What is the Mount Peeley Trailhead?
The Mazatzals run 50 miles north from the Beeline to the East Verde, and the Mazatzal Divide Trail #23 runs the length of their crest, 30 miles of it mostly as the Arizona Trail, from the City Creek Trailhead in the north to this lot in the south. The Mount Peeley Trailhead is the high way in. At about 5,600 feet, some 1,400 feet above the Barnhardt Trailhead and more than 3,000 above the Beeline at Sunflower, it is the highest drive-up start in the range, and it puts you on the divide after a half-mile walk on the Cornucopia Trail #86, where a large metal sign marks the junction of Arizona Trail Passage 22 (Saddle Mountain) to the south and Passage 23 (Mazatzal Divide) to the north.
The day hike is Mount Peeley, 7,030 feet, the rounded summit directly above the lot. There is no trail to it; from the divide a cairned route leaves the trail and climbs the east ridge through manzanita and loose rock, roughly 4.7 miles round trip and 1,450 feet of gain, to a broad top with rock piles and a view from Four Peaks to the Mogollon Rim. The Deer Creek Trail #45 drops 8.75 miles from near the trailhead to the Beeline for a shuttle, and the Cornucopia continues 3 miles south to Forest Road 25A.
What you get is the Mazatzal high country without the 1,800-foot climb from Barnhardt, a half-day summit and a lot that rarely holds more than two cars. What you do not get is a facility of any kind, water, shade on the summit or an easy road. The road is the test and the quiet is the reward.
How to hike Mount Peeley right
Pay nothing. No fee at the trailhead and no permit for the Mazatzal Wilderness. Past the boundary, wilderness rules apply: groups of 15 or fewer, no bikes, no motors.
Get there. Shea Boulevard east to SR 87 and north on the Beeline past Sunflower. About 4.75 miles northeast of the Sunflower turnoff, past milepost 222 at the top of the long climb, turn left on Forest Road 627A, a winding paved road. After 1.25 miles a gravel road joins from the right; cross the cattle guard and continue another 1.25 miles to a three-way junction, stay right onto Forest Road 201, and follow it 9.3 to 9.5 miles to the end. Figure 115 minutes from Old Town: an hour on the Beeline, then 45 minutes on the forest roads. The lot holds a handful of cars and is rarely half full.
Drive FR 201 in daylight and slowly. It is graded and regularly maintained, in better shape than it looks from the turnoff, but it is one lane with tight turns and steep drop-offs, and meeting a truck means someone backs up. High clearance is wise and trailers are not recommended. In dry weather a car with decent clearance can make it; in wet, snowy or icy conditions it needs four-wheel drive or is closed, and it is usually closed by snow in winter.
Pick the season. April through November, and September and October are best: the oaks and bigtooth maples in the drainages below the divide turn in October. Monsoon lightning hits this ridge in July and August; be off the high ground by noon, and read the monsoon field manual before a summer trip.
Climb the east ridge. Follow the Cornucopia Trail to the signed Y with the Mazatzal Divide, go right a short way and watch for the cairn that marks the leave-off. The east ridge is brushy manzanita and loose rock for about 40 minutes, two to three hours round trip in all; long pants save your legs. The top is a broad bump with rock piles and the best view of the southern Mazatzals there is.
Carry the water. There is none at the trailhead and nothing dependable on the divide. Thicket Spring, McFarland Canyon and the seeps along Passage 22 are seasonal, and so are the springs north on the divide. Backpackers should carry water from the car and read the Arizona Trail Association’s water report the night before.
Wildlife and dogs. Black bears and mountain lions live in the Mazatzals; hang or can your food. Dogs are allowed under control, but the brush on the Peeley route is hard on them.
Skip it if nine miles of nervous road for a half-day summit sounds wrong. Barnhardt is the classic Mazatzal hike with pavement nearly to the trailhead, Mount Ord has a road to the top and the Beeline view, and Ballantine is the low-desert version an hour closer.
Mercury, sheep and two fires
The Mazatzals were Yavapai and Tonto Apache country, a range of high grassland, pine and deep canyons that the Southeastern Yavapai and their Apache neighbors used from the desert floor to the divide. They held it until 1872 and 1873, when General George Crook’s Tonto Basin campaign hunted the bands through these mountains and onto reservations. No source we could find explains who Mount Peeley is named for, and we will not guess.
Below the trailhead road, the Americans found something worth digging. In October 1911, E. H. Bowman of Phoenix, prospecting for gold, found cinnabar at the old Sunflower ranch, and the Sunflower Cinnabar Mining Company was organized in 1913. The Mazatzal deposits, Sunflower, Pine Mountain and Rattlesnake, became the source of about 95 percent of all the mercury ever mined in Arizona, and the mines worked on and off until the 1980s. The mountains also carried sheep: the Heber-Reno Sheep Driveway crossed the range near Sunflower, and the Forest Service and sheepmen built Bushnell Tank as a watering stop for flocks walking between the desert and the Rim. In 1933 the Civilian Conservation Corps built the Sunflower Ranger Station, now on the National Register.
Protection came early. The Forest Service set the Mazatzals aside as a primitive area in 1938 and a wilderness in 1940, and they became one of the original wilderness areas under the 1964 Wilderness Act, later enlarged in 1984 to about 252,000 acres. The divide trail predates the long trail; the Arizona Trail made it famous. Flagstaff teacher Dale Shewalter proposed a Mexico-to-Utah trail in 1985, Congress made it a National Scenic Trail on March 30, 2009, and the last gap closed on December 16, 2011. Passages 22 and 23 meet half a mile from this lot, which turned a dead-end forest road into an Arizona Trail access point.
Then the fires. The Willow Fire of 2004 burned about 187 square miles of the Mazatzals, much of the high country around the divide among it, and the Sunflower Fire, which started on May 12, 2012, burned about 18,000 acres more around Sunflower and the southern end of the range. Together they turned a ponderosa and chaparral ridge into an open one. The manzanita has come back; the pines, mostly, have not, and the views are wider for it.
Why it matters
Mount Peeley is a short summit with the whole history of Arizona’s middle mountains on view from the top: the Yavapai and Apache homeland that Crook emptied, the mercury mines at Sunflower, the sheep driveway, the early wilderness, the long trail and the fires that now define the range. It also shows what the Arizona Trail did for a little-known road: it gave a dead-end forest lot a purpose. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is clear. In October, with a high-clearance car and a dry forecast, this is the easiest way to stand on the Mazatzal crest, two hours from Old Town; the rest of the year, Barnhardt or Mount Ord will do.