly.
The system that resulted is unusual for a town of Casa Grande’s size: a real ridge trail with graded difficulty, a competitive-grade bike loop, two signed trailheads with kiosk maps and a set of hours. It has never had a budget for restrooms or water, and it has never charged a fee, which is probably why. The racers found it first, the Valley’s mountain bikers second, and most hikers who pass on I-10 still have not.
Why it matters
Casa Grande Mountain is the proof that a small city can build a trail system without a county parks department, a bond or a preserve tax, as long as it is willing to spend six years on paperwork and feed a lot of volunteers. Scottsdale’s preserve was bought with a sales tax and built with professional crews; this one was built by AmeriCorps kids on a 2004 federal planning grant. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is practical: it is an hour south, free, empty and well made, the best long bike loop between Phoenix and Tucson, and a good short summit when you want a view without a crowd.