What is Sheep Bridge?
In 1943 the Flagstaff Sheep Company held a winter grazing allotment on the east side of the Verde River and a summer allotment on the west, and every spring and fall it lost animals swimming the flocks across. So the company and the Howard Sheep Company built a bridge: a narrow suspension span at Red Point, made from cable and steel salvaged from the Bluebell and Golden Turkey mines and a railroad, by a crew of Basque, Mexican and Hispanic herders, for $7,277, finished in 1944. Some 11,000 sheep a year crossed it. The drives ended in the late 1970s, the bridge went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and after it was closed in 1987 and dismantled in 1988, the Forest Service built the 1989 replica that stands there now, beside the original west tower.
Today the bridge is a landmark and a trailhead, the only crossing on this stretch of river and the way into the west side of the Mazatzal Wilderness: the Verde River Trail #11, the Willow Springs Trail #223 climbing 17.5 miles to the Mazatzal Divide and the Arizona Trail, and the Dutchman Grave Trail #22, which together make a 25-mile loop from 2,100 feet to about 5,000. Just upstream on the west bank, a hot spring at roughly 99 degrees seeps into old concrete stock tubs in the reeds. The river is wild, cold in winter and fast in spring, and the canyon is empty.
What you get is a wild river, a strange piece of ranching history, a soak, and the best dispersed camping on the Verde, for free. What you do not get is anything else: no toilet, no water, no table, no cell signal, and no road that a crossover should attempt. The road is the price, and it is the whole reason the place is still quiet.
How to do Sheep Bridge right
Pay nothing, know the rules. None. Dispersed camping, 14-day limit. Wilderness rules across the bridge: groups of 15 or fewer, no bikes beyond the boundary. Motorized boats are prohibited on the river here. The Forest Service asks you to bring a portable toilet and pack everything out.
Get there. Two ways, both long. From Carefree, take Cave Creek Road north until it becomes Forest Road 24 and continue about 33 miles of dirt to the Bloody Basin and Tangle Creek junction, then turn right on Forest Road 269 for 12 miles to the river. Or take I-17 north to exit 259, Bloody Basin Road, and follow it east about 36 miles through Agua Fria National Monument and down into the basin to the same FR 269 descent. Either way is about 3 hours from Old Town. FR 24 is partly maintained; FR 269 is not, and the Forest Service calls it rocky and technical, high clearance required and 4WD when wet. The road ends on a camping terrace above the river. The I-17 route is smoother and more scenic, with the ruins and petroglyphs of Bloody Basin along the way, but both end on the same 12 miles of FR 269: rocky ledges, a steep descent to the river and no maintenance to speak of, so a stock high-clearance 4x4 with good tires, not a crossover.
Pick the season, and check the whole forecast. October through April. The canyon floor is above 100 degrees all summer, and winter storms close the roads with mud for days; Bloody Basin turns to grease and people have been stuck for days, so check the forecast for the whole weekend, not just the drive in.
Make it an overnight. Three hours each way on dirt is too much for a day, and the camping on the terraces above the river is the best part.
Water and facilities. Nothing. No restrooms, no potable water, no tables. Bring a portable toilet; the Forest Service asks for it.
The river. Levels swing with the season and the Verde can run with great velocity, in the Forest Service’s words. Do not wade high water or drive flooded crossings; the stupid motorist law applies on forest roads too, and a Bloody Basin flash flood does not need rain where you are standing.
The spring and the walk. The hot spring is in the reeds on the west bank a few hundred yards upstream of the bridge, piped into concrete tubs; it is tepid, not scalding, and often shared. Cross the bridge and walk the first mile of the Willow Springs Trail for the view back down the canyon, and go no farther without a map, water and a plan.
Dogs. Allowed; keep them out of the hot tubs.
Skip it if the road is the problem. If you want the Verde without a 4x4, Horseshoe is a graded hour away and Bartlett Lake is paved all the way; if you want a hot spring, Verde Hot Springs at Childs is a different kind of trip. Sheep Bridge is for the day you want all of it and the road is the price.
The bridge the sheep needed and the hikers inherited
Red Point was a crossing before it was a bridge. The middle Verde is Yavapai country, with Tonto Apache bands sharing the Mazatzals to the east, and the ford here connected the river terraces to the mountain springs. The Army’s campaign of the early 1870s ended that; in 1875 the Yavapai and Tonto Apache of the Verde were marched to San Carlos, and ranchers, then sheepmen, took up the grazing on both banks.
The sheep were the problem the bridge solved. By the 1940s the Flagstaff Sheep Company wintered its flocks on the east side of the river and summered them on the west, and the twice-yearly swim drowned animals every time. Dr. R.O. Raymond of the company paid for a bridge; C.O. Gilliam designed it; the company’s foreman Frank Auza and a local builder, George W. Smith, put it up with a crew of more than thirty Basque, French Basque, Mexican and Hispanic herders, using surplus steel from the Bluebell Mine and cable from the Golden Turkey Mine. The road was built and work started in 1943, the span was finished in 1944, and the whole thing cost $7,277: 691 feet long, 45 inches wide, with the walkway about 45 feet above the river. The tower legs were first built of 2x10 lumber, which rotted, and Auza later poured concrete towers; the west one still stands. Some 11,000 sheep a year walked across it.
The river changed around it. In 1946 Phelps Dodge finished Horseshoe Dam downstream, paid for with wartime Defense Plant Corporation money in exchange for the right to take Black River water for its copper towns, and the Verde below the bridge became a reservoir while the stretch above it stayed wild. The Wilderness Act of 1964 made the Mazatzal a designated wilderness, 252,390 acres of it today, with the bridge as its lowest point at 2,100 feet. In 1984 Congress named about 40 miles of the Verde above Horseshoe, the river the bridge crosses, as Arizona’s first Wild and Scenic River.
The sheep stopped in 1978, the year Auza stopped maintaining the bridge, and on November 21, 1978 the Verde River Sheep Bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Listing did not save it. The Forest Service closed the failing span in 1987, demolished most of it in 1988, and in 1989 built the replica that stands today beside the original west tower, not for sheep but for hikers heading into the west side of the Mazatzal on the Verde River, Willow Springs and Dutchman Grave trails. The hot spring in the reeds upstream, 99-degree water piped into three cattle tubs on a ledge, is the ranching era’s other survivor.
What has not changed is FR 269. The Forest Service still does not maintain it and still calls it technical, which is why a National Register bridge three hours from Phoenix sees a few dozen people on a good winter weekend.
Why it matters
Sheep Bridge is the clearest surviving piece of the Verde’s ranching century, a $7,277 span built by herders from mine scrap so that sheep would stop drowning, and it marks the exact line where the river stops being a reservoir and becomes a wild one. It explains the Mazatzal’s west side, why the wilderness has a footbridge for a front door, and why the Forest Service rebuilt a bridge nobody’s sheep would ever use again. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is conditional on the truck. With a real 4x4, a dry forecast and a night to spend, it is the best wild-river camp within three hours of Old Town, with a soak and a walk thrown in; without those, Horseshoe and Bartlett are the Verde you can reach.