What is the High Desert Trail?
Black Canyon City is the pie stop on I-17, and most people never see the mesa behind it. Up Jacie Lane, on a bench of BLM land above the Agua Fria, sits High Desert Park: 89.71 acres leased to Yavapai County under the Recreation and Public Purposes Act and kept up, remarkably, by a volunteer group called the High Desert Helpers. It has what a small town’s park has, ramadas and grills, restrooms, a drinking fountain, a playground, a ball field, courts, and then it has the desert. About 2.7 miles of color-coded trail wander the rim: the blue High Desert Trail, a loop of roughly 1.5 to 1.8 miles with little climbing; Joedy’s Trail in yellow; and short green spurs to the Kings Canyon Overlook and viewpoints over the river and Rock Springs. Benches with names like Javelina and Jackalope sit where the views open to the Bradshaws.
The park also hides a real trailhead. At the end of Warner Road, beside a white water tank, the BLM’s Black Canyon City Trailhead is a day-use dirt lot with an accessible toilet where the 80-mile Black Canyon Trail passes through. South, it drops to the Agua Fria and crosses it four times on the way to the Table Mesa trailhead, 12.5 miles of ledgy, technical trail; north, it climbs toward the Gloriana trailhead at Bumble Bee and on to the Bradshaws. The trail is rated intermediate for its loose soils and constant grade changes.
What you get is the rare trailhead with a place to wash your hands, an hour from Old Town, and a choice between a gentle hour on the rim and as many miles as you want on a historic trail. What you do not get is shade, water on the trail or a long hike inside the park itself.
How to hike High Desert Park right
Pay nothing. There is no fee for the park, the trailhead or the trail, and no permit or pass for the Black Canyon Trail. Only commercial or large group events need a BLM special recreation permit.
Get there. Loop 101 west to I-17 north about 40 miles to exit 242, Rock Springs and Black Canyon City. Go west, turn right at the stop sign, then take the quick left onto Warner Road and follow it to the white tank; the BLM lot is there, and the park’s ramadas, restrooms and Jacie Lane entrance are just up the hill. Call it 60 minutes from Old Town, all paved but the last few hundred yards. The lot holds perhaps a dozen vehicles and horse trailers and is rarely full except on cool-season Saturdays.
Pick the season. October through April; the BLM recommends the Black Canyon Trail only from November through April. Black Canyon City sits at about 2,100 feet, a little cooler than Phoenix and not enough to matter in June. In the warm months, follow the summer sunrise rules or go somewhere higher.
Walk the loop clockwise. Park at the trailhead by the white tank rather than at the ramadas if you are hiking, then walk the blue loop clockwise so the Agua Fria views come at the end. It takes most people under an hour, and the benches are placed where the view is.
Then take the long trail north. For a real day, pick up the Black Canyon Trail at the same lot and head north: the first few miles climb through saguaro onto the mesas with the Bradshaws ahead, and you can turn around whenever you like. Southbound to Table Mesa means four river crossings, which are wet after storms.
Water and restrooms. Restrooms and a drinking fountain in the park, a toilet at the trailhead, and nothing beyond. The river is not drinking water. Fill bottles at the fountain before you leave.
Dogs, bikes, horses. All allowed. Leashed dogs are fine in the park; carry water for the dog. The Black Canyon Trail is built for horses and mountain bikes as well as hikers, and horses have the right of way; see trail etiquette.
No camping here. The trailhead and park are day use only; the county park posts no hours online. Dispersed camping is allowed on BLM land along the trail away from the park, and free primitive camping with toilets is at the Little Pan Staging Area off Table Mesa Road.
Skip it if you want a canyon and a petroglyph wall: Badger Springs in the Agua Fria National Monument is fifteen minutes north. For the Black Canyon Trail closer to home, start at the Bob Bentley Trailhead on Carefree Highway. Rock Springs Cafe at the freeway has pie and a lot full of motorcycles on weekends; go before, not after, if you want a table.
A sheep road that became a trail
The Agua Fria corridor has been a road for as long as people have been in central Arizona. Petroglyphs and pottery around Black Canyon show thousands of years of settlement, and the route the Black Canyon Trail follows was a Native path for travelers and traders between the desert valleys and the high country. Upstream, on Perry Mesa, farmers built stone pueblos between about 1250 and 1450; when Americans arrived, this was Yavapai country.
The American town began with a famous name. In 1871 Jack Swilling, the former Confederate who had organized Phoenix’s first modern canal company a few years earlier, moved here with his wife Trinidad; the walls of their ranch house still stand as the community’s oldest building. The settlement went by several names, Goddard’s, Cañon, Black Canyon, as it grew into a stage stop on the Phoenix-to-Prescott line, a military stopover on the way to Fort Whipple and Fort Verde, and a supply point for the mines of the southern Bradshaws. A post office called Cañon opened in May 1894 under postmaster Charles Goddard, closed in 1899, and reopened from 1903 to 1906.
The trail’s modern shape dates from 1919, when the Department of the Interior formally set aside the route as a livestock driveway. Valley woolgrowers wintered their flocks in the desert and walked them north each spring to summer range in the Bradshaws and the Black Hills, and the driveway gave them a legal corridor across land that was filling with homesteads and fences. Sections north of here still carry sheep and cattle.
Then the highways took the traffic away. State Route 69 and later Interstate 17, built in stages from the 1930s to the 1970s, ran east of the old route, and the driveway faded into a line on the map. In the mid-1960s a multi-agency effort began to rebuild it as a recreation trail; the first sections in Maricopa County opened in the early 1990s, and on May 31, 2008, the Black Canyon Trail was certified a National Recreation Trail, about 80 miles from the Carefree Highway to the Prescott National Forest. Volunteer crews do much of its upkeep.
High Desert Park is the local half of the story. Its exact opening date is not published; what the record shows is a BLM lease to Yavapai County under the Recreation and Public Purposes Act, a town that voted down incorporation in 2004 by 72 percent, and a volunteer crew that keeps the trails, benches and signs in shape without a city to pay for it. The trailhead inside the lease is where the two histories meet.
Why it matters
High Desert Park explains how the Valley’s back country actually works: a federal agency owns the land, a county holds the lease, volunteers do the labor and a century-old sheep road carries the mountain bikes. The Black Canyon Trail is one of the few long trails in Arizona whose route is genuinely historic rather than invented for recreation, and this is the most comfortable place to meet it. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: an hour up I-17, a free lot with a real restroom, a gentle loop for the family and as much of the Black Canyon Trail as your legs want, best between November and April and followed by pie.