What is Woodbury Trailhead?
The Superstitions most people know end at Weavers Needle. East of it the range widens, climbs and empties out, and the Woodbury Trailhead is the southern door into that country. It sits at about 3,520 feet at the end of Forest Road 172B, 13 miles of dirt from the pavement, where a gate stops the road and the Woodbury Trail #114 and JF Trail #106 take over. The JF Trail runs north through the center of the wilderness toward Tortilla Pass and the Tortilla Trailhead; the Coffee Flat Trail #108 heads west through Randolph and Fraser canyons toward the Dutchman’s and Red Tanks trails, and a few miles up the JF the Rogers Canyon Trail #110 branches off, 4.5 miles of creek crossings that pass the Rogers Canyon cliff dwelling, the best-preserved Salado ruin in the range. Nearly every multi-day loop in the east Superstitions touches one of these.
On June 8, 2019 the human-caused Woodbury Fire started near this trailhead and burned 123,875 acres before containment on July 15. The grass and chaparral are back; the oaks and the signs mostly are not. What you get now is open, long-view country with almost nobody in it, a free lot, and a working cattle ranch next door that has been there since the 1890s.
What you do not get is a toilet, water, a sign that survived the fire, or any way in without clearance. Peralta delivers the Superstitions on 8 miles of graded dirt; Woodbury delivers the rest of them on 13 miles of bad road, and the trade is worth it only if you have the vehicle and the time.
How to hike Woodbury right
Nothing to pay. No fee, no Tonto Pass, no permit. Wilderness rules apply past the gate: groups of 15 or fewer, no bikes, no motorized anything, 14-day camping limit.
Get there. Loop 101 south to US 60 east, past Apache Junction and Gold Canyon to Queen Valley Road (about milepost 214) and turn left. After about 1.6 miles, turn right on Hewitt Station Road (FR 357), graded dirt, and follow it about 3 miles to the signed FR 172 junction on the left. FR 172 is the real road: about 9 miles of ruts, rock and wash crossings to the FR 172A/172B split, then left on 172B for about a mile to the trailhead. High clearance is required, four-wheel drive is welcome after rain, and the road is a no-go during and after storms; a tow from here costs more than a weekend anywhere else. Figure 100 minutes from Old Town, 45 of them on dirt, and a lot that is rarely more than a few trucks deep.
Pick the season. October through April. The east Superstitions sit higher and cooler than the Peralta side, but the burn scar has little shade, so May and late September are dawn starts only, and summer is out. Monsoon storms flash Randolph and Fraser canyons; stay out of the slots when storms are forecast anywhere on the range.
Water. None at the lot. On the trails, Rogers Canyon and a few springs run in a wet spring and nowhere is reliable. Carry all of it for a day hike, and plan a backpack around the spring reports.
Pick the hike. For a day, the Coffee Flat Trail west into Randolph Canyon is the gentlest option, descending through the fire scar to the canyon bottom; turn around where the canyon narrows and save the Fraser Canyon slot for a cool, dry day. For two nights, the loop everyone wants is up the JF Trail, over to Rogers Canyon and the cliff dwelling, and out via Reavis Ranch or back along Coffee Flat. Carry a paper map and know how to read it: the fire took the signs, and the JF Trail is easy to lose where it crosses the drainages. None of it is technical in the sense of the class ratings; all of it is remote.
The ruin. The Rogers Canyon cliff dwelling is a protected archaeological site. Look from outside, do not enter, do not touch, do not camp in it. People have, and the walls show it.
The ranch. The JF Ranch at the end of FR 172A is working land. Park only at the signed trailheads, leave every gate as you found it, and give the cattle room.
Dogs. Allowed, under control. The approach road is the harder part for them in heat, and the burn has no shade.
Skip it if you have a sedan or a short day. Peralta and First Water are the Superstitions on good roads; Picketpost Mountain, back on US 60, is the hard day hike with pavement to the lot. Woodbury is for people who already know those and want the half of the range they have not seen.
The ranch road into the half of the range nobody sees
The east Superstitions were lived in before they were legendary. In the 1300s Salado farmers built the cliff dwelling in Rogers Canyon and smaller sites along the drainages that drop toward Queen Creek, farmed the canyon bottoms for a few generations and left, as the Salado left everywhere, before 1450. The Western Apache held the range when the Spanish and then the Americans came, and the name the mountains carry is the one the Pima gave their Apache-haunted heights; the lexicon entry covers the Lost Dutchman business, which belongs to the west end and has nothing to do with this trailhead.
The people who made the east end usable were ranchers. Elisha Reavis farmed the high valley in the middle of the range that still carries his name, selling vegetables to the mining camps, until he died in 1896. Jack Fraser, who had started running cattle in the country in the 1890s, took over the Reavis place and worked the range under the JF brand, and the JF Ranch at the end of FR 172A, with the trail that carries the brand north through the heart of the wilderness, is still a working outfit; the Forest Service maintains a trailhead at its edge because the ranch road was the only road. The Woodburys, who gave their name to the trailhead, the trail and a windmill nearby, appear in the record as mining claimants in this corner of the range and not much else; no source I found says more about them, and I have not guessed.
Protection came in layers. The Forest Service set aside the Superstition Primitive Area in 1939, the first formal recognition that the range should stay roadless; the Wilderness Act of 1964 converted it to the Superstition Wilderness, and the Arizona Wilderness Act of 1984 expanded it to 159,757 acres, taking in the eastern country around Reavis Ranch and Rogers Canyon. The ranch roads from the south, Hewitt Station and FR 172, stopped at the wilderness line, and the trailheads at their ends, Woodbury, JF Ranch and Rogers Trough, became the back doors to a range whose front door at Peralta was already crowded.
Then it burned. On June 8, 2019 a human-caused fire started near the Woodbury Trailhead and ran north and west through the wilderness for five weeks, driven by wind through chaparral that had not burned in a century. By containment on July 15 the Woodbury Fire had covered 123,875 acres, the fifth-largest in Arizona’s history at the time, from Queen Creek to the Apache Trail and from Weavers Needle to the Salt. It spared the Rogers Canyon dwelling and the Reavis orchards and took almost everything else: the shade oaks along the JF Trail, the trail signs, the junipers on the saddles. The Tonto closed the east Superstitions for months. The trails that reopened run through a scar of grass and resprouting chaparral, open and long-viewed in a way the range had not been in living memory, with the drainages scoured and the water sources, never reliable, rearranged. The signs have been slow to come back. The quiet never left.
Why it matters
Woodbury is the Superstitions as a working landscape rather than a legend: a ranch road to a wilderness line, a Salado village that outlasted the fire, a cattle brand on a trail and a burn that reset a hundred years of brush. It is also the honest measure of the range. Peralta is a trailhead; Woodbury is a commitment of 13 bad miles, a paper map and all your own water, for the half of the Superstitions that has no crowd because it has no easy way in. For a Scottsdale visitor with the vehicle and the time, it is the best backpacking door within two hours of Old Town. Check the forecast, air down for the washes, leave the gates as you found them, and look at the ruin from outside.