What is the Thompson Trail?
The White Mountains have plenty of pine and a few real rivers, but very few trails that simply follow one. The Thompson Trail #629 does. From a small lot on Forest Road 116 at about 8,820 feet, it drops to the West Fork of the Black River and keeps it company downstream for about 2.5 miles, on an old railroad grade and then a single track along the bank, to a junction with the West Fork Trail #628 and its #628A loop. There are no crossings, no switchbacks and no real climbing; the river loses a couple hundred feet in the distance and so do you.
What you get instead is water and green. The trail passes an Apache trout fish barrier about ten minutes in, a built waterfall that keeps non-native trout from swimming upstream, then threads wet meadows the Forest Service calls cienegas, groves of spruce and fir, and slopes where the 2011 Wallow Fire burned and young aspen have since come up thick. Elk and turkey are common, Mexican wolves are present, and the river itself is the reason the trail exists: it was built with an Arizona Game and Fish Heritage Fund grant as part of the long campaign to bring back the state fish.
What you do not get is anything at the trailhead: no toilet, no water, no sign you can see from the road, and room for five or six cars. It is a long way to drive for five flat miles, which is why it belongs to a weekend at West Fork or Big Lake rather than a day trip.
How to hike the Thompson Trail right
Pay nothing. No fee, no permit, no reservation. An Arizona fishing license if you carry a rod.
Get there. Loop 202 and SR 87, the Beeline, to Payson, then SR 260 east through Heber and Show Low to Hon-Dah, about three and a half hours. Continue east on 260 roughly 20 miles to SR 273, turn south past Sunrise Park about 14 miles to Forest Road 116, and turn right for about 4 miles of good gravel to the trailhead on the right. Call it 270 minutes from Old Town. Coming from Greer or Eagar, the Forest Service routes you down SR 261 to SR 273, north 2.1 miles, then left on FR 116 for 3.5 miles. The lot holds five or six cars.
Find the trail. It is not visible from the lot. Walk about 100 yards west along the road, then drop down the bank on the south side toward the river. The grade you land on is the old railroad bed; the foot trail runs just below it along the water.
Pick the season. The highways in, SR 261 and SR 273, close with snow, usually from December into April. June through early October is the window. Late June and July, after the snowmelt has drained from the meadows but before the monsoon turns every afternoon electric, is the best of it; start by nine. Early October brings the aspens. The cienegas hide potholes under what looks like solid turf in early summer, so wear boots you do not mind soaking.
Facilities. None. No toilet, no trash, no water at the lot. The nearest services are at Big Lake or Greer.
Fishing. The West Fork is an Apache trout recovery stream with barriers, special regulations, and a native-fish restoration project that has changed the rules in recent years. Do not assume the stretch beside the trail is open; read the current Arizona Game and Fish regulations for the West Fork of the Black River before you fish, and expect artificial-only and catch-and-release reaches. The rules are enforced.
Dogs and bikes. Dogs on leash. The trail is foot-only; bikes and horses use the parallel railroad bed upslope, and horses are prohibited on the connecting Trail #628.
Skip it if you want a summit or a loop. Five flat miles is the whole hike. Combine it with a night at West Fork or Diamond Rock down the Black River, or Hoyer in Greer, and it becomes the best part of the trip. For a bigger day nearby, the trails around Big Lake and the Mount Baldy routes out of Sheeps Crossing are the next step up.
The river that got its fish back
The West Fork of the Black River rises on the east side of Mount Baldy in country that has been Western Apache for centuries; the bands whose descendants make up the White Mountain Apache Tribe summered in these meadows, and the reservation boundary still runs along the Black River’s lower reaches. The fish in the river were theirs too. The Apache trout, a golden-olive native found nowhere but the White Mountains, once held some 600 miles of cold stream on and around Baldy. Then the settlers came, Mormon families founding Greer and Alpine in the 1870s and 1880s, cattle and sheep on the meadows, and, from the early 1900s, rainbow, brown and cutthroat trout stocked for sport that crowded the native fish and bred with it. By the late 1960s the Apache trout was down to about 30 miles of stream.
The first rescue came from the tribe. In the 1950s the White Mountain Apache closed their Baldy streams to fishing to protect the last pure populations, decades before anyone else acted. The federal government followed: the Apache trout went onto the first federal endangered species list in 1967 and was carried onto the stronger 1973 act, first as endangered and later as threatened, and a long partnership of the tribe, the Arizona Game and Fish Department, the Forest Service and federal hatcheries began the work of removing non-native trout from recovery streams, raising pure fish, and building low concrete barriers so the rainbows and cutthroats downstream could not come back up. The West Fork of the Black River was one of those recovery streams, and the small waterfall ten minutes down the Thompson Trail is one of those barriers.
The trail is a byproduct of that work. In the 1990s Game and Fish and the Forest Service built it with a grant from the state’s Heritage Fund, the lottery money Arizona voters set aside for wildlife, and with volunteer crews, so that people could reach the recovery reach without trampling the banks; the grade above it is an old railroad bed from the logging era, when lines pushed into the Black River forests to feed the mills at McNary, and the Forest Service lets bikes and horses use the bed so the foot trail along the water stays quiet. The Forest Service does not publish a construction year for the trail, and neither will this guide.
Then the forest burned. On May 29, 2011, two campers left a fire unattended near Bear Wallow, 20 miles south, and the Wallow Fire ran for six weeks across 538,049 acres, the largest fire in Arizona’s history, evacuating Greer, Alpine and Nutrioso and reaching into New Mexico. It burned the slopes above the West Fork, and it destroyed several of the fish barriers that had taken forty years to build, letting non-native trout back into reaches that had been cleared. The aspen you walk through on the Thompson Trail are the fire’s children, come up thick in the ash where spruce stood. The barriers were rebuilt, the restoration project moved the regulatory lines again, and in 2024 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took the Apache trout off the endangered species list entirely, the first sport fish ever recovered under the act. The West Fork is still managed as a recovery stream, which is why the fishing rules beside this trail are complicated and why they matter.
Why it matters
The Thompson Trail is a five-mile walk through the one Endangered Species Act success story Arizona can claim outright, and it is pleasant enough that most people walk it without knowing. The river beside you was closed, cleared, barricaded, burned and rebuilt over seventy years by a tribe, a state and a federal agency that rarely agree on anything, and the golden fish holding in its pools are the result. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is that it is too far for a day and exactly right for a weekend at West Fork or Big Lake: free, flat, green, cold, best in late June or early October, with a tiny lot, wet boots, and a fishing rulebook you read before you tie on anything.