What is Soldier Falls Trailhead?
The east side of the Rincons is the side Tucson forgets. One long dirt road, Mescal Road (Forest Road 35), climbs from the interstate at Mescal through ranch country and the scattered community of Happy Valley to the Miller Creek Trailhead at the edge of Saguaro National Park. Partway up, where the road has crossed Ash Creek a few times and climbed its steepest, rockiest pitch, an unmarked pull-out on Coronado National Forest land marks a worn path into a side drainage. A quarter to half a mile along a fence line, with a couple hundred feet of climbing, the drainage ends at a rock face where Soldier Falls drops into a pool.
It is a seasonal fall in the fullest sense. After a wet January it pours; in a dry winter it does not run at all, and the pool at the bottom is what you get. The name is not official, the path is not maintained, and some apps mislabel it with the number of the Soldier Trail on the Catalina Highway, which is a different hike 30 miles away. Birders know this pull-out as a hotspot for the oak and mesquite edge, and that is honestly the better reason to stop in a dry year. Expect cattle, barbed wire, and nobody else.
What you get is a short walk to real falling water in a part of southern Arizona that has almost none, on a road that is itself the attraction. What you do not get is a sign, a toilet, a guarantee of water, a phone signal, or any margin for error if the creeks come up behind you.
How to hike it right
Pay nothing, expect nothing. No fee, no pass, no sign, no toilet, no water, no cell signal to speak of. Nothing reserves.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east past Tucson to exit 297 (Mescal/J-Six Ranch Road), then north on Mescal Road. The pavement crosses the railroad about two miles in, passes the fenced-off Old West movie set near mile three and turns to dirt. From about mile five the road fords Ash and Paige creeks repeatedly, climbs a steep and rocky stretch, and levels out around mile seven. The pull-out is roughly ten miles from the interstate, at about 4,600 feet, on the uphill side, with the path leaving along the fence. Figure 195 minutes from Old Town when the road is dry, with the last stretch at 15 miles an hour. The Forest Service calls Mescal Road generally passable to passenger vehicles; a sedan driven with patience is fine in dry weather, and nothing is fine when the creeks are running. Reset your odometer at I-10.
Pick the week, not the season. Go within a week of rain or during Rincon snowmelt, mostly January into March in a wet year, if you want a waterfall. Fall is pleasant and dry; summer is hot at this elevation and the monsoon closes the road. In a dry winter come for the birds and the pool, or do not come.
Turn around at the first deep crossing. If the first ford is running more than ankle deep on a sedan’s tires, go back; the road gets rockier and steeper before it gets better, and a tow from here is a long one. A storm over the Rincons raises Ash Creek quickly, the road has stranded people, and the forecast you want is for the mountains, not Tucson. Read our flash flood entry first.
Respect the land pattern. The pull-out and the path are on national forest, but Mescal Road threads between private ranches and state trust parcels. Park off the road, stay on the worn path, leave gates as you find them, and do not wander onto fenced ground.
Water and the walk. Carry water even for a half mile; nobody maintains the path and nobody is coming to find you, so tell someone your plan. The pool is the cattle’s too.
Dogs. On leash, and out of the pool if the cows have been using it.
Skip it if it is the only thing on the day. Two hours each way for a half-mile walk to a fall that may not be running does not add up alone. Make it one stop on a day that also includes Miller Creek, a night at a Happy Valley campsite or the Cieneguita campground on the grasslands south of I-10, and it earns its place. For a desert waterfall with a real trail and a far worse crowd, Tanque Verde Falls is on the Tucson side of the same range; for the park itself, Saguaro National Park and the backcountry at Douglas Spring are the front door.
The back side of a mountain the park never reached
The Rincons are Cew Do’ag to the O’odham, and the Spanish word for a corner describes their shape, an L of ridges with Mica Mountain at 8,664 feet on the apex, Rincon Peak on the south arm and Tanque Verde Peak on the west. Hohokam villages lined the Cienega and Rincon valleys from about 200 to 1450 and left petroglyphs and pottery in the foothills; after them the range and the valley to its east, Happy Valley, were Apache country, and stayed that way long enough that Anglo ranching on this side did not take hold until the Apache Wars ended in 1886.
The railroad came first. In 1880 the Southern Pacific laid track along Cienega Creek, following an old wagon road into the creek bed, and set a siding and water stop on the last flat ground that became Vail, named for the ranching brothers Edward and Walter Vail, who deeded the right of way across the Vail Ranch; Walter’s Empire Ranch is now the heart of the Las Cienegas conservation area to the south. The Mescal siding up the line had a post office from 1913 to 1931 and then nearly nothing until the 1960s, when a Western movie set went up beside it that has stood in for frontier towns in Tom Horn, Tombstone and The Quick and the Dead; its fenced buildings are the landmark where Mescal Road’s pavement ends.
The high country went to a different owner. In 1905 Tucson businessman Levi Manning built a summer cabin at Manning Camp, high in the Rincons at the head of the drainages that fall toward Happy Valley; it is still the park’s backcountry hub and on the National Register since 1975. On March 1, 1933 President Hoover proclaimed Saguaro National Monument around the Rincons under the Antiquities Act, and the east slope above Mescal Road became its boundary, with the Coronado National Forest holding the foothills, Happy Valley’s ranch inholdings and the road outside it. In 1984 Congress wrapped the monument’s east and south sides in the roughly 37,000-acre Rincon Mountain Wilderness, and on October 14, 1994 the monument became Saguaro National Park, its original lands renamed the Rincon Mountain District. Mescal Road’s end, the Miller Creek Trailhead, is the park’s only eastern door, and the climb from it toward Manning Camp is one of the longest in southern Arizona.
Soldier Falls has no history of its own that anyone wrote down. The name is not on Forest Service maps, the agency does not describe the path, and the “Soldier” could as easily refer to the cavalry that chased Apaches through Happy Valley in the 1880s as to anything else; some trip reports call it Happy Valley Falls instead, and some mapping apps have tagged it with the number of the Soldier Trail on Mount Lemmon, which climbs to a Depression-era prison camp 30 miles away. What is certain is that birders found the pull-out first, for the oak and mesquite edge at 4,600 feet, that hikers followed the fence line to the fall, and that Google turned a pull-out into a trailhead. The road itself is the real artifact: a ranch and forest track that the Coronado calls generally passable to passenger vehicles and that has stranded enough of them in Ash Creek to earn its reputation.
Why it matters
Soldier Falls matters less as a waterfall than as a lesson in how Arizona’s public land is actually stitched together: a national park on the ridge, a national forest on the slope, state trust parcels and private ranches along the road, a movie set at the bottom and a pull-out that became a destination because a map said so. The east side of the Rincons is what the Tucson side looked like before the park built a visitor center, and the road is the price of seeing it. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is firm: never drive out for the fall alone, but if a wet winter has you heading up Mescal Road for Miller Creek or Happy Valley anyway, give it half an hour and bring the binoculars.