Long Canyon Trail to Long Canyon Tank

The author and thirteen other hikers left Cottonwood at 0800 on 26 March 2016 to hike on Long Canyon Trail. We planned to hike to Long Canyon Tank, about three miles from the trailhead at Forest Road 618H, and return. To reach the trailhead, we drove east on SR 260 to I-17 and turned north. We exited I-17 at the SR 179 exit and turned right to follow FR 618 across Wet Beaver Creek to the junction with FR 618H. The road is paved all the way to the FR 618H turnoff which is, itself, a well-maintained dirt road. About 0.7 miles after turning onto FR 618H, we came to the Long Canyon Trailhead. Parking is on the left side of the road and a chain is stretched across the road limiting access beyond this point to those with business at Southwest Academy. A gate (right), providing access to the trail, is located on the right.

The trail runs up to the mesa, now looming high above us, that lies between Deadwood Draw and the Canyon that carries Wet Beaver Creek and we knew that we had a steep climb ahead. A trailhead sign (left) posted a few yards from the gate warned us that the trail would be difficult to follow after the first two miles. Lettering on the sign that said “Bell Trail #13 – 10 miles” was confusing and I never determined the meaning. If intended to provide the length of Bell Trail, it is incorrect. Bell Trail, according to the Forest Service description¹, is 11 miles long, ending at Forest Road 214 about a mile east of Cedar Flat Tank. However, all other sources I found, including the Coconino National Forest Motor Vehicle Usage Map² and Garmin's Topo U.S. 24K Southwest map³ show it ending at Roundup Basin Tank which would make it around 7.6 miles long. It also couldn't mean that it was 10 miles by way of Long Canyon Trail to Bell Trail because, although both trails, on most maps, do end at Roundup Basin Tank, that is only about 7.8 miles.

As we continued along the trail, we found ourselves climbing steeply along a rough, rocky trail. It was a much more difficult hike than we had expected and two of our hikers turned back before we reached the top of the mesa. The rest of us continued on our way, going quite slowly and resting often. Flowers were a good excuse to stop and we paused frequently to admire those found along the way. Just a short distance up the trail we noted a bunch of blackfoot daisies (below left) followed closely by a somewhat scraggly globemallow (below right).

Blackfoot daisies                     Globemallow

As implied by the trailhead sign, the trail was easy to follow as we made our way toward the rim of the mesa. Behind us we had an ever-changing view, at first of the Wet Beaver Creek and the area around the Beaver Creek Ranger Station, then, as we climbed higher, of Capitol Butte, on the other side of Sedona, as it gradually became visible above White Mesa. The photograph (below) shows this view.

Looking back from the shelf below the rim of the mesa

The above photograph was taken somewhere around the first of two steep climbs required to reach the top of the mesa. As can be seen in the map insert (below), the first climb is followed by a fairly level hike along a ridge before a second steep climb to the rim of the mesa.

Map insert showing two sharp climbs to reach the rim of the mesa

As we continued up the trail to the mesa we could at times look down on the campus of Southwest Academy, nestled alongside Wet Beaver Creek at the old Beaver Creek Ranch Headquarters. You may find either of those names, sometimes both, depending on what map you are using. I later did a little online research and found the following description:

Southwestern Academy is a nonprofit, coeducational college preparatory school for grades 6-12, with two campuses—one in San Marino, California, and the other in Rimrock, Arizona, USA. The school is accredited by WASC. The school offers boarding and day enrollment for 145 students for grades 6-12 in San Marino and 40 students for grades 9-12 at the Rimrock campus. A year of postgraduate studies is offered at both campuses. Students can transfer between the two campuses. The school was founded in 1924 by Maurice Veronda, father of the current headmaster, Kenneth Veronda.⁴

The school was founded, as noted above, in 1924 in San Marino, California. The Arizona campus, at the old Beaver Creek Ranch, was added in 1963. The ranch was homesteaded in the 1880s by the Casner family; the Broken A-4 brand was registered for the ranch in 1889. The present stone buildings were constructed after the ranch became a private hunting lodge in 1929. Southwestern Academy opened at the site in 1963⁵.

The sign at the trailhead had warned that the trail became indistinct after 2 miles and at 1.7 miles we found another sign (right) indicating that we had arrived at that spot.

I set the scale on my GPS to 120 feet to make sure we didn't inadvertently deviate too far from the downloaded track we were following. As it turned out, however, we really didn't need the GPS track which, in any case, turned out to vary as much as 0.2 miles from the actual trail. We just followed the well-traveled cattle trail. We assumed that the cows knew the most direct path to the tank we were aiming for. They did, however, tend to wander a bit, shifting the trail so that it passed under low-lying tree branches (below left) to brush off flies. But the general direction never varied; they were headed to the watering hole. Verifying our decision to follow the cattle trail instead of the GPS track, we found ancient wire-bound cairns (below right) at intervals all along the way.

Trail detours to pass under limbs              Old wire-bound cairns        

We had started the hike climbing a steep slope covered with juniper and a variety of low-growing plants such as cactus, snakeweed and cliffrose. Now we were hiking along an essentially level trail with widely-spaced junipers and pinon pines growing in high desert grassland. We knew that the area was grazed by antelope as well as cows but we saw neither. We did, however, find some fairly recent droppings from both (right) scattered along the trail.

From the top of the mesa as we neared Long Canyon Tank we had an excellent view to the north, across the canyon that carries Wet Beaver Creek and on to the San Francisco Peaks in the far distance.

Looking north from Long Canyon Trail on the mesa near Long Canyon Tank

It was almost noon when we arrived at Long Canyon Tank (below) and we stopped there for lunch.

Long Canyon Tank – a dreary-looking place but it did have water

We still had not reached Long Canyon; its rim was at least another half mile to the east, as shown in the map insert (below). As the map shows, were we to follow Long Canyon Trail to its end at Roundup Basin Tank, we would hike along the canyon's western rim for some distance and then cross it to meet with Bell Trail which also, according to most of the maps I consulted, ends at Roundup Basin Tank.

The magenta line shows Long Canyon Trail from Long Canyon Tank to its end at Roundup Basin Trail – most of this track was downloaded from HikeArizona.com

On our way back we passed the only standard trail marker (below left) we saw on this hike. We pushed right along and were starting the descent from the mesa rim (below right) by 1340.

Trail 63 Marker                       Hikers starting the descent

On our way back down Daisy pointed out a really nice indigo plant (below left) that I had not seen on the way up and, when we were almost at the bottom of the trail, we passed through a patch of unusually aromatic cliffrose bushes. I stopped to photograph one of them (below right). It was certainly not the most impressive specimen we saw but others were too far off the trail and I was tired.

Indigo plant                             Cliffrose                   

My pack had become unbalanced when we stopped just before we began the last steep descent. I had removed a filled thermos and apparently restowed it improperly causing it to list to the right. Being too pig-headed to stop and correct the problem, thus descending with an unbalanced load, I found that I had some very sore muscles and was walking with a decided list to starboard when I got back to the trailhead.

The total hike distance was 6.6 miles, the highest elevation was 5126 feet and the total ascent was 1296 feet.

Our GPS Track is shown in red on the included map (following). The cyan track at the top is Bell Trail and the dark magenta track continuing east from Long Canyon Tank is the continuation of Long Canyon Trail as it makes its way to Roundup Basin Tank.

1http://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coconino/recreation/hiking/recarea/?recid=55234&actid=50

2 http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprd3834451.pdf

3 http://www.amazon.com/Garmin-MapSource-Southwest-Topographic-Coverage/dp/B001RYK0JE

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_Academy

5 http://www.southwesternacademy.edu/pdfs/StudHdbk%202015-16.pdf