What is Five Pools?
East of Superior the land breaks into the dacite cliffs of Apache Leap and, behind them, Devil’s Canyon, a long drainage that runs south from the Oak Flat mesa toward Mineral Creek and the Ray Mine. In its lower reach, at about 3,000 feet, the canyon drops over a chain of waterfalls into bowls carved smooth and deep, a place canyoneers call Five Pools: about 210 feet of falls in total, the individual drops running from 15 to 60 feet, each landing in water you must swim. Vines and moss hang on the walls, the walls rise far above the falls, and on a May afternoon with full pools it is as beautiful a spot as there is in central Arizona.
It is also a technical canyon. There is no trail from anywhere. The standard route drives the deteriorating Forest Road 215 south from Oak Flat, walks down Hackberry Creek on slickrock and boulders past a Class 3 dryfall, turns down Devil’s Canyon through brush and poison oak, and then commits to five rappels, swims, and vertical Class 4 scrambles to get back out. Guidebooks list the loop at 5 to 8 miles and 900 to 1,800 feet, which understates the day. On the scramble scale, this is past the top of it.
It is for experienced canyoneers with ropes, anchors, wetsuits and a partner who has done this kind of thing, and for nobody else. What you get is a chain of pools that the Apache knew as the home of the mountain spirits long before anyone counted them. What you do not get is a trail, a toilet, drinkable water, cell signal, a legal certainty about the road in, or a swim you can walk to.
How to do Five Pools right
Decide honestly first. If you are not already a canyoneer with your own anchors and a partner who has run Class C canyons, do not go. The walls above the third pool are far higher than the 60-foot rappel, the water is deep and cold, the exits are vertical Class 4 moves on wet rock, and people have needed rescue here. If you are, read on.
Fees and permits. None. The canyon is Tonto National Forest and open.
Check the land status. Oak Flat, Chi’chil Bildagoteel to the Western Apache, became Resolution Copper’s private property on March 16, 2026, with lawsuits still running. The company says it will keep the campground, roads and climbing areas open for the foreseeable future and has hired a contractor to manage the campground. That is a statement, not a right of way; check its notices and the Globe Ranger District before you go, and obey any posting or gate you find.
Get there. US 60 east through Apache Junction and Superior, about 100 minutes to the Oak Flat Campground turnoff (Forest Road 469, Magma Mine Road) 4 miles east of town. From there, Forest Road 215 heads south toward the head of Hackberry Creek and gets steadily worse; stock SUVs stop within a mile or two and walk, and only modified 4x4s make the last stretch. An alternate approach from SR 177 near milepost 165 reaches the EK Tank side through a gate and a washed-out ranch road, on foot. Neither is signed. The canyon itself is still national forest; the roads from the campground side cross the exchanged parcel.
Pick the season. Late April or May after a wet winter, when the pools are full and clear, or September into October. The water is cold in spring; bring a wetsuit for the swims. July and August are out: the approach is a furnace and the canyon flashes.
Flash floods. The canyon drains a huge block of high country east of Apache Leap and rises in minutes. No rain anywhere in the forecast, upstream included, or no trip. The flash-flood rules are not optional here, and a monsoon cell over the Pinals counts.
Water and the exit. Nothing drinkable; carry three liters and a filter. Plan the exit before you drop the first rope: the left side below the second pool gives a traverse back to your fixed lines, and the social trail west toward EK Tank avoids reversing the brushy canyon on the way out. No cell signal; leave a plan with someone.
Pack it out. Everything, including other people’s bottles. The spot has been loved hard on social media and it shows.
Skip it if what you want is a Saturday swim. Boyce Thompson Arboretum has Queen Creek running through it, the Gila River at Winkelman has a beach you can walk to, and Picketpost Mountain across the highway is the honest hard day hike in this country without a rope.
A canyon the Apache call Ga’an, now behind a company’s gate
The place has two names and they describe two different worlds. To the Western Apache the mesa above the canyon is Chi’chil Bildagoteel, the place of the Emory oaks, where families have gathered acorns and held girls’ Sunrise Dance ceremonies for as long as anyone’s story goes back, and the canyon below it is Ga’an Canyon, home of the Ga’an, the mountain spirits or messengers at the center of Apache religion. Salado and earlier people left grinding holes and sherds along the creeks. The English names, Oak Flat and Devil’s Canyon, came with the miners, and so did Apache Leap, the cliff above Superior named in an unverified 1870s story of warriors who jumped rather than surrender to cavalry. Silver was struck at the Silver King in 1875, Superior grew up on copper at the Magma mine, and the Apache were confined to the San Carlos reservation a few miles east, from which their descendants have been coming back to the oaks every year since.
The mesa was protected for sixty years by an administrative act almost nobody remembered. In 1955, during an expansion of the Tonto National Forest, President Eisenhower withdrew the Oak Flat campground area from mineral entry, which meant no one could stake a claim on it, and the withdrawal held for the next six decades. The copper underneath did not care. In the 1990s exploration drilling found one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits in the world a mile beneath the mesa, and Resolution Copper, a joint venture of Rio Tinto and BHP, spent the 2000s trying to get the land. Stand-alone exchange bills failed repeatedly in Congress from 2005 on; the San Carlos Apache Tribe opposed every one.
The exchange finally passed in December 2014, when Senator John McCain attached the Southeast Arizona Land Exchange to the National Defense Authorization Act hours before the vote; President Obama signed the bill on December 19. Resolution would receive 2,422 acres of national forest including Oak Flat in return for 5,344 acres of private land elsewhere in the state, with the transfer required within 60 days of a final environmental impact statement. Opponents noted that an appraisal put the company’s offered land at about $7 million and the ore under Oak Flat at more than $112 billion. In March 2016 the National Park Service listed Oak Flat on the National Register of Historic Places as a traditional cultural property; in February 2020 hundreds of tribal members walked 45 miles from San Carlos to the mesa. The Forest Service published the final EIS in January 2021, starting the 60-day clock, and the Apache Stronghold group sued on February 19, 2021 under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the 1852 Treaty of Santa Fe; the new Biden administration withdrew the EIS that March to redo tribal consultation.
The courts settled it slowly and all one way. The Ninth Circuit ruled in March 2024 that the mine would not impose a substantial burden on Apache religious exercise under the law; the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal on May 27, 2025; a last round of claims from preservation groups and tribal members was rejected in March 2026 and a second appeal denied. On March 16, 2026 the Forest Service conveyed Oak Flat to Resolution Copper, and the campground, the climbing areas and the forest roads on the mesa became private property with a corporate landowner promising to keep them open. Devil’s Canyon below the exchanged parcel, Five Pools included, stayed national forest.
What comes next is the mine or not. Resolution’s plan is a block-cave operation 5,000 to 7,000 feet down, about ten years to build and forty to run, that its own studies project would leave a subsidence crater roughly 2 miles wide and 1,100 feet deep where the oaks are, and that opponents say would draw down and contaminate the groundwater that feeds the canyon. Whether the pools still fill in a wet spring in 2070 is a question nobody can answer. For now the water runs, the walls are green, and the road in crosses a line that moved this year.
Why it matters
Five Pools is where the prettiest water in central Arizona meets the hardest question in Arizona land policy, and you cannot visit one without crossing the other. The canyon shows how much of the state’s beauty sits on contested ground: Apache sacred land, a Cold War mineral withdrawal, a midnight rider on a defense bill, a decade of litigation and a transfer completed this spring. For a Scottsdale reader the verdict has two parts. If you are not a canyoneer, go to Oak Flat while you still can, sit under the oaks, and leave the canyon to the people with ropes. If you are, go in May on a dry forecast, check the gate, and treat the place as what it is to the people who named it.