What is Margie’s Cove Trail?
The Sonoran Desert National Monument is nearly half a million acres of saguaro forest, bajada and low ranges south of Buckeye and west of Maricopa, crossed by I-8 and SR 238 and otherwise reached by unmaintained dirt. Inside it, the North Maricopa Mountains Wilderness is 63,200 acres of ridges and peaks between 1,000 and 2,813 feet, separated by wide washes and some of the thickest saguaro stands you will find within an hour of the Valley. The BLM calls the plant community here the most striking thing about the monument, and it is right.
Margies Cove Trail is one of four designated wilderness routes. It runs about nine miles from the west trailhead off SR 85 to the east trailhead off SR 238, nearly level, following old jeep tracks and the broad sandy bottoms of washes, with the Brittlebush Trail joining from the south in the interior. It is a trail in name only: no signs, no cairns, no markers. The BLM recommends it for experienced hikers who can read the Butterfield Pass and Cotton Center SE topo maps, and that is not boilerplate.
The west trailhead is also a tiny campground: three sites with tables and steel fire rings, an accessible vault toilet, parking for ten vehicles, information panels, no water, no fee. What you get is a saguaro forest with nobody in it and the darkest sky within 90 minutes of Scottsdale. What you do not get is a trail, a tap, a ranger or a signal.
How to hike it right
Navigate, do not follow. This is the real hazard. The washes braid and the old tracks disappear in places. Load the BLM monument map and both USGS quads on your phone, carry a paper copy, and know your turn-around time, because cell service is unreliable and there is no landmark that says you are halfway. Most people do not go end to end; the first three or four miles east from the west trailhead, into the cove below the ridgeline where the saguaros are thickest, is the good part and makes a seven- or eight-mile day.
Get there. About 1 hour 25 minutes from Old Town. Loop 101 south to I-10 west, exit at SR 85 south toward Gila Bend, and go about 20 miles to Woods Road, just south of milepost 134. Turn east, and at the cattle guard turn immediately left to follow the brown Margies Cove Trail signs west, then north along the highway fence, then east 3.8 miles to BLM Route 8001E. Turn right and go south 1.2 miles to the trailhead. The BLM rates the road for a high-clearance two-wheel-drive vehicle when dry; it is not maintained. Bring a full-size spare and a shovel, and do not try it after rain. The east trailhead is reached from SR 238 via BLM Routes 8002 and 8002A, about eight miles of dirt with high clearance recommended; it matters only if you are shuttling the full nine miles.
Pick the season. Late October to mid-April. Summer highs run to 115 degrees and the trail is, in the BLM’s words, seldom used. Rattlesnakes are out by February. Flash floods in the washes are a monsoon and winter-storm risk; see the site’s note on flash floods.
Water. None anywhere on the monument. A gallon per person per day minimum, more while hiking.
Camp by the rules. Camping at the trailhead is free, first come, first served, with the BLM’s 14-day limit. Fires only in the trailhead rings, and only when restrictions allow. The sky here is nearly as dark as Painted Rock’s; see the stargazing guide for what to look for.
Rules and company. Foot and horse travel only in the wilderness; no bikes, no vehicles. The southern monument is a corridor for smuggling, and you may meet Border Patrol or BLM law enforcement on the roads. Leashed dogs are generally fine on BLM wilderness land; pack out their waste.
Skip it if you want a signed trail with facilities. Estrella Mountain Regional Park is on the way back with 58 miles of marked trail, and Painted Rock west of Gila Bend is the easier free camp with petroglyphs thrown in. For a summit in this same stretch of desert, Quartz Peak is a maintained BLM trail.
A wilderness the stagecoaches crossed first
The Maricopa Mountains sit between two O’odham worlds. North of them, along the Gila, stood the irrigated villages of the Akimel O’odham, the river people, whose ancestors the archaeologists call Hohokam. South of them stretched the dry country of the Tohono O’odham, the desert people, who moved between winter wells and summer fields. The monument proclamation lists what they left in these ranges: rock art, stone-tool quarries, scatters of pottery and the trails that connected one water to the next. The washes Margies Cove Trail follows were walked long before anyone drove them.
The gap between the north and south Maricopa ranges was the easy way west, and everyone who went west used it. Juan Bautista de Anza brought a column of colonists bound for San Francisco along the Gila corridor in 1775 and 1776. The Mormon Battalion hauled its wagons through in 1846, cutting the first wagon road across the Southwest. In the 1850s the Butterfield Overland Mail put its stage line through the same saddle, and the name stuck: Butterfield Pass is the USGS quadrangle the BLM tells you to carry, and the coaches’ route is now a National Historic Trail that the monument proclamation names alongside Anza’s and the Battalion’s. The range the stagecoach drivers hurried past is the range you walk into.
Then it went quiet for a century. Ranchers ran cattle on the bajadas, prospectors poked at the granite, and jeeps wore the two-tracks that are still faintly visible on the trail. In 1990 Congress passed the Arizona Desert Wilderness Act, which turned 63,200 acres of the northern range into the North Maricopa Mountains Wilderness and closed those tracks to wheels. Eleven years later, on January 17, 2001, President Clinton used the Antiquities Act to proclaim the Sonoran Desert National Monument, roughly 496,000 acres of BLM land wrapped around I-8 and SR 238, with the North and South Maricopa and Table Top wildernesses as its core. The proclamation singled out the saguaro forests, the historic trails and the archaeology, and it ordered the grazing allotments south of I-8 closed as their permits expired, a decision that has kept the monument’s southern half emptier than its northern.
The monument has never been developed in the way a national park is. There is no visitor center, no entrance station, no fee. The BLM’s investment has gone into four designated wilderness trails totaling 26 miles, Margies Cove, Brittlebush, Lava Flow and Table Top, and into the small camps with a toilet and three sites at Margies Cove West and Table Top. That restraint is deliberate, and so is the lack of markers on this trail. The agency wants the interior of the wilderness to stay a place for people who can find their own way, and it says so.
Why it matters
Margies Cove is what the Valley’s desert looked like before the Valley. The saguaro stands here are as dense as anything in Saguaro National Park, the washes are the ones the Anza colonists and the Butterfield coaches used, and the silence is complete because the monument was built on the principle of leaving things alone. It also shows the trade: no markers means no crowds, and no crowds means that a navigation mistake is yours to solve. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple. If you can read a topo and carry your water, the first four miles from the west trailhead and a night at the three-site camp are the best free desert weekend within 90 minutes of Old Town. If you cannot, go to Estrella and come back when you can.