What is the Parker Creek Trailhead?
The Sierra Ancha is the high, dark range east of Roosevelt Lake that most Valley hikers never name, a 7,000-foot block of limestone cliffs, pine forest and deep canyons with cliff dwellings in them, and a 20,850-acre wilderness at its heart. Parker Creek Trail #160 is the simplest way into it. From a pullout on the Young Highway (SR 288) at about 5,050 feet, the trail climbs roughly 4 miles and 2,000 feet up the canyon of Parker Creek, through ponderosa pine and then mixed conifer, to the Rim Trail #139 on the range’s crest at about 7,000 feet. From the junction, the Rim Trail runs south toward Aztec Peak, the range high point at 7,748 feet, and north toward the Moody and Reynolds Creek trails, which makes loops of 12 to 18 miles for people who come to stay.
The trailhead sits at the edge of the Sierra Ancha Experimental Forest, established in 1932 by the Forest Service’s research branch to measure how chaparral and pine watersheds behave when you cut, burn or leave them alone. Its gated driveway is the landmark for finding the trail, and the reason the lower canyon has never been logged or grazed hard. The result is a shaded, steady, well-built trail with almost nobody on it. It is for hikers who want a real climb in real shade, who have done the Superstitions and the Mazatzals and want the range beyond them, and who do not need a sign to tell them where they are.
What you get is pine shade from the first mile, a trail graded for horses and mules a century ago, and a crest with views across the Tonto Basin to Four Peaks. What you do not get is a toilet, water, a fee station, a crowd, or a short drive: it is two and a half hours each way, and nothing on SR 288 sells gas.
How to hike Parker Creek right
No pass, no permit. There is no fee at the pullout and none for the Sierra Ancha Wilderness, which the trail enters near the top. Wilderness rules apply above the boundary: groups of 15 or fewer, no bikes, no motors. Leave the research station’s gate alone; it is a working site and closed to the public.
Get there. Shea Boulevard east to SR 87, the Beeline, north to SR 188 at Jakes Corner, then south along Roosevelt Lake past the dam turnoff to the SR 288 junction. Turn north and climb about 20 miles; the road is paved and twisty. The trailhead is a small signed pullout on the right (east) just past the ADOT maintenance yard, before the highway’s sharp left hairpin, with the trail sign 40 or 50 feet off the pavement. If you reach a gated driveway marked as a research station you have gone one turn too far. Figure 150 minutes from Old Town; coming from Globe on US 60 and SR 188 is about the same. The pullout holds a few cars and is rarely full; park clear of the highway.
Pick the season. April through November. Late September and October are the prize: the Tonto Basin below is still 95 degrees and the trail is in the 70s under the pines, with oaks turning in the drainages. June is dry and buggy. Snow sits on the crest from December into March and SR 288 can be icy after storms. In July and August, monsoon lightning hits the rim by early afternoon; be heading down by noon.
Water. None at the trailhead. Parker Creek runs seasonally in the lower canyon and the Rim Trail has springs; treat everything. Carry three liters, more in June.
The hike. The first three miles are well graded and shaded, switchbacking up the canyon through ponderosa and then fir. The last mile to the Rim Trail is steep and brushy and where the old most-difficult rating comes from. Stop at the first big view of the Tonto Basin and Roosevelt Lake for a moderate day, about five hours round trip, or reach the Rim Trail and walk south toward Aztec Peak for the long one. Loops back via Workman Creek or Reynolds Creek need a car shuttle or a very long day.
Wildlife. Black bears are common in the Sierra Ancha, and this is lion country. Keep food packed and do not leave a cooler in a visible back seat at the pullout.
Dogs. Allowed, under control. The grade and the shade suit them better than most Tonto trails, and the creek, when it runs, is a bonus.
Skip it if two and a half hours each way for a four-mile trail is too much math. Make it a weekend instead: Workman Creek Falls is a few miles up the highway, and Rose Creek and Reynolds Creek campgrounds put you in the pines for the night. For the same elevation with a lake at the bottom, Cholla Campground on Roosevelt is the base, and Tonto National Monument across the lake is the Salado story with a paved trail.
The mountain the Forest Service measured for a century
The Sierra Ancha has been inhabited for a long time and visited for a short one. Between about 1280 and 1350, Salado farmers built stone cliff dwellings in the overhangs of the range’s eastern canyons above Cherry Creek, laying slab walls in mud mortar under timber roofs that tree-ring dating has pinned to roughly seventy years of occupation; the Pueblo Canyon and Devil’s Chasm ruins are the famous ones, and they are the same culture whose dwellings sit in Tonto National Monument across the lake. When the Salado left, Apache and Yavapai people used the range as summer ground, and it stayed theirs in practice until the Army campaigns of the 1870s pushed them onto the San Carlos reservation to the south. The name is Spanish and literal: the wide mountains.
What made the Forest Service care about the Sierra Ancha was water. Roosevelt Dam went up on the Salt between 1905 and 1911, directly below the range, and the Tonto National Forest, proclaimed in 1905, existed in large part to protect the watershed that filled it. Nobody actually knew how a chaparral slope or a pine canyon turned rain into streamflow, or what grazing did to the arithmetic. So in 1925 the agency’s researchers laid out plots on the range’s west slope, and in 1932 they made the site formal as the Parker Creek Experimental Forest, the first watershed research station in the Southwest. Civilian Conservation Corps crews did the heavy work in the mid-1930s, building the stone weirs and gauging stations on Parker Creek and on four small chaparral drainages, where continuous records start in 1934. In 1938 the station grew to 13,255 acres, from 3,550 to 7,723 feet, added the three forks of Workman Creek as a mixed-conifer study, and took the range’s name. For decades the Sierra Ancha was where the Southwest learned what happens to water yield when you cut a pine stand, convert chaparral to grass, or simply keep the cattle off.
The high country east of the station went a different direction at nearly the same time. In 1933 the Secretary of Agriculture designated the Sierra Ancha Primitive Area, closing the crest to roads and development; the Wilderness Act of 1964 converted it into the Sierra Ancha Wilderness, one of the original wilderness areas in the national system, at 20,850 acres with Aztec Peak as its summit. The only serious intrusion came between those dates, when uranium prospectors in the 1950s bulldozed roads into the canyons after the ore that Cold War contracts were paying for. The claims came to little, the roads were abandoned, and the Forest Service has spent seventy years letting them disappear; the trails that remain, Parker Creek among them, are mostly the older stock trails that predate the bulldozers.
The trail you walk, then, is a seam between the two experiments. Parker Creek #160 leaves the highway beside the research station’s gate, climbs through a canyon the station kept from being logged or heavily grazed, and crosses into the wilderness near the crest. The station’s work has wound down; most of the watershed studies concluded decades ago and only one stream gauge still collects long-term data, though newer projects on pollinators, a century of vegetation change and snowpack keep the site alive under the Rocky Mountain Research Station. The wilderness, meanwhile, has done what wilderness does, which is to grow quieter. SR 288 is paved to the trailhead now and gravel beyond Young, and Globe and Payson are the nearest gas in either direction, which keeps the numbers small.
Why it matters
The Sierra Ancha is where Arizona first tried to understand its own water, on the slopes above the dam that made Phoenix possible, and then decided to leave the top of the mountain alone while it did. Both choices are still visible from the Parker Creek Trail: the gated station at the bottom with its ninety-year record, the wilderness boundary near the top with no record at all. For a Scottsdale hiker the practical verdict is plain. It is the best shaded climb within three hours that nobody you know has done, it wants an October weekend rather than a day, and the car needs a full tank before SR 288.