What is the Rock Creek Trailhead?
Everyone in the Valley knows Four Peaks from the west, and almost everyone who climbs them drives the long dirt road to Lone Pine Saddle. The east side is another matter. From the Tonto Basin, the mountain rises 4,000 feet straight out of the saguaros above Roosevelt Lake, and the Chillicut Trail #132 is the one maintained way up it. It starts at the Rock Creek Trailhead, about 2,850 feet, where a seasonal creek comes off the mountain a few miles west of SR 188, and ends 5.5 miles later at the Four Peaks Trail #130, the Arizona Trail, on Buckhorn Mountain at about 6,580 feet, in ponderosa pines. The Forest Service lists it at 5.75 miles; the gain is a little over 3,700 feet either way.
The route has three characters. First, an ill-defined start along Rock Creek with cairns, then an old jeep road marked on the maps as the Baldy Trail, climbing steadily for half an hour. Second, a long traverse across a dozen small drainages with the lake behind you and the Mogollon Rim on the horizon. Third, a set of very steep switchbacks into Baldy Canyon, where a creek runs under sycamores, cottonwoods and willows, a wilderness sign marks the boundary, and the trail climbs, crosses and fades for the last two miles to the pines. Saguaros to ponderosas in one morning is the whole appeal.
What you get is Four Peaks from the quiet side, a riparian canyon in the middle and a trail you will have to yourself. What you do not get is a toilet, a fee station, water, a trail you can follow without a map, or an easy day.
How to hike it right
Pay nothing. No fee and no Tonto Pass; the pass covers the lake’s shoreline sites, not a forest-road turnaround. Wilderness rules apply past the Baldy Canyon sign: groups of 15 or fewer, no bikes.
Get there. Shea Boulevard east to SR 87, north on the Beeline to SR 188 at Jakes Corner, then south through Punkin Center toward Roosevelt Lake. Forest Road 445 (Three Bar Road) leaves the west side of SR 188 about 36 miles north of US 60 at Claypool, which puts it several miles northwest of the Roosevelt bridge; it is signed. Follow FR 445 about 3 miles west, turn left on FR 445A and continue a quarter mile to the trailhead, a small dirt turnaround. High clearance is recommended; the roads cross washes that run after storms. Figure 105 minutes from Old Town. You will likely have the lot to yourself.
Pick the season. October through April. The lower half is open desert that is lethal in summer, and the top can carry snow after winter storms. March and April, with the creek running, are the months.
Water. None at the trailhead. Rock Creek and Baldy Canyon run seasonally, after wet winters and not reliably; treat everything. Three liters minimum for the full hike.
Start at first light and plan eight hours. The first half is exposed desert and the second half is a steep canyon where the trail fades in the brush, so the day is longer than the mileage suggests. The old jeep road is the easy part; where it ends, look left for cairns. In Baldy Canyon keep crossing the creek whenever the tread disappears on your side. The wilderness sign at the Baldy Canyon crossing is the halfway mark in effort as well as distance.
Route finding. The start is faint, the upper canyon is overgrown, and the Forest Service says plainly that route finding skills will be important. Carry a map and a GPS track, and set a turn-around time.
Take the short version if you need to. The two miles to the top of the jeep road still give you Roosevelt Lake and the Rim and are a fair morning on their own. Do not confuse this trail with the Forest Service’s Rock Creek Trail #42, which is in the Mazatzals west of Rye.
Dogs. Allowed; the creek crossings and the length make it a hike for fit dogs only.
Skip it if you want the summit view with less suffering: Lone Pine Saddle and Brown’s Peak deliver it from the west. For a night in the basin before or after, Cholla and Indian Point are the lake campgrounds nearest the turnoff, and the Cemetery Trailhead by the dam is the short walk with history.
Saguaros to pines, and the fire in between
Four Peaks is Wi:khoba to the Yavapai, who shared the Tonto Basin with the Tonto Apache and hunted both sides of the mountain; across the lake, Salado farmers built the cliff dwellings now protected at Tonto National Monument in the 1300s and were gone by 1450. The Army’s answer to the Yavapai and Apache was the Rio Verde Reserve, closed in March 1875 when its people were marched to San Carlos, and after that the basin filled with cattle outfits. The Three Bar was one of them, and its name is on the road to this trailhead, Three Bar Road, FR 445. The Salt River below the basin got Roosevelt Dam in 1911, and the lake that fills the eastern view from the Chillicut’s upper traverse has been the reason for the Tonto National Forest, created to protect the reservoir’s watershed, ever since.
The wilderness is a 1984 creation. The Arizona Wilderness Act of that year set aside 60,740 acres of the Mazatzals’ southern end as the Four Peaks Wilderness, with Browns Peak, at 7,659 feet the highest point in Maricopa County, at its center. The designation closed the old jeep roads, including the one marked Baldy Trail on the USGS sheets that the Chillicut still follows for its first miles, and left a handful of trails to climb into the high country: the Four Peaks Trail along the crest, Lone Pine Saddle’s approach from the west, and the Chillicut from the east.
Then most of it burned. On April 27, 1996, two campers near Lone Pine Saddle on the west side left a campfire unattended. The Lone Fire that resulted ran for 11 days and consumed more than 61,000 acres, most of the wilderness, in what was then the worst fire-danger year on record in Arizona; it was the largest fire in the Tonto’s history and the largest recorded in the state until Rodeo-Chediski in 2002. The forest that came back is not the forest that burned. Where the Chillicut traverses the mountain’s east face, the chaparral is thicker than the pines it replaced and it swallows faint tread, which is why the Forest Service’s one warning about this trail is about route finding and why the Arizona Trail’s Four Peaks passage, which the Chillicut joins on Buckhorn Mountain, is rated among the 800-mile trail’s hardest for lack of maintenance. The Arizona Trail itself was named a National Scenic Trail on March 30, 2009, and declared complete on December 16, 2011.
What has not changed is the mountain’s basic arithmetic. Four thousand feet of relief in five and a half miles takes you through every life zone between Sonoran desert and ponderosa forest, and Baldy Canyon, running under sycamores and cottonwoods halfway up, is the kind of riparian pocket the fire spared. Almost nobody comes. The trailhead is a turnaround at the end of a wash road, the Forest Service’s count of 5.75 miles is the only official number, and on a spring Saturday when Lone Pine Saddle’s lot is overflowing, the Rock Creek lot holds one truck.
Why it matters
The Chillicut is the honest way to understand Four Peaks: not the postcard from the Valley but the climb itself, from the saguaros the Yavapai hunted among to the pines a careless campfire nearly erased in 1996. It shows what a 1984 wilderness line does when it closes a jeep road and lets a trail fade, and what a 61,000-acre fire does to a mountain’s trails thirty years on. For a Scottsdale hiker the verdict is firm: this is a very hard day for a view you can get more easily from Lone Pine Saddle, so come for the canyon, the solitude and the climb itself, in March with the creek running, and not for a shortcut.