What is the Little Pan Staging Area?
West of I-17 between New River and Black Canyon City, the BLM’s Table Mesa Recreation Area is where the north Valley goes to shoot, ride and camp for free, and Little Pan is its parking lot. The agency calls it a staging and rest area: a wide gravel flat at about 1,930 feet with two accessible vault toilets, information kiosks, two OHV training areas and room for a lot of trailers. Primitive camping is allowed, there is no fee, and there is no water, no shade and no one in charge on site. In February 2024 the BLM finalized a plan that draws a 14,262-acre developed recreation area around all this, with designated target-shooting areas, camping areas, interpretive sites and non-motorized trails to come; the 2010 travel plan with its 85 miles of routes stays in force meanwhile.
The reason a hiker cares is the Black Canyon Trail. Its Table Mesa trailhead, a separate hard-packed lot about three miles west of the freeway, is non-motorized. From it the trail runs about 1.5 miles north into the roughly 6.5-mile Little Pan Loop, which drops to the Agua Fria, crosses it twice and climbs the mesas on the far side, about 10 miles round trip. North of the loop the 12.5-mile segment to Black Canyon City is the most technical stretch of the whole 80-mile trail, with ledges above the river and about 1,350 feet of climbing.
The country is handsome: saguaro flats, the green line of the Agua Fria, the Bradshaws stacked up to the north. What you get is free camping where you ride and a serious trail 55 minutes from Old Town. What you do not get is quiet on a weekend: dust, engines and gunfire are the soundtrack, and you have to make peace with them.
How to do Little Pan right
Know what is free and what is not. Camping, hiking and riding cost nothing, first come, first served. OHVs need a current Arizona OHV decal. Commercial, competitive and large organized group events need a special recreation permit from the Hassayampa Field Office.
Get there. Loop 101 west to I-17 north, about 30 miles to exit 236, Table Mesa Road. Turn left (west), then right after 500 feet to stay on Table Mesa Road. The pavement ends almost immediately. Follow the main dirt road north about 2.5 miles, take the left at the first fork and the right at the second, and you are at Little Pan, roughly 55 minutes from Old Town. The dirt is passable for most cars when dry and washboarded always; after rain the washes run, which is how a flash flood catches people here.
Hikers and cyclists, park at the trailhead instead. For the Black Canyon Trail, stay on Table Mesa Road; the trailhead lot is about three miles from the exit, easy to miss without a map pin, and fills early on winter weekends. Do the Little Pan Loop clockwise with at least two liters. The river bottom is the confusing part: watch for Black Canyon Trail signs and backtrack if you lose them. The crossings may be dry or shin deep. Starting on the Table Mesa side puts the climb first and the easy descent last, which makes it a better day hike than starting at Black Canyon City; riders who start there make it a 24-mile lollipop.
Pick the season. November through April. The BLM says it, and the trail’s river-bottom sand and shadeless mesas make it true. Fire restrictions, Stage 1 and 2, arrive most springs and stay through the monsoon; check before you light a stove.
Camp like it is a parking lot, because it is. Pull in on a weekday, set up well away from the OHV training areas, and bring a shade structure, earplugs and every drop of water. There are two vault toilets at Little Pan and none at the trailhead. There is no water anywhere, and the Agua Fria is not drinking water. Pack everything out; the Leave No Trace basics apply even where nobody else seems to follow them.
Dogs and horses. Dogs are fine; keep them leashed and close, because shooting and OHV traffic are constant. The trail is open to horses, and they have the right of way.
Skip it if you want the same country without the noise. The trail’s northern trailhead at Black Canyon City has restrooms and a water fountain, Badger Springs and the Agua Fria National Monument are twenty minutes farther north, and the trail’s southern end at the Bob Bentley Trailhead is closer to home. East of the freeway, the Single Track Trailhead climbs Daisy Mountain.
The sheep road beside the shooting range
The Agua Fria was a road before it was anything else. The river is one of the few reliable lines of water between the desert valleys and the Bradshaw Mountains, and the route the Black Canyon Trail now follows was a Native path for travelers and traders long before anyone mapped it. Hohokam farmers worked the river country, Perry Mesa’s pueblo builders lived upstream between about 1250 and 1450, and when Americans arrived this was Yavapai land. Downstream, the same river now backs up behind New Waddell Dam at Lake Pleasant.
The trail’s legal life began in 1919, when the Department of the Interior set aside the route as a livestock driveway. Valley woolgrowers wintered their sheep on the desert and walked them north each spring to summer range in the Bradshaws and the Black Hills, and the driveway gave them a corridor through country that was filling with homesteads and fences. In 1946 the General Land Office and the Grazing Service merged into the Bureau of Land Management, which inherited the Table Mesa country and still manages it. Through the middle of the century, State Route 69 and then Interstate 17 pulled the traffic east of the old route; the exit at Table Mesa Road turned the empty land west of the freeway into the north Valley’s nearest piece of open public desert.
What people did with it is the rest of the story. The trail side got rebuilt: a multi-agency effort to restore the old driveway as a recreation trail began in the mid-1960s, and on May 31, 2008, the Black Canyon Trail was certified a National Recreation Trail, about 80 miles from the Carefree Highway into the Bradshaw foothills. The motorized side grew on its own, as Phoenix spread north and Table Mesa became the closest free place to shoot and ride. In 2010 the BLM approved a recreation and travel management plan that set an 85-mile network of roads and trails, marked primitive camping areas and drew buffer zones to keep target shooting away from roads and facilities.
It was not enough. On January 4, 2023, citing conflicts between users, visitor safety and damage to natural and cultural resources, the Hassayampa Field Office opened scoping on an 11,500-acre planning area, and in February 2024 it finalized a 14,262-acre developed recreation area with designated shooting ranges, camping areas, interpretive sites and non-motorized trails. The name Little Pan does not appear in any history we could find; it is a road and staging-area name on BLM maps, at the junction where the plan puts a technical vehicle course, and we will not invent an origin for it.
Why it matters
Little Pan is what happens to public land at the edge of a metro area of five million people with no rules but the ones the land agency can enforce. A century-old sheep driveway and a modern shooting and OHV hub share the same mesa, and the BLM’s answer has been to draw lines rather than close anything: shooting here, camping there, engines on these routes, hikers on that trail. It is the Valley’s clearest example of multiple use as a working arrangement rather than a slogan. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict depends on what you brought: with a side-by-side and friends, it is free camping where you ride; with hiking boots or a mountain bike, skip the staging area, park at the Table Mesa trailhead on a weekday morning, and do the Little Pan Loop between November and April.