What is Estrella Mountain Regional Park Campground?
For most of its history Estrella Mountain Regional Park had the smallest campground in the county system: a handful of narrow hookup pads beside the rodeo arena with no shade and no showers, plus a gravel lot where you could dry-camp for a few dollars. Campers reported in 2021 that the park had stopped offering camping altogether, and the owner’s maps list, which guessed at 37 sites, was working from older information still.
What exists in 2026 is a construction site. Under the park’s 2016 master plan, the county removed the arena and is building a proper 50-site developed campground there: water and electric at the sites, two restroom buildings with showers, five covered camp-host sites, a dump station, a fenced equestrian trailhead, a designated dog area and a rebuilt Rainbow Valley trailhead. The project page says construction will take about two years from early 2025, and the Rainbow Valley and Coldwater trailheads are closed from February 3, 2025 through March 2027 for it. The park’s own camping page, meanwhile, says only that it “periodically will rent out their host sites,” by phone. That is the honest state of things: no campground now, a good one coming.
When it opens it should be worth knowing about. The site sits at about 950 feet on the bajada below the Sierra Estrella, at the edge of 58 miles of trail that see a fraction of the traffic of McDowell Mountain or Usery, with the county’s only grass picnic area a short drive away and the Gadsden-Rainbow Valley loops starting from the campground’s own trailhead. What you get in 2026 is a plan and a phone number. What you will get in 2027, if the schedule holds, is the only county campground built with horse trailers in mind.
How to camp Estrella right
Do not show up expecting a site. Nothing on the county’s reservation map exists for Estrella in 2026, and the gate staff will send you to White Tank. Ask about host sites at (602) 506-2930 ext. 6; the park rents them occasionally, by phone, and that is the whole overnight inventory.
Know the future rates. When the campground opens, the county’s approved schedule puts a developed site at $50 a night in 2027 and $60 in 2028, plus a $10 reservation fee and $10 a day for an extra vehicle, booked up to six months ahead at exploremaricopacountyparks.org with the usual rules: check-in 1 p.m., out at noon, eight people per site, 14 nights maximum in 28 days. Watch the park-projects page and the reservation site from about the fall of 2027; a brand-new campground beside the quietest trails in the Valley will book out the moment people notice it.
Get there. Loop 101 south to I-10 west, exit Estrella Parkway south three miles to Vineyard Avenue, then east to the park entrance on the south side; about 50 minutes from Old Town, all paved. Inside the park the loop road passes the picnic ground and nature center and reaches the construction zone near the Arena trailhead. Park entry is $10 per vehicle in 2026.
Hike and ride anyway. The park is open. With Rainbow Valley and Coldwater closed, start from the Baseline trailhead (hikers and mountain bikers), the Gila trailhead (hikers only) or the Quail trailhead (all users) and use the connector trails; parking at those is limited. The Competitive Track closes for occasional events. The Quartz Peak Trail, the hard climb into the range proper, starts from BLM land on the far side and is a separate trip.
Pick the season. Whenever it opens, October through April. The park is low and hot, and the storms of August 17, 2026, which closed the playground and several ramadas, showed how hard the monsoon hits this side of the Valley. Check the alerts page before any visit.
Water. Drinking water and flush restrooms exist at the picnic area and nature center today; the campground’s own will come with the buildings.
Dogs. The plan includes a dedicated dog area, and county rules will apply: six-foot leash, licensed, never left unattended.
Horses. The fenced equestrian trailhead is the feature to watch; if it is built as planned, this becomes the one county campground designed for riders. See the horseback riding guide for where to ride in the meantime.
Skip it in 2026, because you have to. For a West Valley night use White Tank’s campground, Lake Pleasant or the seven primitive sites at Skyline, and check the county’s project page before you believe any app that says Estrella has sites.
The county’s first park and its last campground
The Sierra Estrella, the Star Mountains, rise to 4,512 feet at Hayes Peak over the villages of the Akimel O’odham and the Maricopa, the Piipaash, who farmed the Gila below them when the Spanish arrived and who still hold most of the range inside the Gila River Indian Community. The two peoples fought together, turning back a Yuma and Mohave war party at the Battle of Pima Butte in 1857, two years before the reservation was drawn in 1859. The land had changed countries only a few years earlier: the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 moved the range from Mexico to the United States, and the Butterfield Overland stage soon carried California-bound travelers along the Gila under the mountains, a route the railroad made obsolete within a generation.
The north end of the range, outside the reservation, stayed open desert into the twentieth century while the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company bought 16,000 acres of the valley to the north in 1917 to grow cotton for tire cords, founding the farm town that became Goodyear in 1946. In 1954 Maricopa County opened Estrella Mountain Regional Park, 19,840 acres of bajada and mountain front, the first park in what became an eleven-park county system and still the only one with a grass picnic ground, 65 acres of it. Over the decades the county added a rodeo arena, a nature center, a golf course on the river side and, beside the arena, a small campground: a loop of narrow hookup pads with no shade and a gravel lot for dry camping. It was the least of the county’s campgrounds, and by 2021 campers were reporting that it had closed.
The 2016 master plan called for something better, and the growth of the West Valley made it urgent; Goodyear passed 95,000 people in the 2020 census, up from 18,911 twenty years earlier, and the county’s other campgrounds book out every winter. Construction began in early 2025, the Rainbow Valley and Coldwater trailheads closed on February 3, 2025, and the arena came down to make room for 50 developed sites, showers, a dump station, five host sites, a dog area and a fenced equestrian trailhead, the first in the county system built for horse campers. The target is March 2027. The county’s new fee schedule has already priced the sites at $50 in 2027 and $60 in 2028.
The storms of August 17, 2026 were a reminder of what the site is: a low bajada that floods, where the playground and three ramadas were closed for weeks afterward. When the campground opens it will be the newest in the system and the first new one in a generation, beside 58 miles of trail that most of the Valley has never ridden.
Why it matters
Estrella explains how the Valley’s county parks came to be: a 1954 purchase of empty desert at the edge of a farm town, used lightly for sixty years, and now surrounded by a city of 100,000 people who want somewhere to camp. It is also a lesson in reading maps; apps still list 37 sites and a $12 dry-camping lot at a place that has had neither for years. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is to wait: there is nothing to sleep in here in 2026, White Tank and Lake Pleasant have the sites, and the fall of 2027 is when to start watching the county’s reservation page for a brand-new hookup campground under the Star Mountains.