What is the Granite Mountain Trail?
Granite Mountain is the landmark of Prescott, a dome of stacked granite boulders northwest of town that tops out at 7,626 feet and anchors a 9,799-acre wilderness. The Forest Service calls it the most popular wilderness on the forest, which it credits to the 20-minute paved drive from downtown and the strangeness of walking among house-sized boulders instead of trees. Trail #261 is the way up. It is not the Granite Mountain in north Scottsdale, which has its own trailhead and a fraction of the elevation.
From the Metate Trailhead at about 5,650 feet, the trail climbs gently through pinyon, juniper and ponderosa for about a mile and a half to Blair Pass, a saddle where the Little Granite and Clark Spring trails come in. Then it turns onto the mountain and gets serious: a long series of switchbacks across open granite benches, with the view opening a little more on each turn, until the maintained trail levels onto the mountain’s southern shoulder at a vista point around 7,100 feet. Call it four miles one way and roughly 1,500 feet of gain, though published figures vary by a few tenths and a couple hundred feet. The Prescott basin, Thumb Butte, the Bradshaws and the Sierra Prieta are below you; on a clear winter day the San Francisco Peaks show to the northeast. The true summit is a mile farther through brush and boulders with no trail. Most people, correctly, stop at the vista.
What you get is a real mountain hike with a trailhead that has water and a toilet, two and a half hours from Scottsdale. What you do not get is a summit, shade above the pass, or a short day.
How to hike it right
Pay at the kiosk. $5 per vehicle at the Metate Trailhead, free on Wednesdays. Prescott National Forest passes ($20 for four months, $40 annual) and America the Beautiful passes are honored. The Forest Service writes tickets here. Campers at Yavapai Campground can walk to the trailhead on connector trails, which is also the answer when the lot fills on a winter Saturday by nine.
Get there. About 2 hours 25 minutes from Old Town, all paved. Loop 101 to I-17 north, exit at Cordes Junction onto SR 69, through Prescott Valley and downtown Prescott to Iron Springs Road. From the corner of Iron Springs and Williamson Valley Road, go northwest about 3 miles on Iron Springs, turn right on Granite Basin Road (Forest Road 374), and follow it 3.8 miles to the Metate Trailhead on the left, past Yavapai Campground. The trail starts across the road from the lot. The gate locks at night on the posted schedule: 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. May through September, 7 to 5 in winter, 7 to 7 in spring.
Pick the season. Year-round. October through May is ideal. In summer the upper switchbacks are fully exposed and the trail is a start-at-dawn affair, with afternoon thunderstorms from late June through mid-September that you do not want to meet on open granite. In winter the upper trail holds snow and ice for days after a storm.
Water. Drinking water and a vault toilet at the trailhead, nothing on the trail. Two liters per person is the minimum; three in warm weather.
Start by seven and stop at the vista. The first 1.5 miles to Blair Pass are shaded and gentle; the switchbacks above face south and west across bare rock and are hot by late morning even in May. The vista point is where the maintained trail ends. The summit is another mile of unmarked boulder-hopping that adds an hour each way and not much view. Set a turn-around time against the gate hours.
Wilderness rules. Groups of 15 or fewer, dogs leashed, no bikes past the boundary, no campfires anywhere in the wilderness, no camping within 200 feet of the trail. Peregrine falcons nest on the cliffs and the climbing routes close from roughly February 1 to July 15; hikers are unaffected.
Dogs. On leash, always; it is a wilderness rule, not a courtesy.
Skip it if eight miles is more than you want. Thumb Butte is the two-mile Prescott hike with a view, the Peavine Trail at Watson Lake is the flat one, and Tom’s Thumb in the McDowells gives you the boulder experience without leaving Scottsdale.
Boulders, falcons and the Doce Fire
The rock came first and it is very old. Granite Mountain is Mint Wash granodiorite, dated to about 1.68 billion years, formed when chains of volcanic islands collided with the edge of the continent and were shot through with granite. The boulders you walk among are what a billion and a half years of weathering does to that. To the Yavapai the mountain is ʼWi:kvte:wa, and it is a sacred place; the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe, whose reservation sits on the other side of town, still regards it as one. In the 1860s Anglo surveyors tried to rename it Mount Gurley, after John A. Gurley, the first appointed governor of Arizona Territory, who died in 1863 before he could take the office; the name did not survive him by much.
The federal government arrived with the Prescott Forest Reserve on May 10, 1898, which became a National Forest in 1907. The next layer was Depression labor. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps, working from a base camp at what is now the old Yavapai County Fairgrounds, built Yavapai Campground beside Granite Basin Lake and worked the Thumb Butte country across town; the campground was used as a backdrop in the 1941 film Pride of the Bowery, set in a 1934 CCC camp. Granite Basin became Prescott’s playground, and the mountain above it drew rock climbers to the 500-foot southwest face, which is still rated among the best granite in Arizona.
The Arizona Wilderness Act of 1984 drew a line around the mountain: 9,799 acres by the Forest Service’s count, which closed the upper trail to bikes and the whole dome to roads and made Trail #261 the way up. Peregrine falcons nest on the cliffs, and the Forest Service closes the climbing routes each year from about February 1 to July 15 while they do; the hiking trail stays open.
June 2013 was the month that marked the mountain. The Doce Fire burned 6,767 acres of the wilderness, roughly three quarters of it, running across the granite benches that the trail switchbacks through above Blair Pass; the brush and the scattered pines you walk past today are what has grown back in a dozen years. The crews on that fire included the Granite Mountain Hotshots, the Prescott Fire Department’s own crew, formed in 2002 as a fuels-mitigation unit and certified as a hotshot crew in 2008, which took the name of the mountain that stands over the city. On June 30, 2013, on the Yarnell Hill Fire 30 miles to the south, 19 of the crew’s 20 members were killed when the fire overran them. The memorial state park is at Yarnell. The mountain the crew was named for keeps the fire scar.
Why it matters
Granite Mountain is where Prescott’s self-image lives: the boulder dome on the city’s horizon, the sacred mountain of the Yavapai, the climbing cliff, the CCC lake at its foot, and since 2013 the name on the worst day in the history of American wildland firefighting since 1933. It is also the clearest example in central Arizona of what the 1984 wilderness law did, which was to take a mountain 20 minutes from a city and make the only way up it a four-mile walk. For a Scottsdale hiker the verdict is simple: it is the real mountain hike two and a half hours from Old Town, worth half a day and five dollars, and the vista point, not the summit, is the destination.