What is Coon Bluff Recreation Site?
A mile east of Phon D Sutton, the Bush Highway passes a brown sign for Coon Bluff Road, and a narrow mile of pavement drops to a low rise of mesquite and cottonwood on the south bank of the Lower Salt River. Picnic tables sit under the trees, vault toilets at the end of the lot, and a gravel bar runs out into the river at the east end. That is the whole of the developed site, and that is the point: it is shaded, it is slower than its neighbors, and from the lip of the bluff you look straight down on the shallows where the Salt River wild horses cross to the island every evening in the cool months.
For a long time this was also the one place on the Lower Salt where you could pitch a tent, on winter weekend nights under a seasonal rule, and the owner’s maps list still carries Google’s label “Coon Bluff Campground.” That is no longer true. The Tonto National Forest’s current page for the site, which it now titles Raccoon Bluff Day Use Area, says plainly: day use only, no overnight camping, no trailers, no motorized boats. Treat it as a picnic ground with a very good view and plan to sleep elsewhere.
What you get is the most reliable wild-horse viewing in Arizona, a shaded table on a river, and a Tonto Pass’s worth of quiet a mile from the tubing crowds. What you do not get is a campsite, drinking water, a lifeguard, posted hours or a guarantee of a parking space at sunset in February.
How to do Coon Bluff right
Buy the pass in town. A Tonto Daily Pass on the dash: $8 bought ahead at a Forest Service office or a vendor (gas stations along Power Road sell them), $12 from the card machine in the lot. The $80 Tonto Discovery annual pass works, and America the Beautiful passes cover picnic sites like this one. See the Tonto National Forest entry for how the pass system fits together.
Get there. Loop 101 south to Loop 202 east, exit Power Road north, which becomes the Bush Highway in the forest. About ten miles from the freeway, a mile past the Phon D Sutton turnoff, turn left at the Coon Bluff sign and follow the narrow paved road a mile down to the lot. Figure 35 minutes from Old Town. The lot is dirt and gravel, moderate in size, and fills on winter weekend evenings with horse-watchers and in summer with tubers who did not get into Phon D Sutton.
Pick the season. Open year round, but the site is at its best from October through April, when the horses are on the river at dusk and the shade is enough. In summer it is hot, buggy and busy with the tubing overflow, and the current from Saguaro Lake releases is strong enough to pull a wader off the gravel bar.
Water. None. Vault toilets only. Bring your own water and ice; there is nothing to buy between Power Road and Saguaro Lake. No glass anywhere on the river, and no trash pickup you can count on.
Watch the horses the right way. Arrive an hour before sunset between November and March, walk east along the bluff past the last picnic table and sit. The horses come out of the mesquite below you to cross to the island, and you will be above them with the light behind you, which is why every wild-horse photograph you have seen from the Salt was taken here. Do not walk down to them. Stay at least 50 feet back, never feed them, and do not get between a mare and a foal; harassing one is a misdemeanor under state law. The wild horses entry has the legal history.
Wade with care. The gravel bar at the east end is the place, but the drop-off into the channel is sudden and the water is released from the bottom of Saguaro Lake, cold year round. Keep children in the shallows and everyone out of the eelgrass where the horses feed.
Dogs. On leash, short, and away from the horses, which will kick.
Make it a day. Picnic here, then drive five minutes to Phon D Sutton for the nature trail, or on to Pebble Beach for the tubing scene described in the tubing and horses guide.
Skip it if you want to sleep by the water. No camping, no water, no clock hours posted, and a lot that locks when it is full. The nearest legal beds are Usery Mountain’s campground 15 minutes south or the boat-in sites on Saguaro Lake; for a lake day with a trail, Butcher Jones is twenty minutes up the road.
The bluff where the horses won
The river below the bluff has been engineered for a thousand years. The Lower Salt is the Hohokam heartland; their canals left the river a few miles downstream, where the Salt River Project’s Granite Reef Dam now does the same job, and their O’odham and Piipaash descendants on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community hold the south bank below the forest boundary. The north bank and the stretch of river at Coon Bluff became federal land when the Tonto Forest Reserve was proclaimed on October 3, 1905, to protect the watershed above the Valley’s new dams.
The dams changed the river under the bluff. The Salt River Project built Stewart Mountain Dam, 207 feet high, a few miles upstream between 1928 and 1930, making Saguaro Lake and adding a 13,000-kilowatt generator; the dam was listed on the National Register in 2017. From then on the river at Coon Bluff has been whatever SRP releases: cold water from the bottom of the lake through the summer, when the Valley’s canals need it, and a trickle in winter. The gravel bar, the eelgrass shallows and the island the horses cross to are all shaped by that schedule.
Recreation came with the Valley’s growth and the Bush Highway, and the Lower Salt became the Tonto’s busiest river, a tubing corridor in summer and a picnic ground in winter. The Tonto Pass arrived in 1999 to pay for the toilets, tables and trash the crowds required, and Coon Bluff became one of the fee sites along the road. For years the Forest Service allowed limited tent camping here on winter weekend nights, the only such allowance on the Lower Salt, which is why older guides and the Google pin still say campground. The agency’s own page for the site, now retitled Raccoon Bluff Day Use Area and last updated in June 2025, bars overnight camping, trailers and motorized boats; when the change was made the page does not say, and this guide does not guess.
The horses are the reason the bluff is famous, and their legal status was settled within the last decade. On July 31, 2015, the Tonto National Forest posted a notice to impound the Salt River herd as unauthorized livestock, citing collisions on the Bush Highway and horses in the recreation sites. The response was immediate: more than 30,000 petition signatures, a 50-page counterproposal from the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group, and a political storm that led the agency to delay 120 days and then rescind the notice before Christmas. On May 11, 2016, Governor Doug Ducey signed HB 2340, sponsored by Representative Kelly Townsend of Mesa and passed by the Senate 27 to 2, declaring the horses are not stray animals and making it a class 1 misdemeanor to harass, shoot, injure or kill one. The Forest Service estimated as many as 100 horses in 2015; how many there are now, and what they are, remains argued.
What is coming is management rather than removal: fertility control, a state and Forest Service agreement, and a day-use area that will go on filling at dusk with people holding long lenses.
Why it matters
Coon Bluff is where the Valley decided what it wanted its river to be. A federal agency proposed to remove the horses as livestock in 2015 and the state made them protected animals within ten months, the fastest reversal of a Forest Service decision in Arizona memory, and the bluff above the crossing is where you see what that vote bought. It is also a plain lesson in how the Salt works: cold water on a dam’s schedule, a pass to pay for the toilets, and a campground that quietly became a picnic ground. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple. Go in winter, an hour before sunset, with a pass bought in town and a dog on a short leash, sit on the bluff and let the horses come to you. Sleep somewhere else.