What is Catalina State Park?
Catalina State Park is 5,525 acres of saguaro bajada and mesquite washes at the foot of Pusch Ridge, the 3,000-foot granite wall that forms the west face of the Santa Catalina Mountains. The park’s own trails are mellow; what makes it matter is that two of them, Romero Canyon and Sutherland, cross the fence into the Coronado National Forest and climb straight into the Pusch Ridge Wilderness.
The Romero Canyon Trail is the one everyone comes for. From the main trailhead it crosses the Sutherland wash, reaches the Montrose Pools overlook at about a mile, passes the Forest Service gate, and then climbs steadily on a rocky, stair-stepped tread to Romero Pools at roughly 2.8 miles and 1,000 feet of gain: a run of granite tubs and short cascades that fill after rain and snowmelt. Strong hikers continue to Romero Pass at about 6,000 feet, a 3,300-foot, 10-hour day on an unmaintained trail. Around it are seven easier routes, including the 2.3-mile Canyon Loop, the shaded Bridle Trail that works for strollers and wheelchairs, the Romero Ruins interpretive loop over a Hohokam village site, and the 50-Year Trail, a favorite of mountain bikers and horse people. The campground below it has 120 sites, all with water and 20/30/50-amp electric, flush restrooms with hot showers and dump stations. A seasonal non-electric overflow, Ringtail, opens January through March.
What you get is the most comfortable base in southern Arizona for a hiker who wants the Catalinas without driving the Catalina Highway, with a grocery store 20 minutes away. What you do not get is solitude on a winter weekend, a dog past the first mile, or pools with water in them in a dry October.
How to do Catalina right
Pay, and book the campground months out. $10 per vehicle with one person, $20 with two to four, $5 for walk-ins and cyclists. The gate is open 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.; after hours the self-pay station takes exact cash. Camping is $50 per night in loops A and B, $25 at the equestrian center and Ringtail, $15 for a second vehicle, 14 nights maximum, through azstateparks.com or 877-697-2757 with a $3.60 fee. Loop B is the quieter end with the view of Pusch Ridge. The campground is busiest and best from November through March.
Get there. Loop 101 south to I-10 east, about 90 miles to exit 240, Tangerine Road. Go east on Tangerine 12 miles through Oro Valley to Oracle Road (SR 77), turn right, and the park entrance is on the left after about two miles. Figure 115 minutes from Old Town; this avoids central Tucson entirely. The main trailhead lot is large but fills on winter weekends by nine; the Romero Ruins lot and equestrian center absorb overflow. After heavy rain the Cañada del Oro ford on the park road closes and you walk from the lower lot.
Time the pools. Romero Pools is a different hike wet and dry. Go in the two weeks after a real winter storm or during March snowmelt, when the creek runs; in a dry October the tubs are warm puddles with algae and the destination disappears, though the hike is still fine. The first mile to the Montrose overlook is easy; the work starts after the gate.
Pick the season. October through April for hiking. In summer the park opens at 5 and that is when you should be on the trail, because the whole approach is open bajada with no shade; the summer rules apply in full.
Water. At the campground, the visitor center and the trailhead restrooms. None on the trails; the creek is not to be counted on.
Dogs. Welcome on leash on every park trail, but not past the Forest Service gate about a mile up the Romero and Sutherland trails, which is bighorn sheep country. Bikes stop there too.
Bighorn closure. From January 1 to April 30, lambing season, you may not travel more than 400 feet off designated Forest Service trails above the park.
Skip it if you only have a day; it is a long drive for 5.6 miles. The front-range alternative with a tram is Sabino Canyon; for a cheap campground on the mountain itself, Molino Basin on the Catalina Highway; for a state-park climb an hour closer to Scottsdale, Picacho Peak on the way down I-10.
The ranch that was almost a town
The bajada below Pusch Ridge has been farmed for fifteen centuries. Between roughly A.D. 500 and 1450 the Hohokam kept a village here with a ballcourt, pithouses and later adobe compounds, drawing water from the Cañada del Oro and the Sutherland wash; the mounds and the ballcourt depression are what the Romero Ruins loop walks over. The Tohono O’odham, who hold the Tucson basin after the Hohokam, call the range Babad Do’ag, Frog Mountain, and the Spanish presidio at Tucson, founded in 1775, looks up at the ridge from 15 miles south.
The ranch came out of that presidio. Francisco Romero, born there in 1822, took up a 160-acre ranch near the Cañada del Oro in 1844, by the state’s account, and built stone-walled ranch buildings directly on top of the Hohokam village, which is why the ruin carries his name. The Romeros ran cattle here on and off through the Apache years until Francisco died in 1905; an 1873 county map shows their buildings inside what is now the park. To the west, in 1874, George Pusch and John Zellweger bought the big spread that became the Steam Pump Ranch, and the granite wall above it took Pusch’s name. In the 1940s J.E. McAdams, an Ohio industrialist, assembled 4,100 acres of the old range and called it Rancho Romero.
In 1971 Ratliff, Miller and Muhr Investments bought Rancho Romero and asked Pima County to rezone about 4,000 acres east of Oracle Road for a self-contained community: a town at the foot of the mountain, where the trailhead is now. The opposition was immediate and broad enough that the plan stalled. An Oracle Road Green Belt Committee lobbied the Parks Board in the fall of 1973; a state feasibility study in November found the land met every criterion for a park; and the Board, in December, voted against it anyway. The legislature overruled them. On May 1, 1974, Governor Jack Williams signed House Bill 2280, authorizing a state park of more than 13,000 acres in Pima and Pinal counties, to be assembled by land exchange. University of Arizona students drew the first master plan that December.
Assembling it took nine years. The Board drew an 8,430-acre boundary in 1975 across state trust land, Pima County land and private parcels; the legislature put up $982,000 in 1978 for leases and purchases; a 25-year recreational lease on 4,692 acres of state land came in 1981, along with the federal grant that paid for the contact station; a neighbouring landowner sued over the state land in 1982 and lost. Meanwhile Congress, in 1978, designated the 56,430-acre Pusch Ridge Wilderness above the park line to protect the desert bighorn, which is why the Forest Service gate a mile up the Romero trail is the boundary of everything that follows. On May 25, 1983, Governor Bruce Babbitt dedicated Catalina State Park and opened it to the public. In 1991 the state land inside it passed to the Coronado National Forest in the Santa Rita exchange, and the park has run ever since on a Forest Service special use permit, 5,525 acres.
The sheep did not cooperate. Development in Oro Valley and the Catalina Foothills, dogs on the trails and fire suppression that thickened the brush wore the native bighorn down until sightings stopped in the 1990s. In November 2013 Game and Fish released 31 bighorn on Pusch Ridge, and in February 2014 two lambs appeared, the first born in the Catalinas in nearly 25 years. The dog ban past the gate and the January-to-April off-trail closure exist for them. In June and July 2020 the lightning-caused Bighorn Fire burned 119,987 acres across the range and closed the park’s upper trails for a season; the brush is coming back, which the sheep prefer.
Why it matters
Catalina is the clearest case in Arizona of a park created to stop a town. The rezoning request of 1971 drew the line the park still follows, the legislature overrode its own Parks Board to draw it, and the result is a trailhead that would otherwise be a cul-de-sac. The park also shows how these places are built in practice: leases, exchanges, a lawsuit, a decade, and in the end a Forest Service permit rather than a deed. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is two nights, not one: camp in loop B, do Romero Pools after a storm, do the Canyon Loop the next morning, and buy groceries in Oro Valley on the way in.