What is First Water Trailhead?
If Peralta is the Superstitions’ front door and Lost Dutchman is the lobby, First Water is the side entrance the regulars use. It is a free dirt lot at about 2,300 feet at the end of a forest road off the Apache Trail, with vault toilets and nothing else, and it is the start of three trails that open up the whole northwest quarter of the 160,000-acre Superstition Wilderness. The Dutchman’s Trail #104 heads east and south toward Weavers Needle and eventually Peralta. The Second Water Trail #236 runs northeast down a drainage to Boulder Canyon. The Black Mesa Trail #241 connects them across a basalt-capped mesa.
Put together, those three make the Black Mesa loop, about 9 miles with roughly 1,000 feet of total gain: out the Dutchman’s Trail past Parker Pass, up onto Black Mesa, down into Garden Valley, a dead-flat saguaro forest with some of the biggest cactus in the range, and back down Second Water to the car. Weavers Needle shows itself from the mesa and the Dutchman’s Trail. Shorter options: the Dutchman’s Trail to Parker Pass and back is about 4 miles, and Second Water to Garden Valley and back about 4.5.
Compared with Peralta, the climbing is gentler, the distances are longer, and the number of people is a fraction. It is also the jumping-off point for a lot of the wilderness backpacking: La Barge Canyon, Charlebois Spring, the long way round to Peralta. What you get is a long, lonely, mostly flat desert day with big views. What you do not get is water, shade, a paved road or a short summit.
How to hike First Water right
Pay nothing. No fee, and no Tonto Pass. The lake sites a few miles up the road charge; this trailhead does not. It is day use only: no overnight parking and no camping at the lot, though wilderness camping is allowed beyond it.
Get there. Loop 101 south, US 60 east, exit Idaho Road north to SR 88 (the Apache Trail), and right. Pass Lost Dutchman State Park at mile 5; about 5 miles past the park, just after the Tonto National Forest boundary sign and before the road starts to twist, turn right on First Water Road, Forest Road 78. It is about 2.5 miles of graded dirt to the trailhead, rocky and rutted in places. The Forest Service says the road is “not maintained for passenger vehicles” and recommends high clearance; most sedans do it slowly when dry. About 60 minutes from Old Town, the last ten on dirt. Camping along the road is banned, as the First Water Road guide explains.
Park early. The main lot holds a couple of dozen cars and fills on cool-season weekends. A horse-trailer lot about half a mile back takes the overflow; it adds a mile to your day but spares you a ticket.
Pick the season. October through April. Garden Valley and the mesa have no shade, so this is a cold-month loop; by late April and in late September it is a sunrise start and an early finish, and in summer it is closed to common sense. The summer rules apply.
Water. None at the trailhead. Second Water and the creek near the Dutchman’s and Black Mesa junction run after wet winters, usually December through March, and are dry by late spring. Carry two to three liters for the loop and treat anything you find.
The loop. Do it clockwise, Dutchman’s Trail out and Second Water back, so the climb onto Black Mesa is in the morning and the long, open Second Water drainage is behind you before noon. Second Water is the one that still runs after a wet winter, and the pools in the narrows about a mile before the trailhead are the reward on the way out. The junctions at the Dutchman’s and Second Water split and at Black Mesa are signed but easy to blow through, and the trails are rocky and braided in the washes. Carry a map or a downloaded track and watch for cairns in Second Water.
Dogs. Allowed on leash. Nine open miles is a lot for a dog outside of winter; make it a November through March outing.
Skip it if it has stormed in the last 48 hours. The road is not hard, but it is the kind of road that ruins a day in a rental car after rain. Go to Peralta or Boulder Canyon instead.
A spring, a cow camp and the way in
First Water is named for what it is: one of the few reliable springs on the northwest side of the Superstitions, where the mountain’s drainage reaches the bajada. People used it long before anyone drove to it. Salado farmers built a pueblo in Garden Valley, the saguaro flat on the loop, that a Phoenix newspaper in 1893 described as three stories high around a stone-paved courtyard. The Western Apache and the Yavapai, who call the mountain Wi:kchsawa, held the range afterward, and the springs along its base were their water too.
The prospectors came next. When Jacob Waltz died in Phoenix in 1891 and the Lost Dutchman story began, the First Water drainage became one of the standard ways in. The road came with the dam: between 1903 and 1905 the government built the road now called the Apache Trail along the foot of the range to haul freight to the Roosevelt Dam site, and ranch tracks branched off it to the springs and cow camps on the mountain’s edge. First Water Road was one of them.
The camp at the end of it belonged to the Barkleys. In 1907 William A. “Tex” Barkley bought James Bark’s ranch, the Quarter Circle U, and ran cattle across the west end of the range for almost fifty years. The Barkley camp at the end of First Water Road, active in the 1930s, was known for decades as First Water Ranch; the local historian Tom Kollenborn worked there as a young man in the 1950s and wrote that the old camp is now lost. In 1931 the cow camp was the way in for Adolph Ruth, a treasure hunter with a Peralta map, who was packed through First Water to Willow Springs in West Boulder Canyon and never came out; his skull turned up that December, and the national press made the Lost Dutchman a permanent American story.
Wilderness fixed the trailhead where it is. The Forest Service set aside the Superstition Primitive Area in 1939, the Wilderness Act made it the Superstition Wilderness in 1964, and the 1984 Arizona Wilderness Act enlarged it to about 160,000 acres. The boundary sits at the end of FR 78, so the ranch track became a trailhead and the cattle trails became the Dutchman’s, Second Water and Black Mesa trails.
The newest change is about sleeping, not hiking. The pullouts along First Water Road were for years the Valley’s free campground, and by the 2010s they showed it. In January 2023 the Mesa Ranger District banned camping within 300 feet of the road over trash and dumped wastewater, and in January 2026 it renewed the ban through January 2031. The trailhead and the trails stayed open.
Why it matters
First Water is the Superstitions as the people who worked them knew them: a spring, a cow camp at the end of a dirt road, and trails that go somewhere other than a famous view. Peralta and the state park show you the mountain; First Water shows you its back country, the flat saguaro valleys and basalt mesas that ranchers, prospectors and the Salado before them actually lived in. It is also the trailhead that most clearly explains the wilderness line, drawn where the road ended. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: on a dry winter day with six free hours, the Black Mesa loop from here is the best long walk in the range, and you will have most of it to yourself.