What is the Daisy Mountain Trail?
Daisy Mountain is the big, bare peak that fills the windshield as I-17 climbs past Anthem, and it is the one mountain in this collection that is nobody’s park. Its roughly six square miles are Arizona State Trust Land, held to generate revenue for schools, which means it is open to the public only with a State Land recreation permit (about $15 a person or $20 a family per year, bought online) and maintained by no one. For twenty years local groups have tried to turn it into a Daisy Mountain Preserve; as of 2026 it is still a potential preserve on paper and a sellable parcel in fact.
The hike itself is good. From the Parkside neighborhood on Anthem’s east edge an informal trail climbs about 1.2 miles and 750 feet onto the ridge and up to the north summit at roughly 3,180 feet, with the Bradshaws, Lake Pleasant, the Hieroglyphic Mountains and the whole north Valley arranged around you. It is poorly marked above the half-mile point and loose near the top, and mountain bikers and horse riders have worn a web of connecting routes that can be strung into a five-mile loop. There is no shade, no water and no sign.
What you get is a real summit with a better view than most of the Phoenix preserves, 45 minutes from Old Town, almost always empty. What you do not get is a trailhead: no lot, no toilet, no map, and a neighborhood that has every reason to resent your car. It is a resident’s mountain, and a visitor should treat it as a curiosity rather than a plan.
How to hike Daisy Mountain right
Buy the permit first. Required, personal and annual. The State Land Department sells it online; print or screenshot it, because there is no signal on the ridge. Rangers are rare, but the access depends on hikers behaving as guests.
Get there. Take Loop 101 west to I-17 north, exit at Anthem Way (exit 229), go east, then north on Gavilan Peak Parkway into the Parkside neighborhood and east to the intersection of Navigation Way and N. Livingston Way, about 45 minutes from Old Town. That intersection is the only public access point Anthem recognizes.
Do not park there. Anthem Community Council’s own page says there is no street parking at the access point and asks hikers to arrange a drop-off or arrive on foot or by bike. Hikers who park on Navigation Way or in front of homes have been ticketed and towed, and the neighborhood’s patience is what keeps the gate open. If you are staying in Anthem, walk; if not, get dropped and picked up.
Go at first light, in winter. November through March. The route faces south and west with no shade, so carry two liters even for a two-hour hike and be off the ridge before the sun is high. The summer sunrise rules apply from April on, and honestly the mountain is not worth a summer dawn.
Find the line and keep it. The trail is obvious for the first half mile, then becomes a choose-your-line climb up the ridge. Pick the most worn path, look back often, and do not try to shortcut the ridge on the descent; the loose rock on the south face is how people get hurt here. Expect to lose the trail at least once above the saddle. The class ratings entry explains why this counts as a scramble near the top.
Uses and dogs. Hiking, mountain biking and horses are allowed; ATVs are not. Dogs on leash are fine on state land; Anthem’s own trails require leashes.
Take the flat alternative seriously. Anthem owns and maintains a 6.3-mile section of the Maricopa Trail that runs from I-17 through Anthem, Desert Hills and New River to New River Road along the mountain’s base: flat, signed, horse-friendly and free, with a real trailhead. For a bigger day in the same country, the Black Canyon Trail starts ten minutes west, and the Single Track Trailhead on the New River side is the back door up this same mountain for anyone with a high-clearance vehicle.
Skip it if you are a visitor with a car and one morning. Deem Hills and Apache Wash are on the way and have parking lots.
The mountain the state is still holding for sale
The country around Daisy Mountain was farmed and foraged by the Hohokam along the tributaries of the Agua Fria, and ranged afterward by the Yavapai and Tonto Apache; the mountain’s neighbor to the northwest, Gavilan Peak, took its name after a fight between the Cavalry and the Apache at its foot in the 1880s. The first settlement anywhere near was a stage stop. In 1868 Lord Darrell Duppa, the Englishman who named Phoenix and Tempe, opened a station at New River on the north slope of Gavilan Peak; a second stop, now the Wranglers Roost, followed in 1890. New River stayed the end of the pavement for decades: the old Black Canyon Highway stopped there, and a dirt road went on to Prescott.
Why Daisy Mountain is nobody’s park comes down to a line drawn in 1910. The Enabling Act that let Arizona write a constitution, signed June 20 of that year, granted the new state sections of every township to be held in trust for its public schools, some ten million acres in all, and the State Land Department was created in 1915 to manage them. The land was not given to be kept; the trust’s duty is to earn money for its beneficiaries by selling or leasing it, and the department has since disposed of roughly a sixth of it. Daisy Mountain’s six square miles fell in the trust, and there they have stayed, zoned in effect for whatever a buyer will pay. Who Daisy was, we have not found; the name does not appear in the Enabling Act or on any history we could locate.
For most of the twentieth century that did not matter, because nobody lived within ten miles. Interstate 17 replaced the Black Canyon Highway and made the mountain the big bare peak on the right as you climb out of the Valley, and that was all. Then, in 1998, Del Webb began building Anthem at the mountain’s foot, a master-planned community of 23,000 people by the 2020 census, with a country club wrapped around the mountain’s south side and a street grid that ran to the trust-land boundary within a few years. The residents did what anyone would with a mountain in the backyard: they walked up it, and the end of a Parkside cul-de-sac became the mountain’s only public door.
The fight since has been about turning a loophole into a park. The North Country Conservancy has made a Daisy Mountain Preserve its main goal, Maricopa County has asked the State Land Department for a formal trail across the mountain with maintenance help from a nonprofit called Friends of Daisy Mountain Trails, and the Anthem Community Council has posted the rules that keep the informal arrangement alive: a State Land permit, no parking at Navigation Way, no motors. The hard part is money. A preserve means somebody buys the land from the trust at appraised value, as Scottsdale did for its McDowell Sonoran Preserve with a dedicated sales tax, and no city or county has stepped up for Daisy Mountain. Until one does, the mountain remains what it was in 1915: an asset the state is holding, with a trail on it that exists because the neighbors are tolerant.
Why it matters
Daisy Mountain is the clearest example in the north Valley of what State Trust Land means and why it is not the same as public land. Scottsdale spent thirty years and a sales tax turning its own trust-land mountains into the McDowell Sonoran Preserve; Anthem has a mountain just as good and no mechanism to buy it, so it has a permit, a cul-de-sac and a tow truck instead. It is also a very good short summit with a very bad trailhead. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: if you are staying in Anthem, buy the permit and walk up at dawn in January for the best view of the north Valley you will get; if you are not, drive on to a park with a parking lot.