What is Thumb Butte Trail?
Thumb Butte is what is left of a volcanic intrusion that cooled underground and was then stripped of everything around it, a knob of dark rock standing 6,515 feet above the pines two miles west of downtown Prescott. It is in every photograph of the town and visible from most of it. The Forest Service’s Trail #33 circles the butte in a loop of about two miles with roughly 600 feet of climbing, starting from a picnic area in the ponderosas at its foot.
The east side of the loop is the steep side, and much of it is paved, which the Forest Service did to keep the hillside from washing away under decades of boots. The west side is a longer, gentler dirt grade. Between them, at the saddle on the butte’s shoulder, a short spur leads to a viewpoint over Prescott, the Granite Dells, Granite Mountain and the long ridge of the Bradshaws. It is a good view earned cheaply, which is why the loop is the town’s default morning exercise. You do not get on top. The summit is a climbers’ problem, and the rock is closed to climbing every year from about February 1 to July 15 while peregrine falcons nest.
What you get is a real picnic area, with flush toilets, water, 13 tables under big pines, a ramada and paved paths, and the best short hike in Prescott, for $5. What you do not get is length, solitude, a summit, or a trail you can do after the gate closes. For the long day, Granite Mountain is 20 minutes north.
How to hike Thumb Butte right
Pay like this. $5 per vehicle, free on Wednesdays, paid at the kiosk. Prescott National Forest passes ($20 for four months, $40 annual) and America the Beautiful passes are accepted; hang them. The Forest Service patrols this lot. No reservations for anything, including the group site.
Get there. About 2 hours 10 minutes from Old Town, all paved. Loop 101 to I-17 north, SR 69 from Cordes Junction into Prescott, then straight through downtown on Gurley Street, which becomes Thumb Butte Road. The picnic area entrance is 2.2 miles west of the courthouse plaza on the right. The paved lot holds a fair number of cars but fills by mid-morning on weekends, and the gate operates on posted hours.
Mind the hours. The site is gated. 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. May through August, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. September through November, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. December through February, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. March and April. A sunset hike in December means being back at the car by five.
Pick the season. Year-round. At 6,000 feet, summer mornings are pleasant and afternoons bring monsoon thunderstorms from late June through mid-September; winter brings occasional snow and ice on the paved grade, where it stays in the shade. September through May is the easy answer. Wednesdays are free and noticeably busier.
Go counterclockwise. Up the steep paved east side first, so you climb the hard part fresh and come down the gentler dirt grade with your knees intact. The viewpoint spur at the saddle, a few hundred feet off the loop, is the actual destination; the loop itself circles the butte without ever putting you on top of it.
Water and toilets. Drinking water, flush toilets and an accessible vault toilet at the picnic area, with 13 tables, 8 grills, a ramada, electrical outlets and paved paths. Nothing on the trail.
Dogs, bikes, horses. Dogs on leash, and plenty of them early. Mountain bikes and horses use the broader Thumb Butte trail system; the steep paved section of the loop is hiker territory.
Skip it if two miles is not a hike to you. The butte is the warm-up and Granite Mountain, 20 minutes north, is the day. For a flat afternoon, the Peavine Trail through the Granite Dells; for the night, Lower Wolf Creek or Lynx Lake. Compared with Scottsdale, the loop is a shorter, slightly gentler Camelback in the pines, with toilets.
The plug that watched a capital come and go
Thumb Butte is older than everything around it except the granite. It is a plug of volcanic rock, magma that cooled in the throat of a vent millions of years ago and stayed hard while the softer slopes around it washed down toward the Verde; what is left is a single dark knob, which is why it is a thumb and not a cone and why its summit is a rock climb. The Yavapai, who separated from the Patayan cultures of the lower Colorado around A.D. 1300 and spread across central Arizona, held the basin below it, and the butte was a landmark on their routes between the Verde valley and the Bradshaw gold country. Their name is on the county.
The Americans arrived in a rush. In 1863 the Walker party found gold on the Hassayampa and then on Lynx Creek, within sight of the butte; Joseph Walker’s camp on the creek was wiped out by a flash flood within the year, which did not slow anyone down. Arizona became a territory that same year and the Army planted Fort Whipple near Chino Valley as its capital, then moved the fort twenty miles south, and on May 30, 1864, Governor John Goodwin chose a townsite in the pines below the butte and named it for the historian William H. Prescott. The capital stayed until 1867, went to Tucson, came back in 1877 and left for Phoenix for good on February 4, 1889. The butte is in the background of the earliest photographs of the town and of the Derby Mine in 1901, and when the great fire of 1900 burned nearly all of Whiskey Row and the wooden downtown, the brick town that replaced it is the one you see from the saddle today.
The pines came under federal management while the town was still rebuilding. The General Land Office created the Prescott Forest Reserve on May 10, 1898; it passed to the new Forest Service in 1906, became a national forest in 1907 and 1908, absorbed the Verde National Forest in 1908 and the Tusayan in 1934, and now covers about 1.25 million acres, eight wilderness areas among them. The Thumb Butte country west of town was in the first reserve, which is why the butte’s slopes are public and the view from the saddle is of a town with a hard edge where the forest begins. The picnic area in the pines at the butte’s foot and the loop trail around it are mid-century Forest Service work; the agency publishes no construction date, and the paving of the steep east side came later, after decades of boots had cut the hillside into gullies. The fee, the posted hours and the kiosk are products of the 1990s and 2000s, when the Forest Service began charging at its most-used sites to maintain them.
The peregrines are the newest tenants. The falcon was nearly wiped out by DDT in the mid-twentieth century and came back after the pesticide ban of 1972; pairs nest on the butte’s face, and the Forest Service closes the rock to climbers from about February 1 to July 15 each year while they do. The loop trail stays open through the closure. The town below has grown from a few thousand to a metropolitan area of well over 100,000 with Prescott Valley and Chino Valley, and the lot at the butte fills by mid-morning on weekends in a way it did not a generation ago; the free Wednesday, meant as a courtesy, is now the busiest day of the week.
Why it matters
Thumb Butte is Prescott’s Camelback: the landmark that names the town’s geography, the hike everyone does first, and the view that explains the place in a glance, from the brick downtown that replaced the one that burned to the granite country where the gold was found. It also shows how early the Forest Service arrived here, in 1898, which is why the butte is public and Prescott still has pines two miles from its courthouse. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is plain: a $5, ninety-minute loop with a real view and real toilets, best September through May, counterclockwise, before or after Whiskey Row, and the warm-up for Granite Mountain if you have the day.