What is Jewel of the Creek Preserve?
Most of Cave Creek, the stream, is a dry sand channel most of the year. For about a mile north of the Town of Cave Creek it is not: springs feed it, and the water runs year-round through pools and small cascades under a canopy of cottonwoods and willows, one of the last perennial streams in Maricopa County. In 1997 the Desert Foothills Land Trust got the state to designate the parcel for conservation, and in 2001 it bought the 26 acres from the Arizona State Land Department under the Arizona Preserve Initiative, one of the first land trusts in the state to do so, with a Growing Smarter grant and about $450,000 raised from a foundation and the surrounding community.
The trails are a hiker-only figure-eight. From the lot a path drops into the valley to a junction. The Dragonfly Trail, about a mile, follows the east bank downstream, climbs briefly away from the water, and comes back to the creek at a deep pool below a pinkish cliff before crossing a footbridge and returning up the west side. The Harry Dalton Trail, about 0.6 miles, loops through a mesquite bosque, crosses the creek and passes a stand of enormous saguaros. Linked, they are 1.3 to 1.8 miles with about 100 feet of change, an hour at an easy pace. About halfway along, a side drainage climbs to the Spur Cross Trail in the adjoining conservation area, so the walk can grow into a morning.
What you get is running water, shade and a flat sandy path within an hour of Scottsdale, for free, with a grandparent or a four-year-old. What you do not get is a parking space after nine on a winter weekend, a restroom, a fountain, or any tolerance for leaving the trail, because the whole preserve is the fragile strip you are walking through.
How to visit it right
Pay nothing, follow the kiosk. Free, dawn to dusk, hiking only: no bikes, no horses. The trust’s posted rules govern; read them when you arrive. Commercial activity, including photo sessions, needs the trust’s written permission.
Get there. Take Scottsdale Road north to Carefree Highway, west to Cave Creek Road, north through the Town of Cave Creek, and right onto Spur Cross Road. The preserve lot is a small gravel pull-in on the right about 3.7 miles along, still on the paved section, roughly 48 minutes from Old Town. The lot holds about a dozen cars, is free, and is full by mid-morning on winter weekends; arrive before nine. The land trust asks you not to park on the road. The alternative is the county’s Spur Cross lot a mile further on, $5 a person, from which the Spur Cross Trail connects back down to the creek.
Pick the season. The water runs all year, but the walk is an oven from May through September. November and March, when the cottonwoods turn gold and then leaf out, are the months. After a storm the creek is loud and brown and the footbridges are the only dry crossings; give it a day, and read the flash flood entry if the Bradshaws are getting rain.
Water. The creek is not for drinking and the preserve has no fountain or restroom; the Town of Cave Creek has both. Carry a bottle even for an hour.
Walk it downstream first. Take the Dragonfly Trail down the east bank, because the pool under the pink cliff at the far end is the best spot on the creek and is in shade until mid-morning, then cross the footbridge and come back up the west bank into the Harry Dalton loop for the big saguaros. If you want more, the side drainage halfway around climbs to the Spur Cross Trail and the conservation area without paying twice.
Stay on the trail. The riparian corridor is the whole point and it is fragile. Keep dogs leashed and out of the water. Do not build dams or stack rocks in the creek.
Dogs. Leashed dogs are generally welcome; the kiosk has the current rule, and the creek is off limits to them.
Skip it if you want a long hike or a campground. Spur Cross Ranch up the road has the miles, Cave Creek Regional Park has the campground, and Sears-Kay Ruin on the way out adds a Hohokam hilltop; together they make this corner of the county a full day. For a bigger version of the same idea, a land-trust creek with cottonwoods, the Hassayampa River Preserve is an hour west.
The mile of water a town decided to keep
Cave Creek was a settlement before it was a town because of the water. The Hohokam farmed along the creek and, around 1050, built the walled hilltop village at Sears-Kay a few miles east; the Yavapai held the basin after them. Anglo prospectors arrived in the 1870s, when gold and silver claims opened in the hills north of the creek, the Cave Creek Mistress among them, and ranchers took the bottomland. The town grew up at the crossing. Upstream, the land that is now Spur Cross Ranch became exactly that, a cattle ranch, and the spring-fed mile between the ranch and the town kept running while the rest of the creek, pumped and diverted downstream through the twentieth century, turned into a sand wash.
That mile sat on state trust land. Arizona’s constitution requires the State Land Department to manage its trust parcels for the benefit of the schools, which for most of the century meant selling them to the highest bidder, usually a developer. In the 1990s, as the north Valley filled toward Carefree Highway, residents of Cave Creek and Carefree organized the Desert Foothills Land Trust to buy and hold the open desert around them before it went. The legislature had just given them a tool: the Arizona Preserve Initiative, which allowed trust land to be reclassified for conservation and sold to a public body or nonprofit at appraised value rather than auctioned. In 1997 the trust won that designation for the parcel it called the Jewel of the Creek, among the first groups in the state to do so.
Designation was not ownership. The trust spent the next four years raising the money. The state’s Growing Smarter land-acquisition grant program, created in 1998, put up a matching share, and the trust raised nearly $450,000 from the Charlotte Y. Martin Foundation and from the surrounding foothills community to meet it. In 2001 it bought the 26 acres from the State Land Department outright. The same two years remade the whole creek: in 2000 Cave Creek’s voters approved a tax to buy the 2,154-acre Spur Cross Ranch upstream with Maricopa County and the state, and the conservation area opened in 2001 next door. The perennial reach of Cave Creek went from the most endangered mile in the basin to the best protected.
The trust then built what a 26-acre preserve can hold: the Dragonfly Trail down the east bank to the pool under the pink cliff, the Harry Dalton Trail through the mesquite bosque and the saguaros, two footbridges, a kiosk and a dozen parking spaces, and a side drainage linking up to the Spur Cross Trail so the two pieces of creek read as one landscape. The trust’s larger holding, the 271-acre P.A. Seitts Preserve in Go John Canyon beside Cave Creek Regional Park, came later and allows bikes and horses; the Jewel never has. Who Harry Dalton was, the trust’s current pages do not say.
Nothing has changed at the Jewel in two decades except the number of people who know about it. The lot that was adequate in 2005 is full by nine every winter weekend, the trust has had to post rules about photo shoots and dogs in the water, and the cottonwoods, which depend on a spring flow that in turn depends on groundwater under a growing town, are the thing everyone is quietly watching.
Why it matters
Jewel of the Creek is the smallest answer to the biggest question in the north Valley, what to do with state trust land before it becomes houses, and it is the proof that a volunteer land trust, a state grant program and a willing legislature can save a creek one parcel at a time. Scottsdale bought its preserve with a sales tax; Cave Creek’s neighbors bought theirs with a foundation check and bake-sale money, and got the only year-round water within an hour of Old Town. The verdict for a Scottsdale visitor is simple: go before nine on a cool morning, walk the hour, stay on the path, and pair it with Spur Cross or Sears-Kay for a full day in the one corner of Maricopa County where the creek still runs.