What is the Hassayampa River Preserve?
The Hassayampa is a river you mostly cannot see. It starts in the Bradshaw Mountains and runs a hundred miles to the Gila, but for nearly all of that distance it travels underground through sand and gravel. The name is Yavapai and is usually rendered as the upside-down river. Just below Wickenburg a shelf of granite bedrock forces it to the surface, and for a few miles there is a real, year-round desert river with a gallery forest of Fremont cottonwood and Goodding willow along it, a mesquite bosque on the terrace, and a spring-fed pond, Palm Lake, ringed by fan palms planted more than a century ago.
This is the Hassayampa River Preserve, about 770 acres. Frederick Brill ranched it from the late 1860s and planted one of Arizona’s first orchards; it became a dude ranch, then a mobile home park, then a degraded piece of a proposed retirement community. The Nature Conservancy bought it in 1986, replanted and fenced it, and reopened it in 1987. Since 2017 Maricopa County Parks has run it in partnership with the Conservancy. The old Brill house is the visitor center.
The trails are short and flat, seven of them totaling about five miles, and the point is to walk slowly. Some 280 bird species have been recorded: zone-tailed hawk, common black hawk, Harris’s hawk, vermilion flycatcher, the occasional yellow-billed cuckoo in summer. Mule deer and javelina use the bosque at dawn. What you get is shade, running water and birds within 90 minutes of Scottsdale, for $5. What you do not get is a workout, a dog walk, a Monday or a summer afternoon.
How to visit the Hassayampa right
Pay at the door. $5 per person, children 12 and under free, paid at the visitor center. A Maricopa County Parks annual pass works. The county fixed this rate in its January 2026 fee update through 2028. No reservations for a day visit; some ranger programs ask you to register.
Get there. About 1 hour 15 minutes from Old Town. Take Loop 101 west to US 60 (Grand Avenue) and follow it northwest through Surprise and Wittmann about 45 miles toward Wickenburg. The preserve entrance is on the right (north) side of US 60 about 3 miles before Wickenburg, signed, with a short gravel drive to the visitor center and a modest lot. It is all paved and the lot rarely fills except during weekend programs.
Mind the days and hours. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday through Sunday, 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. from May through October with trails closing at 3:30, and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. November through April with trails closing at 4:30. In summer the afternoons are shut, so plan for the morning and be out by ten; the forest is humid and warmer than it looks.
Pick the season. October through April is prime, with wintering raptors, waterfowl on Palm Lake and comfortable temperatures. Spring brings the nesting hawks and flycatchers. Summer is for birders at opening time and nobody else. Monsoon storms upstream can put the river over the trails for a day; the wildlife field guide covers what you are likely to see on the ground.
Walk it in order. River Ramble and Mesquite Meander first, when the birds are moving and before mid-morning school groups; Palm Lake for herons and ducks; Lykes Lookout, the one trail with a climb, for the view over the whole canopy. Palm Lake Loop is barrier-free. Binoculars matter here more than boots.
Water and toilets. Drinking water and restrooms at the visitor center. Bring a bottle for the trails anyway.
Dogs. Not allowed, no exceptions beyond service animals.
Skip it if you want effort or a trail you can run. The White Tank Mountains are on the way home and have the canyon climbs; Lake Pleasant has the water you can get into. For a desert creek with the same cottonwood shade closer to Scottsdale, Jewel of the Creek in Cave Creek is the small version. If you want water and birds without effort, this is the best place within 90 minutes of Scottsdale.
The ranch that was a dude ranch, a trailer park and almost a subdivision
The river surfaced here before anyone had a use for it, and the first people to use it were the Yavapai, whose word for it has been translated a dozen ways but always comes back to the same idea: a river that runs the wrong way, under its bed instead of in it. When the Vulture Mine opened at Wickenburg in the 1860s, the one stretch of the Hassayampa that ran in daylight became a stagecoach station, and then a ranch. Frederick Brill, a Prussian immigrant, took up the land in the late 1860s, with sources placing his ownership from about 1866 to 1871, and made it the most productive farm in the district: cattle, beef for the mine, one of the territory’s first orchards, and Arizona’s first carp farm in the spring-fed pond. His ranch house, built of adobe in those years, is the visitor center today.
In 1913 new owners turned the ranch into the Garden of Allah, one of Arizona’s first guest ranches, named for a popular romantic novel because the palms and the water looked like its setting. The fan palms were hauled in by wagon from Castle Hot Springs and planted around the pond that became Palm Lake; the Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix Railway stopped at a depot called Allah, and the ruins of it are still on the preserve. For a generation this was where easterners came to play cowboy on a river in the desert, and Wickenburg built its dude-ranch reputation on places like it.
Then it went the way of a lot of Arizona river bottom. By the 1960s the Garden of Allah had become the Shady River mobile home park, with trailers under the cottonwoods, cattle in the understory and the forest thinning year by year; a retirement community was proposed for the property. In 1974 Norman and Dorothy Lykes bought it, recognized what a perennial desert river with a gallery forest was worth, and began restoring it on their own. The lookout trail is named for them.
The Nature Conservancy bought the land from the Lykes family in 1986, spent a year pulling trailers, fencing cattle out, replanting cottonwood and willow, and opened the Hassayampa River Preserve in 1987. An addition of desert foothills west of the river in 2004 brought it to about 770 acres. The Conservancy ran it for thirty years as its Arizona showpiece, the place where it could show donors what a restored riparian corridor looked like, and the bird list grew to some 280 species.
The last chapter is a handoff. In 2009 Maricopa County Parks held the first planning meeting for what became the Vulture Mountains recreation area, 71,000 acres of desert west and south of the preserve, and the Conservancy said then that it wanted the county to take the preserve on. An agreement to fold it into the recreation area was signed in April 2016, and in April 2017 the county took over management, with the Conservancy staying as a partner. The county brought Wednesday-to-Sunday hours, a $5 gate, ranger programs and the regional-park annual pass. What it kept was the rule that made the restoration work: no dogs, no bikes, no one on the trails after mid-afternoon in summer.
Why it matters
The Hassayampa is what Arizona’s desert rivers used to look like before groundwater pumping and cattle took the forests off them, and the preserve is proof that a river bottom can be run through a dude ranch, a trailer park and a subdivision plan and still come back if someone fences it and waits. It is also a rare case of a private conservation group handing a finished preserve to a county that was ready to run it. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is a cool-season morning: 75 minutes to the gate, $5, binoculars, three hours of flat shaded trail beside running water, and lunch in Wickenburg. Leave the dog at home and check the calendar for Monday.