What is the Soldier Trail?
Most people drive past the bottom of the Catalina Highway at 45 miles an hour on the way to Mount Lemmon’s pines. The Soldier Trail, #706, starts in that first mile, on the desert side of the mountain, and climbs 2.6 miles to the place the highway builders lived. The route follows an old road and power-line alignment over a series of ridges with Tucson spread out behind you, then drops into Soldier Canyon, a steep granite drainage where the stream, when there is one, falls over a staircase of boulders. From the canyon the trail climbs again to a closed gate at the western edge of the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site, roughly 1,600 to 1,800 feet above where you started at about 3,250 feet.
The site at the top was the Catalina Federal Honor Camp from 1939 to 1973, a minimum-security prison whose inmates built the road you drove in on. It held Gordon Hirabayashi, a 24-year-old University of Washington student who refused to report for the wartime internment of Japanese Americans and was sent here to serve his sentence. His conviction was overturned in 1987, the camp was renamed for him in 1999, and a short accessible path leads to interpretive panels among the foundations. The Arizona Trail passes through the site, so you will meet thru-hikers and mountain bikers up there who have no idea the quiet trail below exists.
The Forest Service rates it moderate. What you get is an honest desert climb, a chance of waterfalls and a real piece of history at the top, far quieter than Sabino Canyon a few miles west. What you do not get is shade, water or a loop.
How to hike the Soldier Trail right
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east into Tucson, then east on Tanque Verde Road to Catalina Highway and north toward the mountain, about 130 minutes from Old Town with no traffic. The lower trailhead is a small pull-out on the north side of the highway about a mile from the bottom, before the forest boundary and the fee station. It holds only a few cars, sits on a fast curve, and the overflow has nowhere good to go: park fully off the pavement and step over the guardrail with care. There are no posted hours.
Pay nothing at the bottom. The lower pull-out is free. The upper trailhead is at the Gordon Hirabayashi site: turn left past milepost 7 and follow the road to the gate. Parking there needs the $8 per day or $10 per week Catalina Highway pass, or an America the Beautiful pass, on the driver’s side of the dashboard. Neither end has drinking water.
Go up, not down. Start at the bottom: the grade is honest, and you finish at the prison camp foundations with a view back over the whole route. For a one-way trip, leave a second car at the Hirabayashi site with a pass on the dash.
Pick the season. The whole route faces south between 3,250 and 4,800 feet with almost no shade. October through April is the window. In May and September start at dawn. In summer drive up the mountain to Rose Canyon or General Hitchcock instead; the summer rules apply here in full. Carry two liters in anything but midwinter.
Time it for the falls. Soldier Canyon runs after winter rain and during snowmelt off the upper mountain. Go within a week of a real storm in January or February and spend time in the canyon rather than hurrying to the top. Check that the stream is flowing before you promise anyone waterfalls; most weeks it is a dry cascade of polished boulders, pleasant but not the same thing.
Stay on the roadbed. The Forest Service says the trail is easy to follow but that spur paths worn to the overlooks can send you the wrong way. Stay on the obvious old roadbed when in doubt. The old road is closed to all vehicles and bicycles and is being allowed to revegetate. No bikes, no motors.
Dogs. Leashed, as on the rest of the lower Catalina Highway; the trail is outside the bighorn sheep closure on the range’s west side. Carry water for them; there is none on the trail.
Skip it if you want shade or a campsite. Molino Basin is the low campground a few miles up the highway, and Tanque Verde Falls is the better waterfall when the creeks are high, with its own well-known dangers.
The road the prisoners built
The Catalinas were the Tohono O’odham’s Babad Do’ag long before they were anyone’s highway, and their Hohokam ancestors farmed the basin below. In the nineteenth century the range was Apache country, and the Army troopers of Camp and then Fort Lowell, on Tucson’s edge from 1873 to 1891, used a camp high on the mountain that still carries the name Soldier Camp. The canyon and the trail probably share that origin, but no source we found ties the canyon’s name to the soldiers directly, so we leave it there. For decades the only way up was a pack trail from Sabino Canyon to Soldier Camp and Summerhaven.
The first road for cars, finished in 1920, came up the far side from Oracle, 75 miles from downtown Tucson and one lane wide near the top. In 1926 Tucsonans began pushing for a road up the south face. Two bond elections failed. Frank Hitchcock, editor of the Tucson Citizen and a former Postmaster General, then went to federal forestry and highway officials, and on March 13, 1933, the Secretary of Agriculture approved a 25-mile road from the foot of the mountains to Summerhaven. Hitchcock’s other idea was the labor: he convinced federal prison authorities that a mountain camp could supply cheap workers and rehabilitate them at the same time.
The first camp opened in June 1933 as tents at 8,000 feet, moved to the base of the mountain for the winter, and in a February 1939 snowstorm moved up to Vail Corral at 4,860 feet, the site at the top of this trail. Inmates built it themselves: twelve buildings, staff cottages, a water system and no walls, just a white line they were told not to cross. Car thieves, bootleggers, tax evaders, conscientious objectors and 44 Japanese Americans who had refused Executive Order 9066 worked the road. The best known was Gordon Hirabayashi, convicted in 1942 of defying the curfew and removal orders; the Supreme Court upheld his conviction in 1943, and with no government fare offered he hitchhiked to Tucson to serve his time outdoors. More than 8,000 prisoners worked on the highway before it was declared finished on March 10, 1951. Hitchcock had died in 1935.
The camp outlived the road. It became a federal youth camp in 1958, passed to the State of Arizona in 1967 as an Indian youth rehabilitation center, and closed in 1973, after which most of the buildings were bulldozed. Hirabayashi’s conviction was vacated by the courts in the 1980s, the Ninth Circuit ruling in 1987; in 1999 the Coronado National Forest renamed the site for him and in 2002 unveiled the interpretive kiosk. He died in 2012 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom that year. The Soldier Trail, an old road and power-line route from the highway’s first mile, is now the way to walk up to that story instead of driving to it.
Why it matters
The Catalina Highway is how Tucson reaches its sky island, and this trail shows what it cost: eighteen years of prison labor, and a camp that held a man the government later admitted it had wronged. Walking up from the desert to the foundations gives you the mountain’s two histories at once, the natural one of granite, saguaro and seasonal falls and the human one of the road. It is also a good, honest climb that almost nobody does. For a Scottsdale visitor already in Tucson on a cool morning it beats another lap of Sabino, and after a winter storm it is one of the better short waterfall hikes in southern Arizona. Start at the bottom, carry water, and read the panels at the top.