What is the Haunted Canyon Trailhead?
The far eastern Superstitions, between Superior and Miami, are a different range from the one you see from Apache Junction: higher, greener, cut by canyons that actually run. Haunted Canyon is the best of them that you can reach in a day. Trail #203 runs 8.5 miles from Pinto Valley Mine Road (FR 287) on the east to FR 287A on the west, and from the lower trailhead the route first follows the mining road along Pinto Creek for about 1.8 miles, past pump stations and fenced valves, before turning right up the canyon. From there it is sycamores, Arizona walnut, a creek that flows in spring, and a trail that climbs gently through a slot of dark rock. About 5 miles in, a spur leads to Tony Ranch, a 1920s homestead with stone walls and surviving fruit trees in a shaded bend. Beyond, the trail climbs hard out of the canyon to FR 287A, and the Paradise Trail #271 and Bull Basin Trail #270 offer loops for people with two cars or long legs.
The name is older than the mine and nobody agrees on its origin. The mine is the odd part: the first mile of the hike is through an industrial water system, and the Forest Service notes that parts of the trail cross private property. Then the canyon closes in and you forget all of it.
What you get is shade, water and solitude in a range famous for having none of the three, free, with no pass. What you do not get is a toilet, a proper trailhead, a pretty first mile, or a way to do the full traverse without a second vehicle on a bad road.
How to hike it right
Pay nothing, mind the signs. No fee, no Tonto Pass, no permit for day hiking or camping in the wilderness. Wilderness rules apply once the trail leaves the road: groups of 15 or fewer, no bikes. The route crosses inholdings near the creek and around Tony Ranch; stay on the trail and leave gates as you found them.
Get there. US 60 east through Apache Junction, over Gonzales Pass and through Superior. About 13 miles past Superior, turn left (north) on Pinto Valley Mine Road, Forest Road 287. The road is graded dirt built for mine traffic; follow it past the Capstone Pinto Valley mine toward the one-lane iron bridge over Pinto Creek, and just before the bridge turn left on FR 3037. The lower trailhead is a quarter mile down, a dirt pullout with room for about 8 cars. Call it 110 minutes from Old Town. The upper trailhead is another 13 miles up FR 287 and 287A, which the Forest Service describes as rough, rocky and steep, and recommends high-clearance 4x4 for.
Pick the season. October through April is best, with March and early April after a wet winter for water in the canyon and sycamores leafing out. The canyon has real shade, which makes it kinder than the west Superstitions in warm weeks, but the mine road crossings flood after monsoon storms and the canyon itself flashes.
Water. None at the trailhead. The canyon runs in spring and after rain; treat everything, and do not drink from Pinto Creek, which runs through the mine.
Get through the first 1.8 miles. The stretch along Pinto Creek past the pump stations and fenced valves is dull; walk it early. The trail sign where the route leaves the road is small and on the right at the fourth pump station. If you reach a locked gate or mine equipment that looks serious, you went past it.
Turn around at Tony Ranch. Stone walls, a corral site and old fruit trees in a shaded bend, a little over 5 miles in, roughly 10 to 11 miles round trip. Respect the private-property signs around the inholdings. The full 8.5 miles to FR 287A finishes with a steep climb out and is a shuttle hike; the Paradise loop needs a car at FR 287A or a 4-mile road walk.
Dogs. Allowed, under control. Mind the mine equipment and the creek crossings.
Skip it if the industrial first mile and the shuttle logistics put you off. Woodbury gets you into the same wilderness from the south, with more dirt and no pipes; Picketpost Mountain is the hard short climb on the way home; Oak Flat is the free campground 20 minutes back toward Superior; and Tonto National Monument across the Pinals is where the canyon’s first farmers left their houses.
A canyon between a wilderness line and a copper pit
People farmed this country before anyone mined it. In the 1200s and 1300s Salado pueblos stood along Pinto Creek and the Salt; Besh-Ba-Gowah, a mile south of Globe, was occupied from about 1225 to 1400, and the cliff dwellings at Tonto National Monument look over the Salt arm of Roosevelt Lake from the same era. When the Salado left, the eastern Superstitions became Western Apache country and stayed so until the Army and the reservation line at San Carlos ended it in the 1870s. Globe’s silver camp dates from about 1875; the copper under Pinto Creek was staked soon after, and the Miami Copper Company held the Pinto Valley ground from 1909.
The homestead came between the booms. Sometime in the 1920s a settler built the place now called Tony Ranch five miles up Haunted Canyon, in a bend with shade and seasonal water: stone walls, a corral, fruit trees that still bear. The Forest Service and the hiking guides agree on the decade and little else, and I could not pin down who Tony was or when the ranch was abandoned. The canyon’s own name is older than the mine and comes with the usual unsourced ghost stories.
The lines around the canyon were drawn twice. The Forest Service set the Superstitions aside as a Primitive Area in 1939 and called them a wilderness under its own rules in 1940; the Wilderness Act of 1964 made it official at 124,140 acres, and the Arizona Wilderness Act of 1984 added 35,640 acres, bringing the total to about 160,000. The upper canyon and Tony Ranch are inside the boundary; Pinto Creek and the mine ground are not. That is the geography you walk: a mile and a half of industrial water system on forest and private land, then a sign, then wilderness.
The industry arrived in earnest after the wilderness did. Cities Service began open-pit development at Pinto Valley in 1972 and shipped its first copper in 1975; the property passed to Occidental, then Newmont in 1983, Magma, BHP, and in 2013 to Capstone Mining, whose trucks you share the graded road with and whose one-lane iron bridge and pump stations mark the trailhead. The pipeline road along the creek that the official trail follows is part of the mine’s water system, which is why the Forest Service’s own trail description warns about private property and why the first 1.8 miles look the way they do. The mine lists more than 440 million tonnes of ore in reserve and is not going anywhere.
Why it matters
Haunted Canyon is the eastern Superstitions in a single hike: Salado farms, Apache country, a Depression homestead, a 1964 wilderness line and a 1972 copper pit, stacked along one creek. It is also an honest picture of how Arizona’s public land works at the edges, where the wilderness boundary runs a few hundred yards from a mine’s water pipeline and the trailhead belongs to both. For a Scottsdale hiker the verdict is this: come in March after a wet winter, walk fast through the pumps, and you will have a running creek, sycamores and a ruined orchard to yourself in a range where the famous trails are carrying a thousand people a day.