What is Usery Mountain Regional Park?
Drive east on Brown Road until Mesa runs out and you hit a mountain with a white stripe across its face. That is Pass Mountain, the stripe is a band of volcanic tuff, and the 3,648 acres of bajada and canyon wrapped around its south and west sides are Usery Mountain Regional Park, part of the county park system since 1961 and named for King Usery, a cattleman who ran stock here in the 1870s and 1880s and ended up in the Yuma prison. The park backs onto the Tonto National Forest, so the trails on the north side leave county land and keep going into the Goldfield Mountains.
There are 23 named trails. The one everyone knows is the Wind Cave Trail, 1.5 miles one way and about 800 feet up to a shallow overhang on the mountain’s face where the tuff meets the granite. The one worth planning a day around is the Pass Mountain Trail, a 7.5-mile loop around the whole mountain with 731 feet of elevation change, over a saddle on the east side with a view of the Superstitions nobody expects from Mesa. Below those, a mesh of easy trails (Blevins, Moon Rock, Cat Peaks, the barrier-free Merkle loop) crosses flat desert thick with saguaros, and that is where the bikers, horses and school groups go.
The rest of the park is what makes it a destination rather than a trailhead: a nature center with programs most weekends in winter, picnic ramadas with grills and water, a model-airplane field, the 73-site Buckhorn campground and an archery range with nearly 100 targets on six courses, the only Five Star rated range in Arizona. The owner’s maps list also pins the Pass Mountain Trailhead, which is simply the park’s eastern lot where the loop begins, and Brown Mountain, the lower peak west of the entrance road that has no official trail. What you get is the most complete desert park in the East Valley. What you do not get is solitude on a winter weekend or quiet on the east side while the shooting range next door is open.
How to do Usery right
Pay at the gate. $10 per vehicle in 2026 and 2027, $12 from 2028; $5 for anyone walking or biking in. The county annual pass is $120 and covers all the mountain parks and Lake Pleasant. The gate takes cards.
Get there. Take Loop 101 south to US 60 east, exit Ellsworth Road and go north about seven miles; Ellsworth becomes Usery Pass Road and runs into the gate. Figure 40 minutes from Old Town. Everything is paved.
Park smart. The Wind Cave lot fills first, by 7:30 on cool-season weekends; the Merkle, Blevins and Horse Staging lots rarely do. Park at Merkle or Blevins and walk the connector rather than circling.
Pick the season. The flat trails are fine most of the year before ten in the morning; the Wind Cave and Pass Mountain are cool-season hikes, done by nine from May through September. The park’s own summer rules and the sunrise hiking rules apply, and the Wind Cave’s south-facing rock holds heat like a griddle.
Water. Drinking water and flush restrooms at the picnic areas, nature center and campground. Nothing on the trails. On Pass Mountain carry two liters a person even in January.
Pick the trail. For the view and the workout, the Wind Cave. For a long day, Pass Mountain, counterclockwise so the climb over the pass is in shade and the long gentle descent along the Goldfield side is in the open. For a six-year-old or a first-time mountain biker, Blevins and Moon Rock: wide, flat and full of chuckwallas on the boulders in spring. For wheels, the 0.9-mile Merkle loop.
Do the odd thing. The archery range is open to anyone with their own bow and a $4 supply ticket from the gate, which is the best cheap afternoon in Mesa. The nature center runs programs most winter weekends.
Dogs. On a six-foot leash everywhere, including the Wind Cave; leave them home in summer.
Skip it if you want quiet; the popping you hear on the east trails is the Usery Mountain Shooting Range next door, not in the park, and it stops at sunset. Compared with Scottsdale’s own trails, Pass Mountain is longer than anything in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve loop system and the Wind Cave is a little easier than Tom’s Thumb with a better place to sit at the top; McDowell Mountain Regional Park is the county’s equivalent on the Scottsdale side. For a river day after the hike, Phon D Sutton on the Salt is ten minutes north, and the campground has its own guide.
The cattleman who robbed a stage
The Salt River runs a few miles north of Pass Mountain, and the river is where the people were. Hohokam farmers dug canals off it for a thousand years, and the O’odham and Piipaash who farm it today were granted the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community by executive order on June 14, 1879, its eastern edge a short distance west of the park across the river. The mountain itself, with its band of white tuff over a granite base, was a landmark on the route from the Salt up into the Goldfields and the Superstitions beyond, and the Wind Cave sits exactly at the seam between the two rocks.
The name came with the cattle. King Usery, King being his given name and not a title, ran stock around the pass in the late 1870s and early 1880s, when the country east of Mesa was open range and the mountain was simply the one you drove the herd around. He did not stay honest. In 1892 Usery took part in the holdup of the Globe-Florence stagecoach, a job that netted two silver bars valued at $1,500 each, some gold breastpins and eardrops, and $200 in cash. He was caught, tried and sent to the Territorial Prison at Yuma for a couple of years, was later convicted of stealing stock and given a light sentence, and after that release was never seen again. The pass, the road and the park all carry his name; the mountain the trails climb, which everyone assumes is Usery Mountain, is Pass Mountain; Usery Mountain proper is the lower rise across the entrance road.
The park came out of a mid-century idea. Maricopa County assembled a ring of desert mountain parks around the growing Valley, and the land around Pass Mountain became part of the regional park system in 1961, according to the county’s own page; other accounts say 1965 or 1967, and the county’s first Park Master Plan, adopted in 1965, is the document that laid out what the parks would hold. Usery got picnic ramadas, a campground that grew into the 73-site Buckhorn loop with water and electric, trails that multiplied to 23, a nature center and, unusually, an archery range that the sport’s governing body rates Five Star, the only one in Arizona. Mesa built east to meet it. The Loop 202 and the subdivisions along Ellsworth turned a remote county park into one with a city at its gate, and the Wind Cave, a short, steep, photogenic climb, became the East Valley’s busiest trail.
What has changed lately is the pressure. The county’s 2026 fee schedule set entry at $10 per vehicle and scheduled $12 for 2028; the Wind Cave lot fills by 7:30 on winter weekends and parking restrictions now cap it; and the county steers visitors toward the lower trails and the Pass Mountain loop to spread the load. The shooting range next door, the model-airplane field and the archery courses give the park a civic, slightly eccentric character that the Scottsdale preserves do not have, and that is not going anywhere.
Why it matters
Usery is what the Valley’s county parks were meant to be: a piece of the desert held back on federal land in the early 1960s, before the city reached it, and then fitted out for everyone from archers to wheelchair users. It also carries the honest history of the range it sits in, a cattleman who turned stage robber and vanished, rather than a legend. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: it is the best all-round desert park in the East Valley, 40 minutes away, worth the $10 for the Wind Cave at dawn or the Pass Mountain loop in January, and the campground makes it a weekend.