What is the Single Track Trailhead?
Daisy Mountain is the lump of State Trust Land that rises to about 3,150 feet between Anthem and New River, east of I-17. The Anthem side has a well-known route from the end of a residential street and nowhere to park. The New River side has this: a dirt clearing at about 2,600 feet on the mountain’s north foot, called the Single Track Trailhead on the maps that bother to name it, with room for a handful of trucks and nothing else.
Two things leave from it. A footpath climbs the north slope straight to the summit, well under a mile with about 550 feet of gain, steeper than the Anthem route and shaded until mid-morning in winter. And the Daisy Mountain Trail, a 2.8-mile singletrack rated intermediate to difficult, rolls south and down about 500 feet to Anthem; it was built for bikes, and riders treat this clearing as the top of a shuttle run. The land is managed by the Arizona State Land Department as trust land, which means a recreation permit, no facilities and no one maintaining anything. Local groups have talked for years about a Daisy Mountain preserve. As of 2026 it is still just trust land with a view.
What you get is the shortest, quietest, shadiest line to the top of the north Valley’s best unofficial summit, and a place to leave the truck. What you do not get is a road a car can drive, a sign, a toilet, water, a phone signal, or any assurance that the arrangement outlasts the next land sale. It is a trailhead for people who already have the vehicle and the permit.
How to hike the Single Track Trailhead right
Buy the permit the night before. Required: an Arizona State Land Department recreation permit, about $15 per person or $20 per family per year at last check, bought online. Keep a screenshot on your phone; there is no signal in the clearing. No other fee, no reservation.
Get there. Take Loop 101 west to I-17 north and exit at New River Road (exit 232), then head east through the town of New River. East of the center, Power Line Road, a dirt track, turns off New River Road toward the mountain and climbs about 350 feet over roughly 2 miles to the clearing. Figure 50 minutes from Old Town, of which the last 15 are the dirt. New River has a gas station; after that you are on your own.
Respect the road. It is rutted and rocky; the GPS tracks and ride reports that describe it call for high clearance and recommend four-wheel drive. A stock SUV handles it dry with care, a sedan does not, and after rain it turns to glue. Load the track before you leave the pavement, and stay off the private ranch roads that branch toward New River’s houses; the no-trespassing signs mean it.
Climb early, in winter. November through March. The summit path leaves the clearing heading south and steepens fast; the north slope buys you an hour of morning shade, which makes this the one way up Daisy Mountain that is not baked by eight. Above the first pitch the trail is a loose use trail with no signs; pick the most worn line and remember it for the descent. The class ratings entry explains why the top is a scramble.
Ride it downhill. Mountain bikers should take the Daisy Mountain Trail south toward Anthem and arrange a shuttle, or climb back up the access road rather than the singletrack. Bikes are what the trail is for; ATVs are not allowed on the mountain, and the permit does not change that.
Water and facilities. None. Carry two liters even for the short summit, more for a ride.
Dogs. Nothing prohibits a leashed dog; the loose rock and the lack of shade are the limits.
Skip it if you do not have the vehicle. Park in Anthem and walk the long way, or ride the Black Canyon Trail from Emery Henderson instead, which has a paved lot, a toilet and no permit; Little Pan up the Agua Fria is the other dirt-road option in this country, and Apache Wash is the city preserve with a lot on the way home.
The end of the pavement, and the land the state never sold
New River was the edge of things for a century. The Hohokam farmed and foraged the washes here, the Yavapai and Tonto Apache ranged the country after them, and in the 1880s the Cavalry fought the Apache at the foot of Gavilan Peak, across the valley from this trailhead, which is how the peak got its name. The first settlement was a stagecoach stop that Lord Darrell Duppa, the Englishman who named Phoenix, opened at New River in 1868 on the north slope of Gavilan Peak; a second stop, the one now called Wranglers Roost, followed in 1890. For decades after that New River was the terminus of the Black Canyon Highway: the pavement ended here and a dirt road went on to Prescott, and the mountain to the south was a landmark for travelers and nothing else.
Why the mountain belongs to no park goes back to statehood. The Enabling Act of June 20, 1910 granted Arizona sections of every township to hold in trust for its public schools, about ten million acres in all, and the State Land Department was created in 1915 to manage them. The trust’s duty is to make money for its beneficiaries by leasing or selling land, not to keep it; the department has disposed of about a sixth of the grant since, and what remains is scattered in sections across the state, Daisy Mountain’s six square miles among them. For most of the twentieth century that meant cattle leases and a power line, whose service road up the north foot of the mountain is the track you drive in on. Interstate 17 replaced the Black Canyon Highway and made the mountain the big peak on the right as you climb out of the Valley.
Anthem changed the arithmetic. Del Webb began building the master-planned community on the mountain’s south side in 1998, and by the 2020 census it held 23,000 people, with a country club wrapped around the mountain’s southern slopes and streets running to the trust-land line. Residents walked up the mountain from the end of a cul-de-sac, and mountain bikers, finding the Anthem side too built up and the north side empty, wore in the 2.8-mile Daisy Mountain Trail from Anthem up to the power-line clearing, and then started shuttling it: drive to New River, ride down to Anthem. Trail apps gave the clearing the name it has now. The route logged on Gaia GPS and the trail page on MTB Project are, as far as we can find, the only documents the trailhead has ever had.
The campaign to make it a park has run alongside. The North Country Conservancy has made a Daisy Mountain Preserve its central goal, Maricopa County has asked the State Land Department for a formal trail across the mountain with maintenance help from Friends of Daisy Mountain Trails, and Anthem’s community council has posted the rules that keep informal access alive. The obstacle is price. Trust land can only leave the trust at appraised value, which is how Scottsdale assembled its McDowell Sonoran Preserve with a dedicated sales tax over thirty years; no city, county or conservancy has found that kind of money for Daisy Mountain, and New River is unincorporated. Until someone does, the mountain stays what it was in 1915: an asset in a school trust, with a permit system, a dirt clearing and a web of trails that exist because nobody has had a reason to close them.
Why it matters
The Single Track Trailhead is the north Valley’s open secret and its unfinished business in one dirt lot. It shows what State Trust Land actually is, which is not public land and not private either, and it shows how recreation happens on it: by permit, by tolerance and by GPS track, with no agency to thank or blame. It also shows the gap between Scottsdale, which taxed itself to buy its mountains, and the communities north of it, which have a better summit and no mechanism. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: if you have a high-clearance vehicle, a permit and a winter morning, this is the best way up Daisy Mountain, shaded and quiet, with room to park; if you have a sedan, go to a park.