What is Mount Ord?
Every drive up the Beeline to Payson passes beneath it: the broad, tower-topped summit on the west side of the highway north of Sunflower. That is Mount Ord, at 7,128 feet the high point of the southern Mazatzals and the easiest real mountain near the Valley to stand on top of. A graded Forest Service road leaves SR 87 and climbs out of the grassland through juniper and oak into ponderosa pine, gaining roughly 2,700 feet in six miles, to a locked gate below the towers. From there the walk is short and the view is the whole middle of Arizona: Four Peaks close enough to count the summits, Roosevelt Lake below, the Mazatzal crest marching north, and the long flat wall of the Mogollon Rim across the Tonto Basin.
The towers are relay equipment for half the state’s radio and the Forest Service’s own network; the fenced compound is why the last stretch is closed to cars. It is not pretty, but it is why there is a road at all. The road itself is the attraction for most people: a free, 20-minute climb from desert to pine forest with pull-outs that look across the whole Tonto Basin.
What you get is the quickest 7,000 feet from Scottsdale, 20 to 25 degrees of relief in June, flat picnic spots in the pines and a 360-degree view for the price of gas. What you do not get is a trail, a toilet, water, a summit you can stand on without a fence in the frame, or a road you should trust after rain.
How to do Mount Ord right
Pay nothing. No Tonto Pass, no permit, no gate fee. Nothing to reserve.
Get there. Take Shea Boulevard east to SR 87, the Beeline, and head north through Fountain Hills, over the Mazatzal divide and down past Sunflower. About 33 miles north of Fountain Hills, near milepost 223, the signed turn for Forest Road 626 is on the right. Figure an hour to the turnoff and 20 to 30 minutes on the dirt, about 85 minutes from Old Town to the gate. The road is graded and well kept, but it is a mountain road: tight switchbacks, no guardrails, loose rock in places and drop-offs that will hold your passengers’ attention. A stock SUV or crossover is fine when dry; a low sedan will scrape. There is a pull-out around mile 1.6 and a bigger one near mile 3 with the first Rim view; the gate at about mile 6 has room for a handful of cars.
Pick the season. April through November. Summer is the reason to come, 20 to 25 degrees cooler than Scottsdale, though monsoon afternoons bring lightning to a summit covered in metal towers; be down by early afternoon in July and August. Snow and mud close the road most winters, and the Forest Service closes it during fire operations. If there has been weather in the past week, call the Payson Ranger District.
Walk the last bit. The gate stops you about a half mile to a mile below the towers. Walk around the summit fence to the north side for the Rim and to the south for Four Peaks and Roosevelt Lake. Hikers who want a workout park at the highway and walk the road: about 12 miles round trip and 2,700 feet of gain, exposed for the first half. The older Mount Ord Truck Trail (FR 27) joins near the top and is rockier and brushier; take 626 both ways unless you are in a real four-wheel-drive.
Water and facilities. None at all. No toilet, no trash service, no reliable cell signal. Bring what you need and take it home.
Camp if you like. Dispersed camping is allowed along the road at existing pull-outs under Tonto rules; the pine flats near the gate fill on summer weekends. Fire restrictions usually begin in May; check before you plan on a campfire.
Dogs. Fine, on leash near other people and under control everywhere.
Skip it if you want to climb something. It is a road, not a trail, and the summit is a fenced tower farm. Brown’s Peak across the highway is the real thing, Barnhardt is the best Mazatzal canyon walk, and Ballantine and the Sycamore Creek trailhead are the lower, closer hikes on the same highway. If you want cool air and a view without effort, this is as good as it gets this close to home.
The summit the Army used for signals before anyone used it for anything
The Mazatzals were Yavapai and Tonto Apache country, a high, broken range between the Verde and the Tonto Basin whose canyons hid people the Army spent the 1860s and 1870s trying to find. The peak’s name comes from that war without the general ever seeing it. In 1868 Major General Edward O. C. Ord was sent west to command the Department of California, which then included Arizona, and the Army’s mapmakers put his name on the mountain; his reputation in the territory was for harshness toward Native people, and the name sits oddly on a peak whose only Army history is a mirror. The same year, 1868, the Army cut the Reno Road along the mountain’s southern flank to link Fort McDowell on the Verde with Camp Reno, a small outpost near today’s Punkin Center in Tonto Basin. It was so steep that wagons needed two mule teams, and parts of its line survive as the Mount Ord Truck Trail, FR 27, the rougher way to the top.
The summit’s first job came in 1890, when the Army ran a heliograph station on it during the last Apache campaigns, flashing Morse code in reflected sunlight to other peaks across the basin. It was a logical choice: the same sightlines that make the view good made the signal carry. Mining followed. The Mazatzals were a mercury district, and in 1925 prospectors found cinnabar in Slate Creek below the peak; the claims became the Ord Mine, one of the range’s quicksilver workings, and the mine roads are part of why there is a road up the mountain at all.
The Forest Service took the summit for fire. In 1936 it built a 60-foot lookout on top, a steel tower with a cab, and staffed it through the fire seasons that followed; the cab is now on display at the Rim Country Museum in Payson. In 1983 a 102-foot steel tower replaced it, and in the decades since the summit has filled with the radio, repeater and amateur-radio equipment that makes the compound a fenced tower farm and keeps the last stretch of road locked for security. Today the fire watching is done by panoramic cameras, and the lookout is a relay station that happens to have the best view in the Tonto Basin.
What made Mount Ord a place Valley people know is the highway below it. The Beeline was a 1950s shortcut across tribal land that a county supervisor got built to save 15 minutes to the Saguaro Lake turnoff; it was paved to Payson with a ribbon cut on July 19, 1958, and widened to four lanes end to end between 1995 and 2001. Every one of the millions of trips up it since has passed beneath the towers north of Sunflower, and the graded road to them, FR 626, became the Valley’s quickest drive to pine country without anyone building a trailhead or a sign bigger than a route marker.
Nothing much has changed lately, which is the point. The Forest Service has no dedicated page for the mountain, no fee, no facilities and no plans; the road gets graded, the gate stays locked, the pines below it fill with dispersed campers on June weekends, and the summit does its quiet work for the radio networks.
Why it matters
Mount Ord explains the shape of the middle of Arizona in a single view: the Verde’s mountains to the west, the Tonto Basin and Roosevelt Lake below, the Rim as a wall to the north, Four Peaks across the highway. It also explains how much of the state’s back country was opened by somebody else’s needs, the Army’s road, a mercury mine’s track, a fire lookout’s access, with recreation arriving last and free. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: when the Valley hits 105, this is 85 degrees and a picnic in the pines 85 minutes from Old Town, no pass and no trail required. Go in June, stop at the mile-3 pull-out, and be off the summit before the afternoon lightning.