What is Hualapai Mountain Park?
The Hualapai Mountains rise straight out of the Mojave Desert southeast of Kingman to 8,417 feet at Hualapai Peak, high enough to carry ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, white fir and aspen on their upper slopes: a sky island, in the same sense as the Pinals or Mount Lemmon. Kingman residents have summered up here since the 1890s. In 1934 Congress set the land aside, the Civilian Conservation Corps moved in from 1936 to build roads, stone cabins, restrooms and water systems, and in 1939 Franklin Roosevelt signed the patent handing 2,226 acres to Mohave County. It is the county’s oldest park, and the CCC’s work is still what you rent.
Today the park runs 23 cabins, from six bunk-style camping cabins to the eight-person Rock House, dry camping loops for tents and RVs, two full-hookup RV campgrounds (Elk Ridge for rigs to 60 feet, Pioneer to 30), seven reservable group areas, a disc golf course and ten miles of trail. The trails start at 6,200 feet in chaparral and climb through pine-oak and mixed conifer past the Silver Bell Mine, worked from the 1870s, to the Potato Patch (a commercial potato farm around 1910) and on to overlooks: Aspen Peak at 7,950 feet, Hayden Peak at about 8,250 under its radio towers, and Hualapai Peak beyond. Elk graze the meadows at dusk; deer, bobcat and the occasional bear use the forest.
What you get is real conifer forest, a stone cabin with a fireplace for $90, and summer temperatures 30 degrees below Scottsdale’s, in a park almost nobody from the Valley has heard of. What you do not get is proximity: it is three and a half hours away, there is no store or fuel up the hill, and the cabins come with nothing but walls, a bathroom and a heater.
How to do Hualapai Mountain Park right
Reserve and pay like this. Day use $12 per vehicle for up to four people, $5 per extra person, sunrise to sunset. Dry camping $20 per night, first come, first served, 14 nights maximum. Full-hookup RV sites $45 by reservation, May 1 to October 31 only. Cabins $55 to $215 by reservation through parks.mohave.gov or 877-757-0915, with a $100 damage deposit, 21 and over; a $5 or $6 reservation fee and a 48-hour cancellation policy apply, with three-night minimums on holiday weekends. Reserve well ahead for summer weekends, when Kingman and Las Vegas families fill the loops.
Pick the right cabin. Book a stone cabin, not a camping cabin, if you can: the 1930s CCC cabins (numbers 1 through 12 and 14 through 18) have fireplaces or heaters, real bathrooms and the setting that makes this place worth the drive, and at $90 for two to four people they undercut every Flagstaff motel. The six camping cabins ($55, sleeping four) are bunk rooms without bathrooms. Every cabin comes empty: no bedding, towels, dishes, cookware, air conditioning or window screens. Bring a full kit and a camp stove.
Get there. About 3 hours 25 minutes from Old Town, all paved. Loop 101 west to US 60 (Grand Avenue) northwest to Wickenburg, then US 93 north about 130 miles through Wikieup to I-40 at Kingman. Follow the signs through Kingman to Hualapai Mountain Road and climb 14 miles southeast out of town; the road gains 3,100 feet, winding and steep near the top but fine for trailers. Fuel and groceries are in Kingman; there is nothing up the hill. In winter the road is plowed but icy in the shade.
Pick the season. Year-round. Summer is the point: 20 to 30 degrees cooler than Kingman and 30 cooler than Scottsdale, with highs in the 70s and 80s. Monsoon storms hit the peaks hard in July and August. Winter brings snow, a $10 per person snow-day fee, and cabins that are warm if you feed the fireplace; the pines after a storm are the best reason to come in January.
Water. Drinking water and restrooms in the campgrounds and at the trailhead picnic area.
Hike it in the morning. Hike the Potato Patch Loop and tack on the Aspen Peak spur for the overlook; the trail markers are numbered to match the county’s online guide. Figure a half day for the loop with one peak. Bikes and horses are allowed on the multi-use sections. Elk graze the meadows at dusk.
Dogs. Two per site, leashed, $10 per pet per night for camping and $10 per pet per day for cabins (maximum $30).
Skip it if you are not already going that way. Three and a half hours is a long drive for pines when Mingus Mountain gives you them in half the time and Fort Tuthill is a county campground at Flagstaff. If you are headed to Kingman, Laughlin or Grand Canyon West, nothing on US 93 compares, and Burro Creek and Alamo Lake are the desert stops on the same highway. The nearest free alternative is the Forest Service’s Packsaddle in the Cerbats across the valley.
The park one Kingman resident wrote letters for
The name tells you who was here first. Hualapai means “people of the tall pines”, the tribe’s word for ponderosa joined to its word for people, and the Amat Whala Pa’a band lived in these mountains east of what is now Kingman, moving between the pine summits and the desert springs below. Their homeland ran along the pine-covered south side of the Grand Canyon for a hundred miles, and the Hualapai Mountains were its southwestern anchor.
Traffic on the Fort Mojave to Prescott toll road brought the Hualapai War of 1865 to 1870, which ended with the tribe driven from this country, and in 1871, with the mountains judged safe, Lt. George Wheeler set up headquarters at the edge of what is now the park to begin his survey of the lands west of the 100th meridian; his cabin stood for more than fifty years and was still there when the park began. Wheeler recorded that the area was known as the Sacramento District and that early parties had been driven out before prospectors returned that same year. The Silver Bell Mine on the mountain dates from the 1870s. President Arthur created the Hualapai Reservation on the Colorado by executive order on January 4, 1883; the tribe’s pines went to the miners and, after Kingman was founded on the railroad in 1882, to the town’s summer campers.
The park is the work of one persistent man. Charles Metcalf, a 43-year Kingman resident who first visited the mountain in 1897, read that President McKinley favored setting federal land aside for community recreation and spent the next three decades arguing for it; in 1929 he wrote Senator Carl Hayden proposing Section 20 as a park. The pieces came together fast after that. The Kingman Country Club, which had been given Section 29 by the Santa Fe Railroad, deeded it to Mohave County on October 19, 1929; Congress set Section 20 aside for recreation in 1934 and let the county acquire Sections 29 and 30 through a public law the same year; and the county bought 8.6 acres in Section 21 in 1937 to protect the community building and picnic area that is still called Rec. 1. National Monument status and a state park had both been floated and rejected. On the patent signed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, the General Land Office transferred the land to Mohave County for “public park, recreational and other municipal purposes”, and by 1940 the park totaled 2,226.6 acres across five sections, exactly what it is today.
The Depression built it. A Civilian Conservation Corps camp reached the mountain in 1935 and began widening the road; the stone cabins went up in 1936, with restrooms, kitchen buildings and water systems, and the ten miles of trail that still climb to Aspen and Hayden peaks were cut by the same crews. In 1937 the National Park Service and the county board wrote the first master plan, which credits Metcalf as the park’s founder. In the 1940s more than a dozen wood cabins were added, and in 1948 the crews building Davis Dam on the Colorado came up the hill to play baseball and eat dinner with their families at Rec. 1, which is still used nearly every weekend.
Since then the park has changed less than most. Mohave County still rents the CCC stone cabins, now 23 cabins in all, and has added the Elk Ridge and Pioneer hookup loops, group areas and a disc golf course. Elk, absent when the CCC was here, have moved into the meadows. The towers on Hayden Peak and the cameras that watch for fire are the only modern things on the skyline.
Why it matters
Hualapai Mountain Park is what a county built when the federal government, a railroad land grant, a country club and a Depression work program all pointed the same way at once, and it has kept the result for ninety years without a concessionaire or a resort. It explains the sky islands of western Arizona, mountains high enough for fir and aspen standing in Mojave creosote, and it keeps the name of the people the pines were taken from. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict depends on the map: it is too far for a weekend on its own, and the right stop on any drive to Kingman, Laughlin, Las Vegas or Grand Canyon West, where a $90 stone cabin with a fireplace at 6,500 feet beats any motel on I-40. Bring everything, book the stone cabin, hike the Potato Patch in the morning.