What is San Tan Mountain Regional Park?
The San Tans are the low, dark range you see south of Queen Creek, granite and schist hills with volcanic rock in the Malpais Hills to the north, topping out a little over 2,500 feet above saguaro flats at about 1,400. In 1986 Maricopa County, Pinal County and the Bureau of Land Management agreed to make a park of them, and the result is the odd arrangement that persists today: more than 10,000 acres of Pinal County desert run by Maricopa County Parks, with the same gate fee, the same annual pass and the same rules as Usery or McDowell Mountain.
It is a trail park. Nine trails total about 20 miles: the Goldmine Trail, 2.5 miles with 541 feet of gain over a saddle on Goldmine Mountain, rated difficult and worth it for the view; the 6.4-mile San Tan Trail, which loops through the interior with only 234 feet of gain; the 4.1-mile Malpais along the hills of the same name; the 2.4-mile Dynamite; and five short connectors, Moonlight, Hedgehog, Rock Peak Wash, Stargazer and Littleleaf, none over 1.3 miles. Near Goldmine Mountain lie the graves of Mansel Carter and Marion Kennedy, prospectors who are buried where they lived.
The main entrance and visitor center, with restrooms, water, a tortoise habitat and a gift area, are on Phillips Road; the Dynamite and Rock Peak Wash trailheads are access points on the park’s edges. There is no campground, no lake and no landmark hike that draws people from across the Valley, and the attendance shows it. On a February Saturday when Usery’s lots are full by eight, San Tan has parking at ten.
How to hike San Tan right
Pay at the gate. $10 per vehicle in 2026 and 2027, $12 from January 2028; $5 per person walking, cycling or riding in. The $120 Maricopa County annual pass covers it, and if you live in the East Valley this is the park you will actually use it at. No reservations.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east, exit Ellsworth Road south through Queen Creek to Hunt Highway, east to Thompson Road, south to Phillips Road and west to the gate. Figure 55 minutes from Old Town, all paved, and expect the last ten miles to be two-lane roads through fast-growing suburbs with their share of traffic lights. The main lot is large and rarely full.
Mind the hours. 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. November through April, 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. May through October. The visitor center keeps 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily in winter and 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday to Saturday in summer.
Pick the season. October through April. The park sits low and hot; from May through September Goldmine is a first-light climb under the summer rules and the long loops are not a good idea at all. Monsoon storms flood the washes the trails cross.
Water. At the visitor center and picnic area, which also has ramadas. None on the trails; carry more than you think a short hike needs.
Do the loop. Climb Goldmine at first light and continue down the far side onto the San Tan Trail for a six-to-seven-mile loop back to the visitor center. The view from the Goldmine saddle across the San Tan Valley to the Superstitions and Picacho is the park’s best, and almost nobody is up there before eight. Stop at the Carter and Kennedy graves on the north side. Mountain bikers get Dynamite and Malpais, which flow better than anything in the Superstition foothills, and horses have the room.
Dogs and kids. Dogs on a six-foot leash, licensed, welcome on all trails; from May through September take them only at dawn. The visitor center’s tortoise enclosure is the best five minutes a child will have here, and the wildlife guide covers what else lives in the hills.
Skip it if you are coming from Scottsdale for a headline hike. Usery or the Hieroglyphic Trail are 30 minutes closer, and Lost Dutchman has the camping San Tan lacks. If you are staying in Gilbert, Queen Creek or San Tan Valley, this is your local mountain park, and it is a good one.
Two prospectors and a park the suburbs grew around
The San Tans sit on the eastern edge of Akimel O’odham country. The Gila River runs a few miles south, and the villages of the Santan District of the Gila River Indian Community, home to the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash, lie just west; the reservation still borders the park on the west and south, and the community says the range runs through its elders’ stories. The name of the mountains, the district and now a whole Pinal County suburb is shared, though no source consulted for this guide pins down where “Santan” itself came from.
For most of the twentieth century the range was open BLM desert, and its best-known residents were two men with picks. In 1948 Mansel Carter, an Ohio-born former pilot and logger who had opened a camera shop in Gilbert in 1941, and Marion Kennedy, a Cherokee from Oklahoma who had studied at the Carlisle Indian School and made a living delivering ice, moved into a cave at the foot of Goldmine Mountain. They built a shanty, mined small claims for copper, silver, turquoise and gold, and filed 55 claims over about twelve years, which Carter’s heirs still hold. Kennedy died in 1960 at 86, and Carter buried him near the camp. Carter stayed, carving figurines from wood and cactus skeletons for visitors, and became known as the Old Man of the Mountain. He died in 1987 at 85 and was buried beside his partner.
By then the park existed. In 1986, a year before Carter died, about 6,800 acres of BLM land became San Tan Mountain Regional Park under an agreement that let Maricopa County run a park in Pinal County. The county added roughly 3,400 acres in the 1990s, pushing it past 10,000.
That did not last. The 2000s housing boom turned the farmland around the park into San Tan Valley, a community that took its name from the mountains by informal public poll. A June 2003 master plan responded with trail building, fencing around sensitive areas and the closing of illegal access points cut by new neighbors, and the visitor center went up in 2005. Today subdivisions press against the boundary, and the park functions as the backyard of a suburb that did not exist when it was drawn. In 2017 Queen Creek named a new community park, Mansel Carter Oasis Park, for the old prospector.
Why it matters
San Tan is what regional parks are for: a piece of desert set aside before anyone thought it was needed, and then needed badly once the subdivisions arrived. The Carter and Kennedy graves are a reminder that the range was a place people lived and worked within living memory, not just scenery, and the reservation boundary is a reminder of whose desert it was before that. It also shows the Valley’s county park system at its most practical, a Maricopa park on Pinal land serving people from both. For a Scottsdale visitor it is not worth the drive on its own. For anyone in the southeast Valley it is the best everyday desert trail park, quiet even on a winter weekend, and the Goldmine loop at sunrise is as good a two-hour hike as the East Valley has.