What is Phon D Sutton Recreation Area?
Where the Verde River slides into the Salt above Granite Reef, the Tonto National Forest keeps a day-use area named for a man almost nobody can identify: Phon D. Sutton. It is 15 picnic tables under six shade ramadas on a bench above the river, vault toilets, a wide dirt lot and a sandy beach where the water is shallow and slow. Behind it, the Lower Salt River Nature Trail loops through one of the Valley’s last intact mesquite bosques, where the birding is good enough that Audubon groups meet here on winter mornings and bald eagles nest nearby in spring.
It is also horse country. The Salt River wild horses, a herd the state recognized and protected in 2016, graze the river bottom between here and Coon Bluff, and in the cool months they walk into the river at dusk to eat eelgrass. Half the cars in the lot on a January evening are there for the horses, not the picnic. In summer the site changes character completely: it becomes the main tube and kayak take-out for floats launched upstream at Pebble Beach, the lot locks when full by late morning and the ramadas turn into a parking-lot party. Both versions are legitimate. Know which one you are driving to.
What you get is shade, a slow river, horses most winter evenings and the best picnic tables on the Lower Salt, 35 minutes from Old Town on pavement. What you do not get is a campsite, drinking water, or any peace on a July Saturday.
How to do Phon D Sutton right
Hang the pass before the ranger arrives. A Tonto Daily Pass must be on your mirror: $8 per vehicle bought ahead at a Forest Service office or a retail vendor (many gas stations on Power Road sell them), or $12 from the credit-card machine at the site, which is sometimes down. The $80 Tonto Discovery annual pass and America the Beautiful passes are accepted at this site. Expect rangers and the sheriff to check.
Get there. Loop 101 south to Loop 202 east (Red Mountain Freeway), exit Power Road and go north; Power Road becomes the Bush Highway (Forest Road 204) as it enters the forest. About nine miles up, turn left on Forest Road 169 at the Phon D Sutton sign and follow the pavement a mile to the lot. Call it 35 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. The road is paved the whole way and the lot is large, flat and fine for any vehicle, though trailers are discouraged.
Pick the version. October through April is for picnics, horses and birds; come in the last hour before sunset, when the picnickers have gone and the horses walk out of the mesquite. May through September is tubing season, when the river is cold and fast with releases from Saguaro Lake and the lot fills early; if you want quiet water in summer, drive on to Butcher Jones.
Water. None. Vault toilets only. Carry what you need and leave the glass at home; it is banned along the river.
Behave around the horses. Stand still at the water’s edge and they will pass within 50 feet; do not approach, touch or feed them. State law protects the herd and the Forest Service tickets people who harass it. Keep the dog leashed and out of the eelgrass shallows where they feed. The full etiquette is in the tubing and wild horses guide.
Walk the trail. The nature trail is a flat, shaded mile and a half through the bosque and is the one trail on the river you can walk in July before nine. Birders should bring the binoculars in winter; the confluence is one of the best spots in the Valley.
Respect the river. Monsoon storms upstream can raise it quickly; the flash-flood basics apply even on a sunny afternoon here. Fallen trees trap swimmers and tubers, the bottom is uneven, the water is cold. Life jackets on anything that floats.
Dogs. Allowed on leash.
Skip it if you want to camp or swim in earnest. There is no camping, no water, and a summer scene that is the opposite of peaceful. For a quiet winter picnic and a near-certain horse sighting it is the best place on the river.
The confluence that waters the Valley
The Salt and the Verde meet here, and a few miles below the meeting the Hohokam built the headgates of the largest canal system in pre-Columbian North America, hundreds of miles of ditches that watered the valley where Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa now stand. The Akimel O’odham and Piipaash who followed them dug their own canals from the same river, and their descendants’ Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community holds the south bank at the confluence today; the whole Lower Salt corridor is their front yard before it is anyone’s recreation area.
The modern river was made by two dams. The first Anglo diversion, the Arizona Dam, washed out in a 1905 flood, and the new Reclamation Service replaced it with Granite Reef Diversion Dam two miles downstream of here, built between 1906 and 1908: a low concrete weir, 1,128 feet long, that turns nearly the whole Salt into the Arizona and South canals. Below Granite Reef the river is usually dry. Above it, the stretch where Phon D Sutton sits was still a wild river until Stewart Mountain Dam closed in 1930 and Saguaro Lake filled; from then on the Lower Salt has been a 12-mile tailwater whose flow is set by SRP’s irrigation schedule, cold and strong in summer when the farms want water and low and clear in winter when they do not. That schedule is why the tubers come in July and the horses come in January.
The name is the mystery. The Forest Service built its picnic grounds along the Bush Highway as Mesa grew toward the river in the middle of the century, and this one was named for Phon D. Sutton, about whom the agency’s own page says nothing. The single account we found says he sat on the Maricopa County Parks Board, created in 1954, and died in 1959; earlier versions of this guide called him a Forest Service ranger, and we could not confirm that and no longer say it. Whoever he was, the site, Coon Bluff and Blue Point were the county’s and the forest’s answer to a Valley that had discovered the river, and the ramadas, toilets and gates arrived as the crowds did. The Tonto Pass, which began in 1999, pays for them.
The horses made the place famous. Feral horses have lived in the Salt River bottom for generations, their origin argued over, and by the 2010s the bands grazing the eelgrass at Phon D Sutton and Coon Bluff were the most photographed animals in Arizona. In August 2015 the Forest Service posted notice that it would round them up as unauthorized livestock; the public reaction, tens of thousands of comments and a line of politicians at the river, stopped the roundup within days. In May 2016 Governor Doug Ducey signed the Salt River Horse Act, making it a crime to harass, kill or remove the horses, and the state, the Forest Service and the Salt River Wild Horse Management Group later agreed on a plan that manages the herd with fertility control rather than removal. The horses you watch at dusk are, legally, neither wildlife nor livestock, and the law that protects them was written because of scenes at this ramada.
What is coming is more of the same: more visitors, more enforcement of the glass ban and the pass, and a herd held at a size the river can feed. The site has been day use only since it was built, and the Forest Service has never suggested otherwise.
Why it matters
Phon D Sutton is where the Valley’s plumbing becomes a place. The river here is the one the Hohokam and the O’odham farmed from, the one Granite Reef turns into canals two miles downstream, and the one SRP releases on a schedule that decides whether you meet tubers or horses. It is also where Arizona decided, in 2015, that a herd of feral horses mattered more than the Forest Service’s rulebook, which tells you something about the state. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is easy: a $8 pass, 35 minutes of pavement, and the best winter picnic and evening horse-watching within reach of Old Town. Come between October and March in the last hour of light, stand still, and let them walk past.