What is the Cemetery Trailhead?
Theodore Roosevelt Dam was the first big project of the 1902 Reclamation Act, built between 1905 and 1911 in a canyon that was a three-day wagon haul from Phoenix, and the people who built it lived, and some of them died, in a construction town that is now under the lake. Roosevelt Cemetery, on a hill above SR 188, is what remains of that town. Cemetery Trail #255 climbs 1.3 miles on a hardened surface from a small lot beside Lakeview Park to the fenced graves of settlers and dam workers, with a self-guided brochure from the ranger station across the highway. It is a short, plain, worthwhile walk.
It is also a trailhead in the larger sense. Past the cemetery a spur connects to the Thompson Trail #121, 2.75 miles of the Arizona Trail that runs along the ridges above the highway and the lake to the Roosevelt bridge and then south to Forest Road 341. Across the bridge the Vineyard Trail #131 picks up the Arizona Trail and climbs 6 miles toward Mills Ridge and the Four Peaks Trail, past the foundations of Camp O’Rourke, with Roosevelt Lake, Apache Lake, the dam and Four Peaks in view most of the way. Because Thompson has no official trailhead of its own, this is where the Forest Service sends you to start it.
What you get is the one free history stop on Roosevelt Lake, a hardened trail any cool-season visitor can walk, and a quiet door onto 800 miles of Arizona Trail. What you do not get is water, a toilet, shade or anything resembling a crowd.
How to hike the Cemetery Trail right
Pay nothing, pick up the brochure. No fee and no Tonto Pass at the trailhead or on the trails; the pass applies to the lake’s recreation sites, not here. Stop first at the Tonto Basin Ranger Station across SR 188, open weekdays, for the self-guided cemetery brochure, because the graves are plain and the stories are what make the walk.
Get there. Shea Boulevard east to SR 87, the Beeline, north about 50 miles to SR 188 at Jakes Corner, then south on SR 188 through Punkin Center and along the lake’s north shore. About 1.5 miles before the Roosevelt bridge and dam, turn into the Lakeview Park entrance road; the trailhead is about 75 feet in, on the right, directly across SR 188 from the ranger station. Figure 110 minutes from Old Town, all of it paved. The lot is small and rarely full. The Apache Trail (SR 88) from the Apache Junction side has been closed past Fish Creek Hill for long stretches since a 2019 landslide and is slow and unpaved when it is open, so do not let your phone route you that way; the Beeline is the route.
Pick the season. October through April. The Cemetery Trail is short enough for a warm morning or a May sunrise; the Thompson and Vineyard ridges are shadeless, and lower elevations here exceed 110 degrees in summer.
Water and restrooms. None at the trailhead; the ranger station across the road has both during business hours. The Forest Service recommends a gallon per person per day on the Thompson and Vineyard trails in hot weather. The lake is right there and none of it is drinkable.
The cemetery. Close the gate behind you, stay on the outlined paths, and leave the graves alone. The trail up is hardened; the paths inside are dirt and too steep for wheelchairs. Allow about 45 minutes up and back with time at the stones.
Keep going if you want the view. The spur past the cemetery joins Thompson, and the two miles along the ridges to the overlook above the Roosevelt bridge are the best cheap view of the lake and dam you will get without a boat. For a real climb, drive over the bridge, park at the unsigned pullout on the northeast side, and do the first 1.5 miles of the Vineyard Trail, which gains most of its 1,500 feet right there and opens Four Peaks, Apache Lake and the dam at once. Thompson and Vineyard are open to mountain bikes; Vineyard is a hard ride.
Dogs and horses. Dogs on leash. The Cemetery Trail is listed for hikers and horses; no motor vehicles on any of the trails.
Skip it if you want a day’s hike rather than an hour’s history. Rock Creek across the basin is the long trail. Otherwise pair the cemetery with Tonto National Monument a few miles south, or a night at Cholla or Windy Hill, and it becomes the best history stop on the lake.
The town under the lake and the graves above it
The Tonto Basin was farmed before it was flooded. Salado people irrigated the bottomlands along the Salt and Tonto Creek from the 1200s and built the cliff dwellings that are now Tonto National Monument, four miles from the dam; they were gone by the mid-1400s, and the basin passed to the Tonto Apache and the Yavapai, who held it until the Army’s campaigns of the 1870s. The ranchers who followed, and the feud between the Grahams and Tewksburys in Pleasant Valley to the north in the 1880s, are the Tonto Basin’s frontier chapter. The dam is its modern one.
The Reclamation Act was signed on June 17, 1902, and the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association, the Phoenix farmers who would become SRP, pledged their land as collateral for the first great project under it: a masonry dam at the narrows below the Tonto Creek confluence. Everything had to be brought in. Work began on August 29, 1903, on the Tonto Wagon Road from the Mesa railhead to the dam site, 60 miles over the mountains, built largely by Apache laborers from the San Carlos reservation who camped with their families in segregated areas near the works; the road was finished on September 3, 1905, at a cost of $551,000, and the Southern Pacific’s advertising men later renamed it the Apache Trail. The dam itself rose from 1905 to 1911: stonemasons from Italy, Scotland, Germany and Switzerland cut and laid the sandstone blocks, laborers of every background hauled and mixed, Mexican teamsters moved the freight, and Reclamation Service engineers oversaw it all. The cornerstone was set on September 20, 1906. An on-site cement plant and a diversion canal with a small power plant served the works, and below the site the town of Roosevelt housed the workers’ families in wood-framed tents; a 1909 photograph in Reclamation’s archive shows wash day there.
People died building it, in falls, floods and the ordinary accidents of a six-year masonry job in a canyon, and others died in the settler families who had come before them. They were buried on the hill above the town, and when President Roosevelt dedicated the 280-foot dam on March 18, 1911, and the lake filled for the first time in 1915, the town went under and the cemetery stayed above the water on its hill. Reclamation’s own history does not count the dead, and the Forest Service does not publish a tally of graves; the ranger station’s brochure supplies the names that are known. Tonto National Monument had been proclaimed on December 19, 1907, to protect the Salado ruins the new lake would bring visitors to, and the Tonto National Forest, created in 1905, existed in large part to protect the watershed above the dam.
The dam was rebuilt within living memory. Between 1989 and 1996 the Bureau of Reclamation raised it 77 feet to 357 feet and faced the old masonry in concrete, at a cost of $430 million, enlarging the conservation pool to about 1.65 million acre-feet and the flood pool to 2.9 million; SR 188 was rerouted over a new steel arch bridge beside the dam. The higher lake pushed the shoreline up toward the cemetery hill but did not reach it. In 2009 the Arizona Trail was designated a National Scenic Trail, and when it was completed on December 16, 2011, its route through the basin ran along the ridges above the cemetery as the Thompson passage; because Thompson had no trailhead of its own, the Forest Service pointed hikers at the little lot by Lakeview Park, and the dam builders’ trail became the Arizona Trail’s door.
Why it matters
The Cemetery Trail is the shortest walk on this site with the longest reach. The dam below it is the reason Scottsdale exists as a city rather than a ranching crossroads: the first Reclamation project, the first reliable water for the Salt River Valley, built by immigrants and Apache laborers in a canyon three days from Phoenix, and the people buried on this hill paid for part of it. For a visitor the verdict is simple: it is a 45-minute history walk, free, with a brochure, that nobody else on the lake will be doing, and it opens onto the Arizona Trail if you want more. Get the brochure first, carry water, and go in the cool months.