What is Horton Creek Trail?
Trail #285 starts beside Tonto Creek at about 5,600 feet, a mile up Forest Road 289 from Kohls Ranch, and follows an old wagon road up the Horton Creek drainage for about 4 miles, gaining roughly 1,200 feet through ponderosa, Douglas fir and bigtooth maple that turn in late October. The creek is beside or below you the whole way, in a series of small cascades and pools over mossy limestone. At the top, Horton Spring pours out of the base of the Mogollon Rim at a volume that looks like a plumbing failure in the mountain, and the pool below it is the coldest water in the district.
The first mile sees families and dogs; the upper miles are quieter. From the spring, the Highline Trail #31 runs east along the base of the Rim to the top of Derrick Trail #33, which drops back to the highway for a loop of about 10 miles. The Derrick side is drier and steeper. The Horton Fire burned the slopes above in December 2024 and closed the trail into spring 2025; it has since reopened. Three miles farther up FR 289 is the Tonto Creek Fish Hatchery, run by Arizona Game and Fish, where many of the Rim’s stocked rainbows come from. It has a show pond and a small visitor center; call ahead in winter.
What you get is the best creek walk in Rim Country, free, with shade from the first step and water at every turn, and a spring at the top that is worth the four miles on its own. What you do not get, in 2026, is the normal parking: the trailhead lot and the two Tonto Creek campgrounds are closed for a bridge replacement, and the hike starts from Derrick Trailhead on the highway instead. You also do not get drinking water, a fee station or a campground at the start, and in July and August you do not get a safe afternoon on the Highline.
How to hike Horton Creek right
Pay nothing, reserve nothing. No Tonto Pass is required at the Horton day-use site or at Derrick Trailhead, and there is no permit. The day-use site has vault toilets and six picnic tables and no water; it is open year-round for day use, with no overnight camping.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, 75 miles to Payson. At the main junction turn east on SR 260 and drive about 17 miles to Kohls Ranch. Just past milepost 268, turn left (north) on Forest Road 289, Tonto Creek Road, which is paved. One mile up, the Horton day-use site and Upper Tonto Creek Campground are on the right, and in a normal year that is where you park. Count on about 115 minutes from Old Town.
Know the 2026 detour. It is not a normal year. The Federal Highway Administration is replacing the Tonto Creek bridge on FR 289 and expanding the Horton Springs lot, with work scheduled from mid-March to October 31, 2026. The trailhead parking and both Tonto Creek campgrounds are closed for the duration. Derrick Trailhead, on the north side of SR 260 a short way east of the FR 289 turn, stays open; from it the Derrick Trail connects to Horton Creek. Taken counterclockwise, Derrick up to the Highline, west along the Rim to the top of the creek, then down Horton Creek, the loop puts the dry climbing first and saves the water for the descent. Check with the Payson Ranger District before you go; schedules slip.
Pick the season. April through November. The maples peak in late October, and May and June give you the fullest creek. Summer afternoons bring thunderstorms; the Rim is one of the most lightning-struck places in the country, so be off the Highline by early afternoon in July and August, and read the monsoon field manual before a summer trip. The upper trail carries ice in winter.
Water. The creek runs all year and the spring is enormous, but treat all of it. Carry a liter per person to start and a filter for the rest. No potable water at the trailhead.
The hike itself. Steady rather than steep for most of the four miles, on the old road grade, with a rockier final stretch to the spring. Budget four to five hours for the out-and-back with time at the top. The 10-mile loop via the Highline and Derrick is a real day with a sunny climb; the simple out-and-back to the spring is the hike to do if you have four hours.
Dogs and horses. Dogs are allowed on leash, and this is one of the better dog hikes in Arizona for the shade and water. Horses use the trail; hikers yield to stock.
Camp nearby, not here. Upper Tonto Creek Campground, the usual trailhead camp, is closed for the bridge project; in a normal year it is a small reservable campground open May through October at $20 a night. For 2026, Christopher Creek, Sharp Creek and Ponderosa along SR 260 are the campgrounds, and Houston Mesa at Payson is the year-round fallback.
Skip it if you want solitude on a weekend or a swim. The first mile is busy, and the creek is cold and small. For water you can get into, Water Wheel Falls on the East Verde is closer to Payson; for a quieter Rim walk, the Highline from Derrick on a weekday is nearly empty.
The spring that tried to be a hatchery
The Rim’s base is a line of springs, and the Tonto Apache, the Dilzhe’e, lived on them for centuries before anyone else arrived; their range ran from the Verde across the Mazatzals to the Tonto Basin, and the ponderosa benches under the Rim were summer country. The Army’s campaign of the 1870s ended that. In 1875 the Rio Verde Reserve near Camp Verde was dissolved and the Tonto Apache were marched to San Carlos; some walked back to the Payson country a generation later to find it settled, and the tribe’s 85-acre reservation south of Payson was not created until 1972.
The settlers who replaced them were ranchers and farmers strung along the creeks, and in the 1870s they blazed a horse trail along the foot of the Rim to connect their places: the Highline. It was a working road, not a recreation trail; families used it to visit, to move stock and to get children to school in Pine. The creek that drops from the Rim at the trail’s east end took the name of one of those settlers, L.J. Horton, and the wagon road up it, which the modern trail still follows, served the homestead and the stock on the spring. Twenty miles west, Green Valley was founded in 1882 and renamed Payson for an Illinois congressman two years later; the same summer, on July 17, 1882, the Army and about 60 White Mountain Apache fought the Battle of Big Dry Wash on the Rim above, the last major engagement between the two in Arizona.
The spring’s second career was aquaculture. In 1928 the state built a small hatchery building and nursing troughs at the head of Horton Creek, where the water comes out of the Rim at a steady cold temperature that trout like. It lasted four years; a severe washout in 1932 wrecked it, and the state concluded the spring’s flow was too erratic to rebuild on. Instead, in 1937, Arizona opened the Tonto Creek Fish Hatchery three miles up FR 289, below the Rim on the main creek, and it has produced a large share of the rainbows stocked in Rim Country ever since. The early hatchery’s foundations are what you are looking at when you reach the spring and wonder about the stonework.
Zane Grey had a cabin three miles east of here from the 1920s, and Grey and the Haught family hunted the Highline; his fiction made the country famous. The cabin burned on June 25, 1990, when the lightning-caused Dude Fire blew up along the Rim, burned about 28,000 acres in ten days, killed six firefighters in a burnover and destroyed 63 structures; it was the worst fire in Arizona’s history at the time, and it damaged the hatchery and burned sections of the Highline. The trail burned again in the 2017 Highline Fire, and the slopes above Horton Creek in the December 2024 Horton Fire, which closed the trail into the spring of 2025. Each time the creek corridor itself came through better than the ridges, which is why the maples are still there.
The current chapter is concrete. The Federal Highway Administration began replacing the Tonto Creek bridge on FR 289 in March 2026, with an expanded lot for the Horton trailhead as part of the job, and the work closes the trailhead parking and both Tonto Creek campgrounds until October 31, 2026. When it is finished the trail will have the parking its popularity has needed for a decade.
Why it matters
Horton Creek is the Rim in one walk: the spring line that made the Apache country livable, the settlers’ trail along the base of the cliff, the state’s long project of turning cold water into stocked trout, and a fire history that has burned the ridges three times in 35 years and left the creek bottom green. It explains why the Highline exists, why the hatchery is where it is and why the Forest Service is spending a season on a bridge. For a Scottsdale visitor it is simpler than that: the one Rim hike to do if you are doing one, free, two hours from Old Town, with water from the first step to the last. In 2026 start at Derrick and go counterclockwise; any other year, park at the creek and walk up.