What is Tanque Verde Falls?
Where Redington Road climbs out of Tucson’s east side between the Santa Catalinas and the Rincons, Tanque Verde Creek has cut a canyon through banded gneiss and granite and, at one bend, drops about 80 feet in a single waterfall with a string of pools and smaller cascades above and below. In a wet February it is the best waterfall within an hour of Tucson. In June it is a warm pool at the bottom of a slick granite chute full of people. Both versions have a long record of rescues and deaths: flash floods under blue sky, falls on polished rock, and jumps into pools with boulders a few feet under the surface. The lower falls also carry an old reputation as a clothing-optional hangout. None of that is a reason not to go; it is a reason to go the way the Forest Service now wants you to.
In 2024 the agency rebuilt the area with three parking lots, a restroom and shaded tables at the middle area, and trails that let you see the canyon without being in it. The Overlook Trail is an easy half mile from the middle lot to a rim viewpoint over the falls, with a steep drop-off at the end. The Upper Tanque Verde Falls Trail descends stone steps a half mile to ledges, sandy beaches and pools above the falls, with 120 feet to climb back out. The Tanque Verde Rim Loop links all three trailheads in 2 miles. There is still no trail along the creek bed; the route to the base of the falls is a scramble and always has been.
What you get is a genuine desert waterfall seen from a safe rim, free, at the end of a short dirt road. What you do not get is a lifeguard, a railing at the pools, drinking water, or any protection from a storm you cannot see.
How to visit Tanque Verde Falls right
Pay nothing, bring water. No fee, no pass. No drinking water anywhere in the area; the trails are exposed and the canyon bakes, so carry more than a half-mile walk seems to need.
Get there. Loop 101 to I-10 east into Tucson, then east on Tanque Verde Road all the way out of town. Past Houghton Road it becomes Redington Road and, a few miles later, turns to dirt as it starts up Redington Pass. The lower, middle and upper trailheads are signed on the north side within the first stretch of dirt; the lower lot is about 3.7 miles past the start of Redington Road. The Forest Service calls the dirt section bumpy but suitable for most passenger vehicles up to the falls. About 150 minutes from Old Town. Lots fill on warm weekends; the middle area doubles as an OHV staging area.
Go when the water runs. Water from January through April in most years, loudest in the week after a winter storm or in March when the Rincons are melting; hot and crowded in May and June; dangerous in the monsoon; dry much of the fall. Early on a weekday is the time. Skip weekends in May and June unless you want the party crowd at the lower falls.
Do the Overlook first. The view from the rim is the view, and it is the only one with no risk attached. Hold small children’s hands at the end, where the drop-off is steep and unrailed.
If you must touch the water, stay above the drop. Use the Upper Falls Trail to the pools above the falls. Do not jump; the Forest Service says so and the record agrees. Wet granite here is as slick as ice, and the pools hide boulders.
Watch the Rincons, not the sky over you. The creek drains a large piece of the north Rincons, and a storm over the mountains can raise it in minutes while the canyon is sunny. Check the radar before you walk in and again at the rim, stay out of the canyon bottom from July through September, and use the rim loop instead of the canyon trails when there is any flood risk, which is the Forest Service’s own advice. Read the flash flood entry and the monsoon field manual if this is new to you.
Camping. Day use only. Camping is prohibited at all parking areas and within 650 feet of the road; dispersed camping is allowed beyond mile 4.6 on Redington Road.
Dogs. Allowed on leash. Keep them off the slick rock near the water and away from the Overlook Trail’s drop-off.
Skip it if you want to swim. Sabino Canyon on the other side of the Catalinas has the tram, the pools and the rangers. If you want a desert waterfall with the same warning attached, Water Wheel north of Payson is closer to Scottsdale and has its own memorial. Pair Tanque Verde with Saguaro National Park’s east district, 20 minutes back toward town.
Thirty deaths and a half-mile trail
The creek that makes the falls drains the north face of the Rincons from Mica Mountain at 8,664 feet, and the valley it waters below the pass was Hohokam farmland and later, in the nineteenth century, a corridor the Apache used to reach the Tucson basin; Fort Lowell stood at the valley’s mouth to stop them until it closed in 1891. Ranchers had settled the valley in the 1860s and named it for a stock tank gone green with algae, tanque verde. Redington Road was cut over the pass to link the Tucson farms with the ranches along the San Pedro at Redington, and it is still a 24-mile dirt road to Cascabel. The pass became Coronado National Forest range, grazed and lightly traveled, and the falls stayed a local secret reached by a scramble down from the road.
By the 1960s Tucsonans were swimming in the pools, some of them without clothes, and the lower falls kept that reputation for decades. The danger grew with the crowds. The canyon is narrow, the granite is polished to glass by the creek, the pools hide boulders, and the watershed above is big enough that a storm over the Rincons sends a wall of water through the falls while the sky at the pools is blue. By one count at least 30 people have died here from falls and flooding since the pools became popular. In 2015 the Arizona Daily Star was still reporting jumpers courting death at the falls, and in 2017 a monsoon flood trapped swimmers in the canyon and 17 people had to be rescued in a single afternoon. The Forest Service’s warnings about this canyon are not boilerplate; they are a casualty list.
The agency’s answer came slowly. In 2012 and 2013 it closed three informal shooting areas farther up Redington Pass for litter and noise and fenced the trashed sites, the first sign that the Santa Catalina Ranger District meant to manage the pass rather than leave it to whoever showed up. Then, in 2024, it rebuilt the falls area: three graded trailheads on the north side of the road, a restroom and shaded tables at the middle lot, an OHV staging area to keep the trailers off the shoulders, and three new trails designed to show the canyon from above. The half-mile Overlook Trail gives the view of the 80-foot drop that used to require the scramble; the Upper Falls Trail descends stone steps to the pools above the drop, where the rock is flatter and the fall is not below you; the Rim Loop links the lots. The Southern Arizona Hiking Club maintains them. Camping was banned within 650 feet of the road. What the Forest Service pointedly did not build is a trail along the creek bed, and its page says so in one sentence.
Why it matters
Tanque Verde Falls is the clearest case in Arizona of a public agency trying to make a beautiful, lethal place survivable without closing it. The water still falls 80 feet, the pools are still there, and the Forest Service has not fenced them; it has built a trail to the view and a trail to the safer pools and left the canyon bottom to the people who insist. That is the right answer and it will not end the deaths. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is simple: it is worth the two and a half hours in the week after a winter storm, for the Overlook Trail and the sound of the water, and it is not worth one minute in the canyon bottom when there is a cloud over the Rincons.