What is the Monument Peak Loop?
Payson sits in a bowl of granite, and the southeast corner of that bowl is the Granite Dells: low hills of weathered, rounded boulders and slabs under juniper and ponderosa, the same rock and the same look as the better-known Dells in Prescott, with far fewer people. Monument Peak, a little over 5,000 feet, is the granite knob in the middle of it, and the Monument Peak Loop is the roughly 3-mile trail that circles its base, starting at about 4,650 feet and gaining somewhere between 140 and 220 feet depending on whose GPS you believe.
It is part of the Payson Area Trails System (PATS), an in-progress network the Town of Payson and the Tonto National Forest have been assembling from old forest roads, social trails and new singletrack so that you can walk or ride from town into the forest without a car. The loop shares the Dells with horses, mountain bikes and ATVs, and the ATV tracks peel off it in several places; the PATS markers are what you follow. A seasonal streambed runs along part of the north side and the shade is better than you expect for Payson.
What you get is a pleasant hour and a half on good granite five minutes from town, free. What you do not get is quiet on a Saturday, a toilet, water or a summit trail; it is a town trail with a forest view, not a Rim hike, and it is honest about it.
How to hike it right
No pass, no fee. No Tonto Pass is needed at the Granite Dells trailheads. There is nothing at the pull-off: no toilet, no water, no sign beyond the PATS marker.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, 75 miles to Payson. At the main junction turn east on SR 260, go through town, and turn right (south) on E. Granite Dells Road. The pavement gives way to graded hard-pack, the road becomes Forest Road 435, and about 3.3 miles from the highway a small dirt pull-off on the left (east) side is the Monument Peak trailhead. If it is full, continue about half a mile to the larger Boulders Loop lot, which connects, and walk back along the connector rather than parking on the road. Figure about 100 minutes from Old Town; the dirt is fine for any car when dry and rutted for a day or two after a storm.
Walk it counterclockwise. That is how the markers read best and how most people go; keep right at the first junction. Follow the PATS markers, not the widest track, because the ATV routes wander off.
Pick the season. Year-round. Spring and fall are best. Winter storms leave snow and mud for a few days at this elevation; June is hot in the open, and the exposed stretches on the south side are warm by 10 a.m. in summer. Washes cross the trail and run for a day or two after rain, which is also when the junipers smell best.
Water. Fill up in Payson. There is none here and no shade structure.
Look at the rock. The reason to come is the granite, and the best of it is on the north and east side of the loop, with a 25-foot boulder standing on end along the road about a mile before the peak. The summit of Monument Peak has no built trail; it is an off-trail scramble over granite for people who want it.
Dogs. On leash; expect horses and ATVs, so keep the leash short at blind corners. Horses have the right of way for everyone.
Skip it if you want quiet and water. Horton Creek is 25 minutes farther east; Water Wheel Falls on the north side of town is the short walk with something at the end; Tonto Natural Bridge is the family stop with a fee. If you are camping, Houston Mesa is 20 minutes away. This one is for the days you are already in Payson and have ninety minutes; pair it with lunch rather than making it the day. For the whole Rim Country itinerary, see day trips from Scottsdale.
The town that finally built its own trails
The Payson basin was Te-go-suk, “place of the yellow water,” to the Dilzhe’e Apache, the people the Americans called Tonto, who lived here with Yavapai bands in mixed, bilingual camps and ranged from the Verde to the Rim. The Army took the country in a decade. In 1871 it gathered the Tonto Apache and Yavapai onto the Rio Verde Reserve; in 1875 it dissolved the reserve and marched them to San Carlos. When some families walked back about twenty years later they found settlers on their land, and most rejoined their Yavapai relatives at Camp Verde instead. The ones who stayed near Payson lived without a land base until 1972, when Congress gave the Tonto Apache Tribe a reservation of 85 acres south of town, the smallest in Arizona.
The settlers had arrived in 1882, when Henry Sidles, John and Lucy Hise and James Callaghan founded a logging, mining and ranching hamlet they called Union Park, or Green Valley. The same year the Battle of Big Dry Wash, the last fight of the Apache wars in Arizona, was fought on the Rim just north of town. A post office opened on March 3, 1884, the town was renamed for Illinois congressman Levi Joseph Payson, who had helped secure it, and the first Payson rodeo was held that August; it has run every year since and claims to be the oldest continuous rodeo in the country. The Granite Dells were the rough, boulder-choked ground on the town’s southeast edge, grazed and woodcut and otherwise left alone.
Zane Grey made the Rim famous. He first came in 1918, returned every year through 1929, bought land on Tonto Creek and set a dozen novels in the country around Payson; the replica of his cabin stands in Green Valley Park. What made Payson a Valley town was the road. The paved highway from Phoenix, the Beeline, was finished in 1958, and Payson became the place Phoenix went for a weekend. The town incorporated in 1973, has grown to about 16,000 people, and lives on retirees, second homes and the traffic that comes up SR 87 every Friday.
The trails came last. For most of its history Payson’s residents reached the forest on old logging roads and social paths across whatever land was handy, and the Granite Dells in particular became a maze of ATV tracks. The Payson Area Trails System is the town’s answer: an in-progress network, run by the Parks, Recreation and Tourism office with the Tonto National Forest, that links sidewalks and bike lanes in town to formal trails on forest land so that people can walk or ride from their doors into the Tonto. Gila County’s tourism office lists about a dozen segments so far, from the Round Valley and Houston trails on the north side to the Granite Dells group on the southeast, where the Monument Peak Loop (3 miles), the Boulders Loop (2.4 miles) and the Cypress Trail (2 miles) were marked and mapped out of the old roads. When each was signed the public pages do not say, and this guide does not guess; the system was still being built out in the mid-2020s, and the markers are newer than the tracks they follow.
Why it matters
Monument Peak is a small trail with a useful lesson: a Rim town that lived for a century on logging, ranching and weekend traffic from Phoenix has decided its boulder fields are worth signing and keeping for people on foot. It is also an honest piece of Payson, Apache ground, ranch ground, ATV ground, now a loop with markers, five minutes from the highway and free. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: it is not the reason to drive to Payson, but if you are there with ninety minutes and a dog, walk it counterclockwise in the morning and have lunch in town.