What is Round Mountain Park?
Globe is a copper town of about 7,000 people built into a canyon of the Pinal foothills, and Round Mountain is the dark volcanic hill that closes the canyon’s south end. The city turned it into a 386-acre park with a network of short, connected loops, and it has become the place Globe walks its dogs, trains for the Pinals and takes visitors who have an hour. The city counts five loops; the Arizona Trailblazers hiking club counts six trails and lists their names: West, Bull’s Eye Rock, Summit, East, Boulder Canyon, Ridge, Box Canyon and Prospector Canyon. The longest single loop is about 3 miles, and doing all of it is 6 to 7 miles, a 4-to-6-hour outing.
The climb is from about 3,560 feet at the visitor center to roughly 4,200 feet at the summit, where a flag marks the top of the West Trail and a 360-degree view takes in the Pinal Mountains, the Apache Peaks, the Globe Hills, the terraced pits of the Old Dominion mining district and the whole town. Lower down are Bull’s Eye Rock, a circular formation with shallow caves that children treat as the main event, and two small shady canyons on the east side. The trails were reworked into named mini-loops in 2023, and the footing is rocky and honest throughout.
What you get is the best short hike in the Globe-Miami area, free, easy to find and with a restroom at the trailhead. What you do not get is wilderness: this is a town park with mine pits in the view, no drinking water and no shade on the upper trails.
How to hike Round Mountain right
Pay nothing. A free city park, no entry or parking fee, open dawn to dusk. The small visitor center with restrooms is staffed irregularly.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east, through Apache Junction, Superior and Miami, about 90 miles. In Globe, from the US 60/SR 188 junction continue 4.8 miles east on US 60 to South Street, signed for Round Mountain Park, near the Quality Inn and a quarter mile before US 70 splits off. It is easy to miss. Turn right and go half a mile to the lot. Figure 105 minutes from Old Town. The paved lot has room for a few dozen cars and fills only for events.
Photograph the map first. The 2023 renaming left a mix of old and new signs on the hill, and the junctions come every few hundred yards. The map on the visitor center wall is the one to trust.
Do the West Trail if you do one. It is about a mile up to the flag, and a summit-and-back is under 2 miles with about 650 feet of climbing. Everything in the park is rated easy to moderate. Bull’s Eye Rock is a short loop near the bottom that kids like; Boulder Canyon and Box Canyon are the shadier side of the hill for a warm morning.
Pick the season. October through April, with December through March the pleasant months. Globe sits at about 3,500 feet, so winter mornings are brisk and good, and summer afternoons hit 100 degrees with no shade up high; from May through September it is a sunrise-only park, and the summer sunrise rules apply.
Water and dogs. Restrooms at the visitor center, picnic ramadas and benches, and no drinking water anywhere; bring your own, and plenty in warm weather. Dogs are welcome on leash, and Globe’s dog walkers own the park before work, so by 9 a.m. on a weekday it is yours.
Make a day of it. Coffee and the historic downtown are a mile north. The Pinal Mountains’ trailheads are 20 minutes south, with free camping at Pinal Campground and Pioneer Pass. On the way home, Boyce Thompson Arboretum is on US 60 west of Superior, and Oak Flat is the campground at the center of the copper fight, just east of Superior. The day trips guide has the rest of the loop.
Skip it if you want real mountains: drive the extra 20 minutes to the Pinals, or west to the Superstitions.
A trail park above a copper town
The canyon below Round Mountain has been lived in for a long time. Between about 1225 and 1400 Salado farmers built and occupied the pueblo at Besh-Ba-Gowah, on the south side of what is now Globe, and the Western Apache, whose homeland ran from these foothills east to the White Mountains, gave the place its name: Bésh Baa Gowąh, usually translated as place of metal. In 1871 and 1872 federal executive orders set the country aside as the White Mountain and San Carlos reservation.
The metal is why that did not last. Prospectors filed the first Globe Ledge claims in September 1873, and Tucson citizens petitioned the Interior Department to remove the mineral region from the reservation; it was soon severed and reopened as the Globe Mining District. Around 1875 the silver camp at Ramboz Peak moved down into the canyon and Globe was founded. It became the Gila County seat in February 1881, held the Apache Kid’s trial in 1889, and incorporated in 1907.
Silver gave out quickly; copper did not. The Old Dominion Mining Company was incorporated in 1880, bought by the Lewisohn brothers in 1894 and by Phelps Dodge in 1904, and the railroad’s arrival in 1898 made the ore pay. Globe hit about 7,100 people in 1910, a strike in July 1917 brought federal troops, and in 1931 the Old Dominion closed for good as the industry moved west to Miami’s bigger pits. The terraced dumps and pits you see from the summit flag are what that half century left. Globe’s population has hovered around 7,000 ever since, and its downtown, a mile north of the park, was listed on the National Register as a historic district in 1987.
Round Mountain Park itself has a short public record. The city does not publish when it acquired the hill or built the first trails, and no source we found pins a founding year; what is documented is the 386 acres, the visitor center and the 2023 rework that turned an informal web of paths into a set of named mini-loops with a summit flag. It is a town park in the best sense, built and used by the people who live below it, and it has grown into Globe’s front yard as mining’s share of the town has shrunk.
Why it matters
Round Mountain explains Globe in one view. From the flag you can see the Pinals that the Apache knew, the canyon where the silver camp settled, the dumps of the copper company that built the town and the downtown that survived it. It is also a small example of what Arizona’s mining towns are doing next: turning the hills around them into trail parks, for themselves first and for visitors second. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: it is free, it is 105 minutes away, and it is the right hour-long hike to pair with Globe’s downtown, Besh-Ba-Gowah or a night in the Pinals between October and April.