What is the Usery Mountain Regional Park Campground?
The campground at Usery Mountain Regional Park is a single big loop of 73 developed sites on the flat below Pass Mountain, and it does the county-campground thing well: water and electric at every site, a picnic table and a grill, restrooms with hot showers, a dump station, and gravel pads long enough for a 45-foot motorhome. Locals call it the Buckhorn campground, after the trail that once ran here; the county’s own pages just call it the campground. Two group campgrounds sit apart from the loop, each with a big ramada, six tables, a patio and shared showers, dry camping only, six units minimum.
What it lacks in shade and seclusion it makes up for in position. The Wind Cave Trail starts a few hundred yards from the loop. The Pass Mountain circuit, the barrier-free Merkle loop and 20 other trails fan out across the park’s 3,648 acres at the western end of the Goldfield Mountains, against the Tonto National Forest. The nature center runs programs most winter weekends, and the archery range is a short drive. Beyond the gate, Lost Dutchman State Park and the Superstition trailheads are about 25 minutes east, the Salt River’s Phon D Sutton and the wild horses 20 minutes north, and a Mesa grocery store ten minutes back down Ellsworth.
What you get is a hot shower, a hookup and a cave hike from the tent flap, 40 minutes from Old Town. What you do not get is shade, privacy between sites or silence; the shooting range beyond the east boundary is audible until dusk. For a visitor who wants to day-hike the Superstitions without gambling on Lost Dutchman’s own campground, this is the sensible base.
How to camp Usery right
Book the day the window opens. $40 a night in 2026 plus a $10 non-refundable reservation fee, rising to $50 in 2027 and $60 in 2028 under the county’s approved schedule. Reserve at exploremaricopacountyparks.org up to six months ahead; for anything January through March, book the morning the window opens, because the loop is a snowbird favorite and the online map goes grey fast. Check-in 1 p.m., check-out noon, eight people and one towing vehicle per site, 14 nights maximum in a 28-day span. Extra vehicles $10 a day. Group camps book by phone up to a year out.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east, exit Ellsworth Road north; it becomes Usery Pass Road and runs into the park gate in about 40 minutes from Old Town, all of it paved. Tell the gate you have a reservation, get your gate code, and the campground is the first left inside the park. The loop road is wide, the pads are mostly back-in, and a 40-foot fifth wheel has no trouble.
Pick by position, not number. The sites on the outer edge of the loop back onto open desert and Pass Mountain; the inner ones look at other rigs. There is no shade anywhere, so bring your own.
Water. Potable water at every site and in the restrooms. Nothing on the trails; carry it.
Pick the season. Open all year. October through April is the season, and winter weekends sell out well ahead. Summer is empty, cheap in spirit if not in price, and hot enough that the electric hookup exists mainly to run your air conditioner.
Walk from camp. On the first evening take the Merkle loop at dusk, when the javelina come down to the washes; the wildlife field guide tells you what else is out. On the second morning drive to the Wind Cave lot at 6:30 and have the cave to yourself before the day-trippers arrive; the county caps parking there and the lot fills by eight on a winter weekend.
Dogs. Six-foot leash, licensed, never left alone at the site, not in the restrooms. Welcome on every trail.
Skip it if you want a tent under a mesquite and a dark sky. McDowell Mountain, the county’s other big desert campground, has a tent-friendly loop and less noise; Lost Dutchman puts you under the Superstitions themselves if you can get a site; and the Tonto’s river sites or the Rim are the answer for shade. If you want a hot shower and the Wind Cave at dawn, book this.
A stage robber’s pass and a county’s ring of parks
The pass between the Goldfield Mountains and the Salt River has always been a shortcut. The Hohokam, whose canals and villages lined the river a day’s walk south and west, foraged this bajada and crossed it; Apache and Yavapai parties used the pass afterward to move between the mountains and the river without being seen from either. Pass Mountain, which locals also call Scarface for the pale band of volcanic tuff across its face, is the landmark that made the route obvious.
The man whose name is on everything arrived with the cattle. King Usery, King being his given name rather than a title, ran stock on the flats below the mountain in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and the pass he drove his herds through took his name. He did not stay respectable. In 1892 Usery and an accomplice held up the Globe-to-Florence stagecoach and rode off with two silver bullion bars worth $1,500 each, a dozen gold breastpins, six gold eardrops and $200 in cash. He was caught, tried and sent to the Territorial Prison at Yuma for a couple of years; released, he was convicted again of stealing livestock, drew a light sentence, and after that disappears from the record entirely. The county did not name the park for a horse thief so much as inherit the name from the mountain, which had been Usery’s for eighty years by then.
The park is a product of the Valley’s postwar decision to keep its mountains. Maricopa County assembled a ring of large desert parks on the Valley’s edges in the decades after the Second World War, mostly on federal land conveyed for recreation, so that there would be open desert left when the subdivisions arrived; McDowell Mountain, White Tank, Estrella and Usery are all the same idea. Usery Mountain joined the county system in 1961, 3,648 acres at the western end of the Goldfields against the Tonto National Forest, and the county laid out the campground loop, the picnic areas, the archery range and the trails over the following decades. The Wind Cave, a hollow at the contact between the volcanic tuff and the granite beneath it, where seep water grows hanging gardens of rock daisy, was always going to be the draw.
Mesa took its time arriving. For most of the park’s life Ellsworth Road ran out through orange groves and open desert to the gate, and the campground was a quiet winter loop for retirees from the Midwest. Then the East Valley’s growth reached the Goldfields, and the park found itself a neighborhood amenity for a city of half a million: the Wind Cave Trail became popular enough that the county capped parking at its trailhead, and the campground was rebuilt to the standard you see now, with water and electric at every pad, hot showers and a dump station. The shooting range on the park’s east boundary, a separate county operation, is the price of the location.
The latest chapter is money. Maricopa County’s parks run on fees and a thin slice of the general fund, and the county’s current schedule raises a developed site from $40 a night in 2026 to $50 in January 2027 and $60 in 2028, plus the $10 reservation fee. It is still cheaper than a motel in Mesa, and the loop still fills every winter weekend, which tells you what the market thinks.
Why it matters
Usery is the East Valley’s version of the bargain the whole county struck in the 1950s and 1960s: take the mountains on the edge of town while they are still federal land and nobody wants them, and let the subdivisions come to the fence. Sixty years on, that fence is the only reason there is a cave hike and a campground at the end of Ellsworth Road instead of another master-planned community. It is also a plain illustration of what a county campground is for: hookups, showers and a trail, not solitude. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is practical. Book six months out for a winter weekend, take an outer-loop site, do the Wind Cave at dawn and the Superstitions by day, and accept the generators and the gunfire as the cost of a hot shower 40 minutes from home.