What is Willow Springs Gate?
North of the Apache Trail, across from the Superstitions, is a lower, redder, lumpier range almost nobody names: the Goldfield Mountains, welded volcanic tuff carved into hoodoos and slots, and home to the Tonto National Forest’s Bulldog Canyon OHV Permit Zone, 34,000 acres with about 20 miles of full-width dirt routes. The Google pin labeled Willow Canyon Trailhead is the Willow Springs gate, one of the zone’s five access points, where Forest Road 12 leaves the highway and heads north up Willow Springs Canyon.
For hikers the draw is the Willow Springs Loop, about 4.3 miles and 640 feet of gain: up the canyon on the road, around the rock formations in either direction, past Willow Springs Basin Tank, and back. The footing is dirt road and rocky spur, the views are of the Superstition front range and Canyon Lake’s canyon walls, and the company is Jeeps on weekends and nobody on weekdays. It is not wilderness and it does not pretend to be. It is a free, open piece of desert fifteen minutes past the state park, and that is enough.
What you get is a loop with Superstition views, no fee, no crowd on a weekday and a tank where the birds gather. What you do not get is a sign, a toilet, water, shade, a marked trail, or quiet on a Saturday.
How to hike it right
Pay nothing, unless you drive in. None for hikers and horses. Motorized vehicles entering the zone need a Tonto National Forest OHV permit from recreation.gov ($10 for three days, $60 for six months, $80 a year); no permit is needed to park outside the gate, and there are no gate codes anymore.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east, exit at Idaho Road, go north to SR 88 (Apache Trail) and follow it northeast past Lost Dutchman State Park. The Dutchman OHV Staging Area, the zone’s main entrance from this side, is about a mile past the park on the left and easy to miss. The Willow Springs gate is about 1.5 miles farther, also on the left, a dirt pullout at a pipe-rail gate just past the Needle Vista Viewpoint. Call it 55 minutes from Old Town. Parking is a handful of spaces on the shoulder; if they are taken, use the Needle Vista lot a quarter mile back and walk along the highway shoulder, carefully.
Pick the season. November through March, with shoulder weeks in October and April at dawn. The Goldfields sit under 2,000 feet and hold heat; the summer rules apply from April and the range is off limits for hiking in summer.
Water and facilities. Nothing. No toilet, no water, no shade, no signs for hikers. The Dutchman staging area a mile and a half back has parking but no water either. Two liters each even in January.
Navigate on purpose. The routes are OHV roads and unsigned spurs, and the formations all look alike from inside the loop. Download a GPS track for the Willow Springs Loop before you leave the house, because there is no cell coverage worth the name, and walk it counterclockwise so the Superstitions are in front of you on the return leg.
Share the road. On weekends the roads inside Bulldog Canyon carry a steady line of side-by-sides and Jeeps; step off, let them pass, and expect dust. By 7 a.m. on a Tuesday you will have the canyon to yourself. Horses use the zone too; yield to them.
Camp elsewhere. Camping is prohibited within 1 mile of every access gate and the pullout is day use; the state park has the campground. The Forest Service closes the gates only for emergencies such as flooding or fire.
Dogs. Allowed on leash. Cholla and vehicle traffic are the hazards, and the Goldfields are thick with the former.
Skip it if you want a trail with a sign and a destination. First Water and Boulder Canyon are a few miles up the road inside the wilderness, where motors are not, and Usery Mountain on the zone’s west side has a lot, a fee and marked trails into the same Goldfields. For the lake at the end of the road, Canyon Lake is ten minutes on. Pack out everything; this stretch of the Apache Trail gets more trash than it deserves.
A gold camp, a dam road and a permit zone
The Goldfields are what is left of a volcano. They are the eroded western edge of the Superstition volcanic field, the same welded tuff that makes the Superstitions’ cliffs, cut by water into the hoodoos, slots and tanks that the Willow Springs Loop winds through. Hohokam farmers on the Salt River below used the canyons for hunting and gathering, and the Western Apache and Yavapai held the range until the Army’s campaigns of the 1870s. Then someone found gold.
The strike was in the southern Goldfields, within sight of the Superstitions’ west face. A camp named Goldfield grew up around it with a post office from October 7, 1893, boomed for four years with mills, saloons and a schoolhouse, and died in 1897 when the veins pinched out and the mines closed; the post office shut in 1898. George U. Young, who had arrived in 1893 and later served as secretary of the Arizona Territory, kept trying, and the site revived briefly as Youngberg with a post office from 1920 to 1926 before Young’s death that November ended it. The miners’ and ranchers’ dirt roads up the canyons are the lower routes of today’s OHV zone, and the rebuilt ghost town on the highway is the tourist stop you pass on the way.
The road you park on came from the dam. The Tonto Wagon Road was begun on August 29, 1903 to haul supplies from the Mesa railhead to the Roosevelt Dam site, one of the first projects under the 1902 Reclamation Act, and finished on September 3, 1905 at a cost of $551,000. Apache workers did most of the construction labor, living in their own camps with their families along the route. When the dam opened, stagecoach and automobile tour operators and the Southern Pacific Railroad sold the drive as the Apache Trail, and the name stuck to SR 88. The Tonto National Forest was created the same year, 1905, to protect the watershed above the dam, and the mined-out, grazed-over Goldfields went into it. The Willow Springs pullout is on the original alignment, a few miles below the point where the pavement gives out.
Recreation came with the Valley’s growth, and so did the engines. By the late twentieth century the Goldfields’ dirt roads were a free-for-all of Jeeps, quads and dirt bikes within an hour of a million people, and the Forest Service’s Mesa Ranger District answered in the 2000s with the Bulldog Canyon OHV Permit Zone: 34,000 acres, about 20 miles of designated full-width routes, five gates at Blue Point, Usery, Wolverine, Hackamore and Dutchman, a permit for every motorized vehicle, a ban on driving off the routes and on camping within a mile of each gate. For years the gates were locked and the permit came with a combination; the agency has since dropped the locks and codes in favor of online permits, and the gates now close only for flood or fire. Hikers and horses were never charged, which is the loophole this guide uses.
The Apache Trail’s recent history has been about staying open. The Woodbury Fire of 2019 and the floods that followed it brought a landslide down on the road between Fish Creek Hill and Apache Lake, and that stretch stayed closed until September 2024, which pushed every visitor onto the paved miles past Willow Springs to Canyon Lake and Tortilla Flat. In 2022 and 2023 the Forest Service rebuilt the Dutchman staging area with more parking for OHV and horse users. The Willow Springs gate got nothing, which is why it is still a pullout and a pipe rail, and why it is quiet.
Why it matters
Willow Springs is a footnote to three bigger stories, a gold camp that lasted four years, a dam road that made the Valley possible and a permit system that is the Forest Service’s answer to a million people with engines, and the footnote is the useful part: it is the one place on the lower Apache Trail where a hiker can walk into the Goldfields for free without a sign, a fee or a crowd. The verdict for a Scottsdale hiker is simple: go on a weekday in winter, carry a track and two liters, walk the loop counterclockwise, and leave the weekends to the Jeeps.