What is the Wind Cave Trail?
Pass Mountain’s south face has a pale stripe across it, a layer of welded volcanic tuff softer than the rock above and below. Water and wind have worked at that layer for a long time, and in one spot they have hollowed out a shallow, shaded alcove about 2,840 feet up. The Wind Cave Trail is the 1.5-mile climb to it from a lot inside Usery Mountain Regional Park, gaining 812 feet by the county’s reckoning, and it is the most hiked trail in the East Valley for good reasons: it is short, it is honest about its grade, and there is a place to sit at the top.
The first half mile wanders across the bajada through saguaros and chain-fruit cholla, crosses from county land into the Tonto National Forest, then begins switchbacking up the mountain’s face. The tread turns to gravel and tuff, the grade steepens, and the Valley opens up behind you until, from the cave’s lip, you can see from the Superstitions across Mesa to Camelback. Ferns grow in the seep at the back of the alcove, and a population of rock squirrels has learned that hikers carry granola bars. Do not reward them.
What you get is a real climb with a real turnaround, a cool ledge, and the East Valley laid out below for the price of a park pass. What you do not get is solitude on any cool-season weekend, shade on the way up, or a summit; the ridge above the cave is an unofficial scramble the county does not maintain.
How to hike it right
Pay at the gate. Only the park entry, $10 per vehicle in 2026 and 2027, $12 from 2028, or a county annual pass. No trail permit, no reservation.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east, exit Ellsworth Road and go north until it becomes Usery Pass Road and reaches the park gate, about 40 minutes from Old Town; the Wind Cave lot is another five minutes inside the park, at the end of Wind Cave Drive. The lot has flush restrooms, water and a few ramadas, and holds a few dozen cars; when it fills, which happens by mid-morning on every cool-season weekend, rangers divert you to the Merkle area and you add a flat half mile each way. Be in the lot before 7 on a winter Saturday.
Pick the season. October through April is the window. From May through September this is a sunrise hike, finished by eight, and the county closes trails on excessive heat warning days; the summer rules apply in full. Park hours are 6 to 8 in winter and 5 to 9 in summer.
Water. At the trailhead. None on the trail. Carry a liter per person for the round trip in winter and twice that in the shoulder months.
Climb it in thirds. The bajada mile is a warm-up; the middle third is switchbacks on good tread; the last third is steeper and looser, on gravel over tuff, and it is where people roll ankles on the way down. Take the descent slowly. The real view is not from inside the cave but from the ledge 50 feet to the right, where Four Peaks shows over the Goldfields.
Leave the squirrels alone. The rock squirrels at the cave have learned to go into packs. Do not feed them, close the zipper, and eat on the ledge.
Dogs. Allowed on a six-foot leash. The gravel on the upper switchbacks is sharp and hot, and the rock burns paws by nine in the morning in warm months.
Skip it if you want quiet or a longer day. The 7.5-mile Pass Mountain loop starts from the same park with the same elevation and a fraction of the people, and the campground lets you do either at dawn without the drive. If you want petroglyphs at the turnaround instead of a view, the Hieroglyphic Trail in Gold Canyon is 25 minutes farther east, and for a harder granite climb on the Scottsdale side, Tom’s Thumb is the comparison everyone makes.
The outlaw’s pass that became the East Valley’s gym
The Usery range stands between the Salt River and the Superstitions, and the valley south of it was Hohokam farmland for a thousand years; their canals took the Salt a few miles from the mountain’s foot, and grinding holes and petroglyphs in the park’s washes mark where they camped and hunted. The pale tuff band on Pass Mountain, the stripe that gives it the local nickname Scarface, is a layer of volcanic ash welded into rock and then undercut by weather, and it was a landmark on the eastern edge of the valley long before anyone put a name on the pass below it.
The Americans arrived with a canal. In 1867 Jack Swilling, a former Confederate officer and prospector, reopened a Hohokam ditch near what became Phoenix, and within a decade the Salt River Valley was farm country with Fort McDowell on its northeast corner; the pass north of the mountain was on the routes between the settlements and the fort. In the late 1870s and early 1880s a cattleman named King Usery, King being his name and not a title, ran stock around the mountain and gave the pass his name. He then gave it a story. In 1892 Usery was convicted of robbing a stagecoach of silver bullion, served part of his sentence and was pardoned, was convicted again of cattle theft and served a short term, and then disappears from the record. The county that named a park for him notes all of this on its own history page.
For the next half century Usery Pass was a sheep road. Each spring and fall, Mexican and Basque herders drove flocks between the high country of northern Arizona and the winter range of the Salt River Valley, and the pass was the gap they used to get around the mountain; the Tonto National Forest, created in 1905 to protect the Salt River watershed above the new Roosevelt Dam, drew its boundary across the mountain’s upper slopes, which is why the cave itself is on federal land and the trailhead on county land.
The park came with the suburbs. Maricopa County created its parks system in 1954 as Phoenix and Mesa began to grow toward the mountains, and in 1967 it opened Usery Mountain Regional Park on the mountain’s south side, a desert park with a campground, an archery range and, in time, a trail system that reached the alcove in the tuff. The Wind Cave Trail became the park’s signature and then the East Valley’s default short hike; the county’s trail table rates it difficult, gives it 812 feet, and does not pretend the lot is big enough. The latest change is the fee: the schedule the Board of Supervisors approved in December 2025 holds entry at $10 through 2027 and raises it to $12 on January 1, 2028.
The mountain itself is not changing, apart from the squirrels. The alcove has been there since the tuff was undercut, the ferns in its seep are the only ones for miles, and the ridge above, on forest land, is still a scramble the county will not sign.
Why it matters
Wind Cave explains how the Valley’s edges became parks: a pass named for a cattle rustler, a sheep road, a forest boundary drawn for a dam, and a county that bought the foothills in the 1960s before the subdivisions reached them. It is also the East Valley’s answer to Camelback, a short honest climb with a turnaround everyone recognizes, which is why the lot fills by mid-morning and why half of Mesa has a photo from the ledge. For a Scottsdale hiker the verdict is plain: it is 45 minutes away, costs $10, and is a notch easier than Tom’s Thumb with a better place to sit at the top. Go on a winter weekday at seven, carry a liter, and do not feed anything.