What is Silly Mountain Park?
Driving east on US 60 past Apache Junction, the Superstitions are on your left and a lone, scruffy hill is on your right with a dirt lot at its foot. That is Silly Mountain, and the dirt lot is the trailhead for one of the East Valley’s most useful small parks. Five short trails with homemade names, Brittlebush, Old Mine, Huff and Puff, Crest and High Point, braid up the hill to a summit at about 2,100 feet, roughly 400 to 450 feet above the lot at 1,727. The longest loop you can string together is about 2.5 miles. At the base, a one-third-mile figure-eight Botanical Walk on compacted crushed granite labels more than 280 native plants from 35 species, with signs on what the Hohokam and the Apache ate and used; it is wheelchair accessible and the best five-minute Sonoran plant lesson in the area.
The hill has a history. Someone bulldozed a road most of the way up it decades ago and the scar was visible from the highway for a generation. In 2008 the Superstition Area Land Trust and the City of Apache Junction partnered to restore it; SALT’s volunteer trail crew built the trail system, the old road was closed and replanted, and a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust paid for the botanical walk. The name, for the record, came from the road beside it, which a county grader operator asked to call Silly Mountain Road.
What you get is an hour, a summit, a straight-on view of Superstition Mountain and, after a wet winter, one of the easiest wildflower slopes in the Valley, all for nothing. What you do not get is quiet, shade, water, a toilet or a hike of any length; the highway is at the bottom the whole way up.
How to hike Silly Mountain right
Pay nothing. No gate, no pass, no hours beyond dawn to dusk.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east through Apache Junction. About 3 miles past the Idaho Road exit, take the Silly Mountain Road exit and turn south under the highway; the park lot is immediately on the right at the base of the hill. About 45 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. The lot is dirt, holds a few dozen cars, has a trail map and a trash can, and rarely fills except on a wildflower Saturday in March.
Pick the season. October through April, and especially the first half of March after a wet December and January, when the south slopes fill with brittlebush and Mexican gold poppies and the Botanical Walk is in bloom; this is a far easier place to see them than Picacho Peak. See wildflower superbloom for how to read a season. In summer it is a sunrise-only walk, and a short one; the summer rules apply even to a hill this size.
Water and toilets. Neither. Bring a bottle; the nearest restrooms are at the gas stations on US 60.
Pick the route. Go up Huff and Puff and come down Crest for the most view per step; Huff and Puff earns its name for about ten minutes and then it is over. Brittlebush and Old Mine are the gentle lower trails for children; High Point takes the summit. The whole network is an hour to an hour and a half. The lot faces the Superstitions, so a late-afternoon visit puts the light on the cliffs across the highway, and the summit is a fine place to watch it.
Stay on the trails. The old road scar is closed as a restoration area and looks like a shortcut from below. It is not; it is the thing the volunteers spent fifteen years fixing.
Walk the Botanical Walk. The third-mile figure-eight is wheelchair and stroller friendly and labels every plant; pair it with the Sonoran plants field guide and you will recognize most of the desert for the rest of your trip.
Dogs. Allowed on leash, and keep the leash on from the car; the lot is right off the highway.
Skip it if you want a real Superstition hike. With the same drive time, the Hieroglyphic Trail is ten minutes farther and has petroglyphs and a canyon, Lost Dutchman State Park has the mountain itself, and Broadway Cave is the short climb with the better destination. If you want an hour, a summit and a wildflower slope with no fee and no crowd, this is the one.
A scar visible from the highway, and the people who closed it
The hill is older than the town by a long way and the town is not old. Hohokam farmers worked the Salt and Gila to the west and gathered on hills like this one; Apache bands held the Superstitions after them, and the Botanical Walk’s signs about which plants were eaten and which were medicine are the park’s acknowledgment of both. The settlement at the hill’s foot began as a crossroads. The Apache Trail opened to the public as a scenic byway in 1922, and where it met the Old West Highway, now US 60, a few businesses gathered and called the corner Apache Junction. It did not incorporate until November 24, 1978, by which time the Superstitions had a wilderness boundary and the hill had a name.
The name is the silliest part. In the 1960s, by the local account, a county road grader operator named Harry Cadwalader asked to call the road beside the hill Silly Mountain Road, and the hill, which had no name anyone cared about, took the road’s. Around the same time someone bulldozed a track most of the way up its face. Whether it was a mining road, a radio-tower road or a joyride, the result was the same: a raw line up the south slope that off-road vehicles kept open for forty years, until it was a 20-foot-wide strip of bare dirt and scree from base to summit, with no vegetation on it and eroded social trails fanning off it, plainly visible from US 60 half a mile away.
The Superstition Area Land Trust, the volunteer land trust that works the foothills around the wilderness, took it on. In 2008 SALT partnered with the City of Apache Junction to restore what it called the scar on the face of Silly Mountain. The work took about six weeks: the scar and the dangerous eroded trails were closed, SALT’s trail builders cut a new system of sustainable trails up the hill, SALT counts nine built in all, of which five carry names on the map, and native plants and grasses went into the damaged ground. Two local corporations made the major donations and local supporters filled in the rest. The old road was left to heal under a closure sign, and it is still healing; the hill greens a little more each wet winter.
The Botanical Walk came after. SALT’s vice president, Don Wells, proposed an accessible trail at the base; Nick Blake, the city’s parks superintendent and landscape architect, turned community input into a planting plan; the city’s crews cleared and compacted the third-mile figure-eight and ran the drip lines, SALT’s trail crew under Wells and crew chief Al Lines built the pathway, local firms donated plants and hardscape, and a $35,000 grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust paid for the rest. The result labels more than 280 plants from 35 species and is, for its size, the best plant lesson in the East Valley.
What is coming is more of the same slow work. The scar is a restoration area, not a trail, and the only threat to the park is people deciding it looks like a shortcut.
Why it matters
Silly Mountain is a small demonstration of something the Valley does badly and this town did well: a damaged hill at the edge of a city, fixed in six weeks by a land trust, a parks department and local money, and turned into a free trail system that families use every week. It explains what the Superstition foothills would look like without volunteers, which is a scar visible from the highway, and what they look like with them. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is modest and clear. It is a town hill with a highway at its feet, an hour’s walk, a summit view of Superstition Mountain and, in a good March, a slope of poppies, and it costs nothing; if that is the hour you want, take Huff and Puff up and Crest down, and leave the old road to the plants.