What is the Gabe Zimmerman Trailhead?
Southern Arizona has lost most of its running streams, which makes Cienega Creek a small marvel: a desert creek fed by groundwater that still flows year-round in stretches, under cottonwoods and willows, through a canyon of sand and bedrock between the Empire and Rincon mountains. Pima County began buying the land in 1986 and now manages the Cienega Creek Natural Preserve for its endangered fish and frogs, which is why access is by free permit. The one place you can walk in without one is here, where the Arizona Trail crosses the preserve and the county built a trailhead for it.
The lot holds 22 cars and 8 horse trailers. From the gate the Arizona Trail heads northeast and drops about a mile and a quarter into Davidson Canyon to meet the creek; a horse bypass takes a parallel line. North, the trail is Passage 8, Rincon Valley, 13.9 miles through Colossal Cave Mountain Park to the boundary of Saguaro National Park. South, it passes under I-10 through a culvert and climbs into Las Colinas. A short walk from the gate stands a steel arch with a tile portrait of Gabe Zimmerman, Gabrielle Giffords’ outreach director, who had worked on the 2009 bill that made the Arizona Trail a National Scenic Trail and who was killed in the January 8, 2011 Tucson shooting. The county renamed the trailhead for him that year and dedicated it on January 4, 2012.
What you get is an easy two-to-three-mile round trip to running water in the desert, free, with the best day access to the Arizona Trail in southern Arizona. What you do not get is a toilet, a tap, shade, or the right to wander the creek without the county’s permit.
How to hike Cienega Creek right
Get the permit if you want the creek. Parking and the Arizona Trail are free with no permit. Leaving the trail into the preserve, to follow the creek or poke into side canyons, needs the free county permit, requested online and emailed to you. Apply a few days ahead, print it and leave a copy on the dash. Groups over 10 need a facility impact permit three or more days ahead, and overnight parking requires a separate form.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east through Tucson to exit 281 (Sonoita/Patagonia, SR 83). Cross to the north side of the freeway and turn onto Marsh Station Road, then follow it northeast about 3 miles to the signed trailhead at 16248 E. Marsh Station Road. About 150 minutes from Old Town. The lot is open dawn to dusk.
Leave the trains alone. Two more small lots 0.3 mile up the road sit at the Three Bridges, where the Union Pacific crosses the canyon on trestles. The county says plainly they are for watching trains, not for entering the preserve, and that crossing the tracks or walking under the trestle is trespassing on railroad property. It is patrolled.
Pick the season. October through April. The grassland approach is hot and shadeless from May on, and July through September is flood season. Winter and spring are also when the creek runs most reliably; flow drops in late spring and stretches can be dry by June.
Watch the sky. Davidson Canyon and Cienega Creek drain a large watershed and rise fast under a clear local sky. The county warns of unstable banks, loose sand and debris and tells you to plan a route to high ground before you need it. Stay out of the canyon bottom when storms are over the Santa Ritas or Empire Mountains, and read our flash flood entry and the monsoon field manual if the idea is new.
Water and facilities. None at the lot: no toilet, no tap, no shade. Creek water is for the fish. Carry what you drink.
The walk. Go early on a cool-season weekday and take the Arizona Trail down to the creek first; it is a little over a mile of easy descent, and the first sound of running water under the cottonwoods is the whole point. A 7-mile loop south through the I-10 tunnel exists for people who enjoy culverts.
Dogs, horses, bikes. Dogs on leash. Horses and mountain bikes on the Arizona Trail alignment only; the preserve itself is foot traffic.
Skip it if you want a campsite with the creek. Cieneguita Campground in Las Cienegas, upstream on the same creek, is the place to sleep, and Douglas Spring is the Arizona Trail’s backcountry camp in the Rincons.
One canyon, three bridges and a trail for a hiker
Cienega means marsh, and the creek that carries the name has been drawing people for as long as there have been people in the Tucson basin. Hohokam families ground seeds in bedrock mortars in Davidson Canyon near where it meets the creek, and the holes are still in the rock a short walk from the trailhead. Water in a dry valley made this a route as well as a place: the easiest way east out of Tucson runs up the creek, and everyone who came later used it.
In 1858 the Butterfield Overland Mail opened Cienega Station on the creek, a stop on the stage line from St. Louis to San Francisco. The stop went by many names over the following decades, Pantano Station and Marsh Station among them, which is where the road to this trailhead gets its name. In 1880 the Southern Pacific laid its Sunset Route up the creek and founded the railroad town of Pantano; floods drove the town to the north bank in 1887, and today it is a few foundations, a water tower and a cemetery inside the preserve.
The bridges came in layers. A rival line, the El Paso and Southwestern, built a second track and its own bridge over the creek in 1912; the Southern Pacific bought it in 1924 and ran the two as a double main line. The concrete arch Cienega Bridge followed in 1920 and 1921 and carried US 80, a transcontinental highway, from 1926 to 1956; it is on the National Register of Historic Places. The trestles at the Three Bridges, where you can watch trains from Marsh Station Road, belong to the same story: a century of railroads and highways squeezing through one gap in the hills.
Protection came from an unlikely office. In 1986 the Board of Supervisors let the county’s Regional Flood Control District buy the creek corridor, to protect the riparian habitat, take the edge off storm peaks downstream and keep groundwater recharging. The land had been overgrazed and mined for sand and gravel; the county began restoration in the late 1990s, and the preserve now protects about 4,000 acres and more than 12 miles of creek. Upstream, the Bureau of Land Management’s Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, established in 2000, protects the headwaters.
The trail is the newest layer. Dale Shewalter, a Flagstaff schoolteacher, walked from Nogales to Utah in 1985 to prove a cross-state route was possible, and the Arizona Trail grew piece by piece after that. Congress made it a National Scenic Trail in 2009, in a bill Gabe Zimmerman worked on as Giffords’ outreach director. He was killed in the January 8, 2011 shooting at a Tucson supermarket, at 30. The trail was finished later that year, when its last gap along the Gila River was built, and the Arizona Trail Association asked the county to name this trailhead for him. The arch was dedicated on January 4, 2012.
Why it matters
Cienega Creek is what most of southern Arizona’s rivers looked like before groundwater pumping and channel cutting dried them up, and it survives because a flood-control district decided a living creek was worth buying. The trailhead layers on everything else that has run through this gap: a Hohokam grinding site, a stage station, two railroads, a highway and a trail that crosses the whole state. It is also a memorial to a young man whose job was the unglamorous work of getting a trail through Congress. For a Scottsdale visitor it is a long drive for a short walk, and worth it once, on a cool morning after a wet winter, combined with a day in Saguaro National Park or a run up the Arizona Trail’s other trailheads like Kelvin on the Gila.