What is Geode Hill?
Below the Mogollon Rim north of Payson, the limestone that once lay at the bottom of a shallow sea now weathers out of the hillsides as round, fist-sized nodules. When the coral and shell inside dissolved after burial, it left a void, and groundwater lined some of those voids with quartz crystals. The result is a hillside along an old forest road where geodes sit on the surface, mixed with solid nodules that look identical until you hit them. Rockhounding guidebooks have listed it for decades as the Payson geode and nodule site; off-road guides call the area the Brody Hills; Google calls it Geode Hill and puts the pin on a residential street. The place itself is on the Tonto National Forest, down Forest Road 1600 off the Control Road at about 5,700 feet, under juniper and pine with the Rim filling the sky to the north.
It is a collecting site, not a hike. You walk a rough road downhill for half a mile or so with a hammer and a bag, turn rocks over, crack a few, and carry out the good ones. The forest allows that, within limits that are worth knowing before you go.
What you get is a free afternoon of real rockhounding two hours from Scottsdale, legal, with a decent chance of a crystal-lined geode for every member of the family. What you do not get is a sign, a lot, a toilet, shade, a guarantee, or a road that Google understands.
How to do it right
Know the rules before you swing. Limited personal collection of common rocks and minerals is allowed on the Tonto without a permit: surface only, no digging with tools or machines, disturbance no larger than a 32-ounce bottle, roughly 10 pounds per person per day, nothing for sale or trade. Petrified wood and vertebrate fossils have separate rules; arrowheads and pottery may never be taken. The Payson Ranger District at (928) 474-7900 can tell you about any claims in the area.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, to Payson. A mile north of the SR 260 junction turn right on Houston Mesa Road (FR 199) and follow it past Houston Mesa Campground, Water Wheel and the East Verde crossings about 12 miles to Whispering Pines, where it ends at the Control Road (FR 64). Turn right (east) on the Control Road, graded dirt, and go about 3 miles to FR 1600 on the right. Drive it about 0.7 miles to where the first rocks threaten an oil pan, and park; there is room for a car or two. Figure about 130 minutes from Old Town. Beyond the barbed-wire gate the road is for Jeeps and ATVs; walk it, and take the right fork at the split below the gate.
Ignore the Google pin. It sits on Neal Drive, a residential street in Whispering Pines. Follow it and you will be idling on a neighbor’s street with a hammer. Use the coordinates on this page, and do not let your phone route you along the Control Road as a shortcut to anywhere; in July 2026 the Gila County Sheriff was pulling passenger cars off it after Google sent them that way.
Pick the season. April to November, best in spring and fall. The Control Road is slick after rain and can be snowbound from December into March. July and August afternoons bring lightning to this slope; be back at the car by 1 p.m. and read the monsoon field manual if you are new to the Rim.
Water and facilities. None. A gallon per person in warm weather. The nearest toilets are the vaults at Water Wheel and the East Verde crossings; the nearest store is Payson.
Gear. A rock hammer or brick hammer, safety glasses for every person swinging or watching, gloves, a bag or bucket, and a towel to wrap finds. A geode hit squarely sends chips in every direction, and there is no shade on the slope.
Hunt smart. The geodes get thicker the farther down the hill you go, so do not fill the bag with the first dozen. Pick the lighter rocks of a given size; hollow ones weigh less, and the ones that rattle are the prize. Leave the fossil coral along the road for the next family.
Dogs. Allowed. Keep them clear of flying rock chips and carry their water.
Skip it if the forest roads are a mess or you want pavement to the fossils. The Paleo Site on SR 260 is a paved-lot alternative, and the Dude Fire memorial on the Control Road east of here is the other reason to drive this road.
A sea floor under the Rim, and the road that runs along it
The rock is the oldest part of the story. About 300 million years ago a shallow sea covered what is now the Rim country and laid down beds of limestone full of coral and shell. Buried, the fossils dissolved and left hollows; groundwater moving through the rock lined some of them with quartz crystals and filled others solid. When the Rim rose and erosion stripped the hills north of Payson, the nodules weathered out and rolled downslope, which is why they lie on the surface of these hills and in the road cuts, hollow and solid mixed together. Rockhounding guides have listed the Payson geode and nodule site for decades; the Forest Service, which owns the ground, lists only the rules.
The people came much later. The Payson basin is Te-go-suk, place of the yellow water, to the Dilzhe’e, the Tonto Apache, who shared the country below the Rim with Yavapai bands and who were preceded, over a thousand years, by Hohokam, Mogollon, Salado and Sinagua farmers and traders. The Army fought the last battle of the Apache Wars in Arizona just north of here, the Battle of Big Dry Wash, in 1882, the same year settlers founded a logging, mining and ranching hamlet called Union Park, or Green Valley, in the basin. The post office opened on March 3, 1884, the town was renamed Payson for an Illinois congressman who had never seen it, and the first rodeo was held that year; it has run every August since. The Tonto National Forest was created in 1905 to protect the watershed above Roosevelt Dam, and the limestone hills, the East Verde and the ranch tracks along the foot of the Rim went into it. The Control Road, FR 64, is the Forest Service’s road along that foot, below and parallel to the Rim Road on top, used for fire and range work and by the summer-home tracts that grew up on forest inholdings along the East Verde, Whispering Pines among them.
What made the Rim country the Valley’s summer escape was pavement. The Beeline Highway from Phoenix was paved to Payson in 1958, cutting a day’s drive to two hours, and the cabins, campgrounds and rockhounds followed. What made the slopes above the Control Road what they are today was fire. In late June 1990 the lightning-caused Dude Fire ran down off the Rim east of here, burned about 28,000 acres in ten days, destroyed 63 structures including Zane Grey’s cabin, and killed six firefighters in a burnover on a single afternoon, among them the first woman wildland firefighter killed in Arizona; it was the worst fire in the state’s history to that date and changed how the country fights fire in the Rim’s chaparral and pine. The young forest and open grass along the Control Road east of Whispering Pines are its signature, and the memorial to the six stands on that road.
The newest history is about the roads themselves. In July 2017 a flash flood on Ellison Creek and the East Verde killed 10 people at the Water Wheel swimming hole on Houston Mesa Road, the road you take to get here, and the vault toilets and warning signs at the crossings date from after it. And every summer since mapping apps began routing through traffic onto the Control Road, the Gila County Sheriff has pulled passenger cars out of it; in July 2026 the office issued a public warning after a run of stuck vehicles on FR 64 and its spurs. Geode Hill’s Google pin, on a residential street three miles from the rocks, is the same problem in miniature.
Why it matters
Geode Hill is the Rim country reduced to a hillside: a sea floor older than the dinosaurs, Apache ground, a forest set aside for the Valley’s water, a dirt road built for fire crews, a fire that rewrote the forest, and a map pin that sends people to the wrong place. It is also one of the few places near Scottsdale where a family can legally take something home from public land, which is a rarer privilege than it sounds. The verdict is practical: go in spring or fall, use these coordinates and not Google’s, park before the rocks, walk down with glasses on, take ten pounds and leave the rest, and be off the slope before the afternoon clouds build.