What is the Sycamore Creek Trailhead?
Where Bush Highway meets the Beeline, about ten miles north of Fountain Hills, Forest Road 403 leaves the pavement a quarter mile up Bush Highway and drops into the sandy bottom of Lower Sycamore Creek. This is the main entrance to the Tonto’s Lower Sycamore OHV Recreation Area, roughly 112 miles of designated motorized routes through washes, low hills and a creek that runs after rain. The Bush OHV Staging Area is the first lot and fills fast; the Sycamore OHV Staging Area, the main one with room for trucks and trailers, is 1.25 miles farther down FR 403. On a January Saturday the lots are full by nine and the washes carry a parade of side-by-sides and dirt bikes.
That is what the Google pin labeled Sycamore Creek Trailhead actually is. Hikers and horses are allowed on the routes and the creek bottom has real sycamores and cottonwoods, so people do walk here, especially the week after a storm when the crossings run and the sand is firm. But there is no marked hiking trail, the routes are numbered roads, and the experience is a motor-sports area with a creek in it. The surrounding desert has burned repeatedly in recent years, the 2020 Bush Fire included, and the Forest Service asks everyone, wheels or feet, to stay on the designated routes while it recovers.
What you get is the nearest piece of the Tonto to Scottsdale where you can legally drive a side-by-side, for free and without a permit for now, with a seasonal creek in the middle of it. What you do not get is a trail, a toilet, a tap, a campsite, quiet or shade beyond the sycamores.
How to do Lower Sycamore right
Pay nothing, for now. No Tonto Pass and no OHV permit are required at the moment. The Forest Service has said plainly that Lower Sycamore will be added to the Tonto OHV permit system, so check its page before you rely on that. Motorized vehicles need the state OHV decal, helmets for riders under 18, spark arrestors and the rest of the state’s list.
Get there. Shea Boulevard east to SR 87, north past Fort McDowell about 10 miles to the Bush Highway exit. Turn onto Bush Highway and within a quarter mile turn onto Forest Road 403 for the Bush staging area, or continue about 1.5 miles to the main Sycamore staging area at the bottom of the hill. Call it 35 minutes from Old Town, all paved to the lots. The lots are dirt and graded; a sedan is fine in dry weather. There are no restrooms and no water at either.
Pick the week, not the season. November through March for anything on foot, and specifically a weekday morning within a few days of a good rain, when the creek crossings have water and the sand is firm. On a dry winter weekend the same place is dust, engines and trailers. Summer is dead and dangerous.
Walk the wash to the creek. Park in the Bush lot and follow the main wash northwest toward the creek, where the crossings run and the sycamores are the only shade for miles. There is no loop and no sign; the routes are numbered roads, and you share them. Step well off the road when vehicles come through, and expect them.
Water. None provided. The creek is seasonal and not drinkable.
Respect the rules and the burn. Day use only in the staging areas; no camping, no fires. Stay on designated routes, because driving off them is prohibited across the Tonto and because the ground here is still recovering from the Bush Fire. A temporary target-shooting restriction applies, and only approved targets are allowed where shooting is permitted. Dispersed camping is allowed in the surrounding forest away from the lots and roads, with a 14-day limit in any 30-day period.
Stay out after storms. When the washes run the Forest Service closes the crossings, and the stupid motorist law applies to anyone who drives into one anyway. Give it several days after heavy rain.
Dogs and horses. Dogs on leash; horses are allowed on the routes and the lots have room for trailers.
Skip it if you want a hike. Ballantine is ten minutes farther up the Beeline and has a trail, a view and no engines; Mount Ord and Four Peaks are the real mountains in the same view. The Saguaro Lake trails are a few miles down Bush Highway, and the lake itself is covered under Saguaro Lake and Bartlett Lake.
The washes between the reservation and the road
Lower Sycamore Creek drains the west face of the Mazatzals into the Verde, and the country between the two rivers is Yavapai ground. The ancestors of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation hunted these washes and farmed the Verde bottom until the Army’s campaigns of the early 1870s; on December 28, 1872, in the Salt River canyon a few miles south of here, troops killed about a hundred Yavapai in the Skeleton Cave Massacre, and the survivors were marched to San Carlos in 1875. Those who came back were given a reservation by executive order on September 15, 1903: 24,680 acres along the Verde, just west of the creek, that the Beeline now runs beside. The nation later voted down the Orme Dam that would have flooded its land in the 1970s and opened the state’s first bingo hall in 1983; its casino is the lit building you pass on the way in.
The creek itself came under federal management when the Tonto Forest Reserve was proclaimed on October 3, 1905, and for half a century it was grazing land crossed by a bad road. The road is the real history here. In the 1930s a Mesa booster named Harvey Bush championed a highway from Mesa to Payson across the Mazatzals, and the route that resulted took his name. In the 1950s the state built a cutoff from Mesa to the Saguaro Lake turnoff that bypassed a slow stretch of the Bush Highway and saved fifteen minutes; drivers called it the Beeline, and the name spread to the whole road. The junction where FR 403 leaves the pavement is the exact seam between the two roads, which is why one staging lot is named Bush and the other Sycamore.
What made the washes a destination was pavement and population. Almost half the Beeline between Mesa and Payson had been widened by 1983; the state began converting the whole route to four lanes in 1989 and finished in 2001, and a divided highway put Lower Sycamore 35 minutes from Scottsdale and an hour from most of the Valley. The Forest Service’s Travel Management decisions of the following years designated the numbered motorized routes, roughly 112 miles of them in four blocks with four entrances, and built the staging lots; Lower Sycamore became the Valley’s nearest legal place to unload a side-by-side. The permit system the Tonto has introduced at its other OHV areas has not reached here yet. The Forest Service’s own page says it will.
Then the desert burned. The Bush Fire, human-caused, ignited on June 13, 2020, near the Beeline and ran north and east through the Sycamore washes, Sunflower and the Four Peaks foothills, burning 193,455 acres before it was contained on July 1, the fifth-largest fire in Arizona’s history. Other fires have followed in the same corridor. The saguaros along the creek are the visible casualties; the ground cover the Forest Service is trying to protect by keeping wheels on the routes is the invisible one.
What is coming is a permit, a fee and, if the Tonto’s other OHV areas are the model, a cap on the number of vehicles the washes can hold on a winter Saturday.
Why it matters
Lower Sycamore is the honest version of the Tonto next to the Valley: not a trailhead but a motorized playground on a burned floodplain between a sovereign nation and a four-lane highway, free because nobody has gotten around to charging yet. It shows how a road built in the 1950s and widened in the 1990s turned empty washes into the Valley’s nearest off-road area, and how one careless fire in 2020 changed what that area looks like for a generation. For a Scottsdale hiker the verdict is blunt: go only on a weekday after rain, to see the creek run under the sycamores, and otherwise drive ten more minutes to Ballantine. For a Scottsdale rider with a side-by-side, this is yours, for now.