What is Tonto Natural Bridge State Park?
Pine Creek runs off the Rim toward the East Verde through a side canyon between Payson and Pine. Somewhere upstream, calcium-rich springs built a dam of travertine across that canyon, and the creek, rather than backing up behind it, bored through. What is left is a natural bridge 183 feet high over a tunnel 400 feet long and up to 150 feet wide, with a creek running through the bottom and water still dripping off the travertine ceiling. Arizona State Parks says it is probably the largest natural travertine bridge in the world, and nobody has produced a bigger one.
The park is a small developed rim with the 1920s Goodfellow Lodge, picnic tables, drinking water, flush restrooms and a paved path with four viewpoints along the top of the bridge, plus four short trails that drop into the canyon: Gowan (about 2,200 feet down and back to an observation deck under the arch), Pine Creek (about half a mile, with only 400 feet developed), Anna Mae (about 500 feet, connecting Pine Creek to the bridge) and Waterfall (about 300 feet to a mossy waterfall cave). None is long. All are steep enough that the park allows an hour for each of the longer ones.
It is a two-hour stop, not a day, about 110 minutes from Old Town. What you get is one astonishing thing without a long hike. What you do not get, when the creek is running high, is anything under the bridge: the canyon trails close, and the visit shrinks to the top path and a photograph.
How to visit Tonto Natural Bridge right
Pay per person. $10 per adult 14 and up, $5 for ages 7 to 13, free under 7, with no vehicle fee on top. An Arizona State Parks annual pass is $200. Day use needs no reservation; the Goodfellow Lodge tours do.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, and follow it 75 miles to Payson. Stay on 87 through town and continue north toward Pine about 10 miles; the signed park road is on the left. It drops about three miles into the canyon, the last stretch at a posted 14 percent grade, to a modest parking lot at the bottom. Large RVs and anything with a trailer should stop at the drop-off area at the top; the lot has no trailer parking and the hill is not a place to learn that.
Arrive at opening. Open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, last entry at 4; the trails close at 4 and the paved path and viewpoints at 5. Shortened hours on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, closed Christmas Day. The lot is small and fills on spring and fall weekends by late morning, which means waiting at the top for someone to leave, and in summer the canyon traps heat by noon.
Check the trail status first. Pine Creek, Gowan, Anna Mae and everything under the bridge close whenever the creek runs high, which is most of July and August in the monsoon and any wet week in winter, sometimes for days. The Waterfall Trail and the paved path usually stay open. A visit with only those two is a $10 photograph, so check the park website before you commit the drive.
Do the trails in order. Go down the Gowan Trail to the observation deck first, because it is the view that explains the place: you stand in the creek bed looking up through the tunnel with water dripping off travertine curtains. Then walk the Anna Mae Trail into the Pine Creek bottom and scramble under the arch if the creek is low; the rocks are slick. No glass on the trails.
Water. Drinking water and flush restrooms at the top. Carry water down.
Pick the season. All year. April is the park’s own pick, with fruit trees blooming on the old homestead; late October and November bring color and cool air.
Dogs. Not on the trails. Allowed on the paved path and at the viewpoints, which are honestly a fair share of the experience.
Skip it if the creek is up and you only came for the tunnel. Pair it instead with the East Verde: Water Wheel and the Second Crossing are minutes from Payson, and Fossil Creek is the bigger travertine day if you can get a permit. The day-trips guide has the rest of the Rim country.
A homestead on top of the world’s biggest travertine bridge
The bridge is a product of water, and so is everything that happened around it. Springs rich in dissolved limestone built a travertine dam across Pine Creek, and the creek cut its tunnel through over a very long time, leaving a flat of rich soil on top watered by the same springs. People have used Pine Creek valley for some 11,000 years, most heavily from about 1000 to 1400 CE, when the archaeological remains show Sinagua and Hohokam influences; who exactly those people were is still argued over. They left by about 1400 to 1500. After them the Tonto Apache used the valley seasonally, planting maize in the creek bottom and hunting the canyons around the bridge.
The first written record of the bridge is a military one. In 1866 Company E of the Army volunteers from Fort Lincoln, later Fort Verde, guided by the scout Pauline Weaver, found the bridge and destroyed a Tonto Apache camp in the valley. The more famous story came later: the prospector David Gowan is said to have found the bridge in 1877 while hiding from Apaches in the tunnel. The park itself notes that the story has never been confirmed in writing, and another account has prospectors reaching it in 1880. Whatever the truth, Gowan homesteaded the 160 acres around the bridge in 1882.
In 1898 Gowan offered the place to David and Lilias Goodfellow, who came from Scotland with their children and spent 1901 to 1908 building a road down into the canyon for about $4,000. Once there was a road there was a resort. In 1925 and 1926 the Goodfellows built a 10-room lodge on the flat above the bridge, and a 125-foot spring-fed swimming pool followed in 1928. The bridge already had a national audience: Charles F. Lummis had written it up for readers back east in 1896.
The resort did not outlast the age of slow travel. The Goodfellow sons sold the business in 1948, and as cars made long trips easy the remote lodge lost its customers. Ownership changed hands through the 1960s and 1970s while the state considered buying and balked at the price; in 1969 the Parks Board offered $250,000 and the owners wanted more. The Wolfswinkle family took title in 1985 and restored the lodge to its original condition in the late 1980s. In 1990 the legislature finally approved the purchase, and on October 12, 1990 Tonto Natural Bridge became Arizona’s 26th state park, dedicated on June 29, 1991.
It nearly closed again. In the state budget crisis of 2010, Arizona State Parks scheduled Tonto Natural Bridge to close on June 3; the Town of Payson and a new friends group put up money to keep it open through the summer, and the park survived the cuts. It runs today much as it did then, a small park with a big feature and a lodge that is a museum of the resort years.
Why it matters
Tonto Natural Bridge is a compact history of how Arizona’s natural wonders became public. A tribe farmed it, the Army cleared it, a prospector claimed it, a homestead family turned it into a private resort by building their own road, and the state bought it back nearly a century later and then almost could not afford to keep it open. It is also a reminder that the water that built the bridge still runs the place: the springs made the travertine, and the creek still decides which trails you can walk. For a Scottsdale visitor it is an easy half day on the way to the Rim. Check the trail status, arrive at 9, go down Gowan first, and leave the trailer at the top.