What is the Copper Canyon Trailhead?
Camp Verde sits at the bottom of the Verde Valley, and just south of town the land steps up in a bench of red and grey rock cut by Copper Canyon, a dry side drainage that only runs after rain. In January 2012, after more than a decade of planning, the Town of Camp Verde and the Prescott National Forest opened a proper trailhead at the mouth of it: a fenced gravel lot at about 3,250 feet with two ramadas, four tables, four grills, a vault toilet, a loading ramp for horses and dirt bikes, and an interpretive sign with a map. Three routes leave the lot. Camp Verde Trail #545 and the General Crook Trail (FS 162) are OHV roads. Copper Falls Trail #504, which starts on the west side of the lot, is the hike.
The loop runs about 3.75 to 4 miles and climbs 300 to 400 feet, from the lot to roughly 3,550 feet on the rim of the canyon. It crosses a usually dry creek, passes an old water tank and corral, switchbacks up through mesquite, catclaw, juniper and a few pinyons, follows the canyon rim with the Verde Valley and the radio towers on Porcupine Mountain in view, and drops at the far end to a bench where a side trail leads upstream to an intermittent waterfall in a red-rock chute. From December into April it falls; the rest of the year it is a reason to come back. Cattle graze the whole loop and the trail is marked only by brown posts stamped 504.
What you get is a real desert loop with a toilet and a table at the car, free, ten minutes off the interstate, on the way to everything north. What you do not get is shade, water, a destination-grade view or, most of the year, the waterfall in the name.
How to hike it right
Pay nothing, reserve nothing. No fee, no pass, nothing to book. Day use only, dawn to dusk; camping is at Clear Creek east of town or Beaver Creek up I-17.
Get there. Loop 101 north to I-17 north and up the hill about 85 miles to exit 285, General Crook Trail, at Camp Verde. Go east on SR 260 for 0.3 miles, turn right on Oasis Road for 0.4 miles, then right on FS 136, a graded dirt road any car can take when dry, and the trailhead is 1 mile on the right. Figure about 100 minutes from Old Town. The lot is big and rarely full; on winter weekends you will share it with a few horse trailers and side-by-sides.
Go counterclockwise. The switchbacks and the 400 feet of climbing come first, while it is cool, and the waterfall comes at the end, up a short side trail from a bench near the 2.6-mile mark. One three-way junction has no sign; keep the canyon on your left and you will be fine.
Pick the season. October through April is the hike. May and September at first light. Summer is a shadeless 3,300-foot desert loop with the waterfall dry; skip it, or walk it at dawn with the summer rules in mind. The falls are worth the detour from roughly December through April or in the week after a monsoon storm.
Water. None at the trailhead and none reliable on the trail. Carry two liters in cool weather, more in warm. The dog needs its own.
Share the ground. Cows, OHVs and horses all use it. The motorized routes leave the same lot, so expect engines on the road in and at the start; #504 itself is non-motorized.
Dogs. On leash this close to town.
Skip it if you want big scenery. It is a pleasant desert loop, not a destination; its virtue is position. For the real thing on the same tank of gas, Fossil Creek is 40 minutes east with a permit, Verde Hot Springs is a long dirt-road day, and Sedona is 40 minutes north without one. The ruin ten minutes up the interstate, Montezuma Castle, is the better stop for anyone who is not hiking.
The canyon the Army’s road came down
Copper Canyon is a short, dry draw, and for most of history nobody wrote about it. The Verde Valley around it was Yavapai and Tonto Apache country, and before them the Sinagua farmed the creek bottoms and built the cliff house at Montezuma Castle ten minutes north. What put the canyon on a map was the Army’s need to get from Prescott to the Verde. Infantry set up a first camp five miles south of today’s town in 1865; Camp Lincoln followed in 1866; and in 1871 the Army built Camp Verde on its present site, renamed Fort Verde in 1879. Around 1872 about 1,500 Yavapai and Apache people were placed on a reservation along the river, and the post’s job shifted from fighting them to keeping them there.
The road came the same year. General George Crook needed a supply route from Fort Whipple at Prescott to Fort Apache in the White Mountains, and in 1872 his crews built it: down off the Black Hills into the Verde Valley by way of Copper Canyon, the same grade I-17 drops today, across the river at the fort, over Clear Creek and up onto the Mogollon Rim, then east along the Rim’s edge for a hundred miles. The chevron blazes his men cut into trees and rocks every mile are the trail’s signature; the one at mile 13 is still cut into a rock beside SR 260, 12 miles east of town. The Forest Service maintains 25 miles of the route as General Crook Trail #130, and the OHV road that leaves this lot carries the name because it follows the Army’s line.
The road’s first use was the one its builders intended. In 1875 the Army marched the Verde reservation’s people, Yavapai and Apache together, 180 miles to San Carlos in winter; the Yavapai-Apache Nation remembers it as Exodus Day and holds a commemoration each year. Families began drifting home around 1900, and the Nation’s reservation today is five small parcels totaling 642 acres, most of them in Camp Verde, with Cliff Castle Casino on the hill above the interstate exit as the visible result. The Battle of Big Dry Wash on the Rim in July 1882, fought along Crook’s road, was the last major engagement between the Army and the Apache in Arizona. Fort Verde was abandoned in 1891, sold at auction in 1899, kept alive as a museum by local people from 1956, and made a state historic park in 1970.
Camp Verde itself did not incorporate until 1986, and the trailhead is a product of the town that followed. The Prescott National Forest wraps the south side of town, and through the 2000s the Verde Ranger District, the town and a group of donors planned a developed trailhead on the forest boundary where the old OHV routes left the pavement. It opened in January 2012: the lot, the ramadas, the toilet, the horse ramp, and a new non-motorized trail, Copper Falls Trail #504, laid out to loop the canyon rim and reach the seasonal fall. The hiking guides of the time call #504 newly created, and the trailhead has grown since from a dirt pullout to parking for more than 20 cars.
That is the whole story, and it is a short one. The canyon’s role was always transit, first for the Army and now for the interstate that follows its grade, and the trailhead is a town’s effort to give the people driving past a reason to stop.
Why it matters
Copper Canyon is a small place that explains a big pattern: the route the Army cut in 1872 to supply its forts and remove the people who lived here became the route the state paved for everyone else, and the Verde Valley’s towns have spent the last forty years turning the leftover forest land along it into something to do. The Yavapai-Apache Nation’s 642 acres in the same town are the other half of that history. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is practical: it is a decent four-mile loop with a toilet, free, ten minutes off I-17, and it is the best use of 90 minutes between the Valley and Sedona in winter, when the fall is running. In summer, drive on.