Prescott National Forest

Offering cool relief from the desert below, the nearly 1.25 million acres of the Prescott National Forest are just brimming with outdoor recreation opportunities. The outstanding climate allows year-round opportunities for camping, picnicking, fishing, hunting, driving for pleasure, nature photography, mountain climbing, hiking, and horseback riding.

Explore Sycamore Canyon as it eviscerates the Mogollon Rim, laying open a colorful labyrinth of crimson cliffs, red sandstone, white limestone, and lava flows. Over 450 miles of trail snake their way through the Prescott like a sidewinder on the sun-baked desert, as well as along switchbacks up the timbered slopes of towering sentinels like the 7,628-foot Towers Mountain. It’s no mirage; river rafters can actually float through the desert in the arid sections of this mystical forest of cactus and sand.

Prescott is also a forest rife with Western folklore—names like Lonesome Pocket, Yellowjacket Gulch, Grief Hill, and Horsethief Basin evoke the West’s wilder days. At Battle Flat in 1864, five cowboys held off 150 Indians in a do-or-die gunfight. Gold seekers were constantly skirmishing with native Americans in these parts.

In the early 1860s, Captain Joseph Walker led an expedition of 34 men into Apache territory after being told by an Indian “there’s gold in those mountains.” One of the members of the expedition, Sam Miller, found what he thought was a dead lynx in a gold-filled creek. He tried to pick it up, it suddenly came back to and life clawed him something fierce—ever since the creek has been known as Lynx Creek.

The Natural beauty of mountain tops, clear lakes and rivers, great varieties of fish, unique wildlife, and remnants of cultural heritage provide settings for a diversity of outdoor recreation activities.