What is Cave Creek Regional Park?
Cave Creek Regional Park is the piece of the Maricopa County system closest to north Scottsdale: 2,922 acres of jasper-studded hills and saguaro flats between I-17 and the Town of Cave Creek, at 2,000 to 3,060 feet, in the county’s hands since 1963. It is a proper park rather than a preserve. There is a nature center with live desert reptiles, exhibits and an amphitheater for ranger walks and reptile talks, a cluster of picnic ramadas with grills, a horse staging area, and a 55-site campground with hookups and hot showers that has its own guide.
The trails add up to about 14 miles, all multi-use. The Go John Trail is the reason hikers drive here: 5.8 miles around the whole mountain with 411 feet of change, rated moderate-difficult, climbing gradually through dense saguaro on the south side and coming back past the old mine country on the north with views to the Bradshaws and New River Mesa. Overton (2.1 miles, 408 feet) is the shorter climb with a real view; Slate (1.6 miles), Clay Mine (1.5) and Flume (2.3) are the gentle ones; Quartz (1.4), Flat Rock (0.5) and Jasper (0.2) are connectors. The Maricopa Trail passes through on its way around the county, and the land trust’s P.A. Seitts Preserve adjoins to the east. It is a park for a winter morning loop, for families with a child who wants to see a rattlesnake behind glass, and for riders and cyclists who want a long gradual circuit with no cars.
What you get is a well-run county park with water, restrooms, shade, a campground and the best moderate loop in the north Valley. What you do not get is free entry, solitude in February, or any shade on the trail itself.
How to hike Cave Creek Regional Park right
Pay at the gate. $10 per vehicle or $5 per person on foot, bike or horse; the fee rises to $12 in 2028. The $120 annual pass covers every county park and pays for itself in twelve entries; if you will also use Usery, McDowell Mountain, Spur Cross or Lake Pleasant this winter, buy it at the entrance station.
Get there. Take Scottsdale Road north to Carefree Highway (SR 74), go west about seven miles to 32nd Street, and turn north; the entrance station is at the end of the road, about 40 minutes from Old Town. From the west, exit I-17 at Carefree Highway and go east seven miles. The park road is paved to every trailhead and to the campground. The Go John trailhead lot is at the north end of the park road, beside the nature center; the Overton and Slate trails leave from the same area. On January through March weekends the lots fill by mid-morning and the entrance station backs up.
Pick the season and the hour. The park is open all year, 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. in summer and 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. from November through April, and the gate locks. The hiking season is October through April; from May the summer rules apply and Go John is a sunrise-only proposition. The campground is busiest January through March.
Water. Fountains at the nature center, ramadas and campground; nothing on any trail. Go John is five dry, exposed miles; leave the lot with two liters per person.
Do Go John counterclockwise. Start from the Go John lot so the long, gradual climb through the saguaros is in morning shade and the descent past the old mine workings on the north side faces away from the sun. Two and a half to three hours for most people. Overton is the right answer with kids who have an hour in them, and the Clay Mine Trail gets you to the gated 1890s shaft the rangers occasionally open for tours.
Share the trail. Every trail is open to hikers, bikes and horses. Go John is a popular ride and a regular route for the local stables; yield to horses and call out on blind corners.
Fire and food. Grills at the ramadas and fire pits at the campsites, subject to the county’s fire bans, which run most of the warm season; propane only when a ban is on.
Dogs. Six-foot leash, current license, not inside buildings. Fine on every trail.
Skip it if you want wilder ground or free entry. Spur Cross up the road is quieter and has the creek; the Jewel of the Creek is a short riparian walk; the city of Phoenix’s Apache Wash trailhead is free and 15 minutes west. Compared with McDowell Mountain Regional Park, the hills here are higher and the trails fewer.
The jasper hills the county fenced
The creek that names everything here runs along the park’s east side, and the cave on its west bank, a rock shelter about 100 feet across, has sheltered people for roughly 11,000 years. The Hohokam were the long residents: from about A.D. 1 to 1450 they farmed the creek and foraged the hills, leaving petroglyphs and village sites across this stretch of desert, including the hilltop compound at Sears-Kay a few miles east. After them came the Yavapai and Tonto Apache, and the park’s hills were among the places the Army fought them; by 1877 the survivors had been moved to San Carlos.
The gold seekers arrived in the middle of that war. Cave Creek was founded in 1870 as a mining and ranching camp and a stop for cavalry patrols, and through the 1870s prospectors staked claims on the red, jasper-studded hills that are now inside the park. The mines were small and the gold was scarce, but the workings are still there, and the county’s guided walks go to them. The oddest is on the Clay Mine Trail. The shaft was dug in the 1890s for ordinary minerals and later became the Pearl Chemical Mine, where a woman named Lelia Pearl Irish sold the soft, talc-like white rock as a mineral drink with health claims the rangers now recite as comedy. The shaft is gated and occasionally opened for tours.
The county came for a different reason. From the 1940s Maricopa County had been talking about a ring of regional parks on federal land around the Valley, big enough to absorb a city that everyone could see was coming; the McDowell Mountain park was leased in 1958 and patented in 1964, and the same mechanism, Bureau of Land Management ground converted to county parkland, produced the rest. Cave Creek Regional Park was established in 1963 as part of that system, and the county’s first Park Master Plan, in 1965, laid out what it would become. The nature center, the ramadas, the horse staging area and the campground were built over the decades that followed, and the trail system was named for what the miners left: Clay Mine, Flume, Slate, Quartz, Jasper. The county does not publish the origin of the Go John name, and we did not find it in any source we could stand behind.
The town caught up with the park. Cave Creek incorporated on July 6, 1986, partly to control the growth coming up Cave Creek Road from Phoenix, and in 2000 the town, the county and the state bought Spur Cross Ranch, five miles up the creek, for $21 million, giving the regional park a conservation-area neighbor with the creek the park itself lacks. The Maricopa Trail, the county’s loop around the whole Valley, was threaded through the park in the 2010s. The fee went to $10, and goes to $12 in 2028, which is still the cheapest ticket to 2,922 acres of saguaro within 40 minutes of Old Town.
Why it matters
Cave Creek Regional Park is the north Valley’s version of a story the county repeated everywhere: take a piece of mined-over federal desert on the edge of a growing city, fence it in the 1960s, build a nature center and a loop trail, and wait for the city to arrive. It did. The park now sits between Phoenix’s Sonoran Preserve and a town that incorporated to slow the same growth, and the Go John loop is one of the few places left where you can walk five miles through unbroken saguaro and see a mine shaft from the 1890s. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: it is the closest county park with real facilities, Go John is the best moderate loop in the north Valley, and $10 is fair. Go counterclockwise on a winter weekday morning, carry two liters, and take the kids into the nature center afterward.