Round Trip Distance: 2.3 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation: 3648 - 3690 feet
Cellphone: 0-3 bars
Time: 2 hrs. 30 mins.
Trailhead: I - 17 Exit 256
Fee: none
Attractions: Pueblo ruins, petroglyphs
The Badger Spring Pueblo is located in the Agua Fria National Monument northeast of Black Canyon City, Arizona. Built on the edge of the mesa, overlooking Badger Spring, and the Agua Fria River, the pueblo originally had somewhere around 30-50 rooms making it of substantial size. Over the rim from the pueblo some petroglyphs can be found on a few boulders of the steep sloping canyon hillside.
From the parking area there are 2 routes to get up on top of the mesa to the ruins. One is the pipeline road and the other, though unmarked on this end, should be Agua Fria Route 9005. The road travels south parallel with the interstate and is pretty rough in places requiring a high clearance 4WD. The road will only get you half way to the ruins before you have to park and start hiking. There is one other option and that is to turn off of I-17 as though going to the Richinbar Ruins and Petroglyphs and turn left onto 9005 near the windmill. That is only an option if you can get though the supposedly locked gate. (The gate has a big paddle lock on it but at present you can simply slip the chain off of the loop and pass through. If you do that be sure to reclose the gate so the ranchers cows don't get out onto the interstate which would be pretty disastrous.)
As you can see from this photo the rough uneven road going up this side of the mesa doesn't look like it has been used in years.
Once you get on top of the mesa the road is pretty good, at least until you get to the 0.9 mile point from the trailhead where you need to go left following a faint set of tire tracks that cut across the pipeline road.
After crossing the pipeline road the route becomes an intermittent single track that passes the corner of a fence and then disappears after a short distance.
For the rest of the way you are pretty much stumbling over lava rock in the general direction of the ruins. We spotted a bush that was growing out of the top of a mound way off in the distance and used it to hike a beeline in that direction. The mound turned out to be the pueblo ruin that we were looking for sitting on the edge of the canyon.
Once at the pueblo ruins there is a brown mylar marker like those found at most of the sites in the area. The marker tell you 2 things. The first is to remind you to tread lightly around archeological sites and remember that it is illegal to do any of your own excavating or to remove any objects that you might find. The other is that the Park Service was expecting at least occasional visitors to the site.
The outline of the 30 - 50 rooms of the pueblo is easier to see from a satellite view of the area. To the left are some lines that may have been farming fields. The smoother looking diagonal swath might be what they call others like it in the area a 'racetrack'.
Looking around the ruins intact sections of walls can be seen. The base of the walls appear to be a good 2 feet wide.
Shards of pottery and lithic scatter are strewn all around the ruins. Pieces of pottery as large as the palm of your hand can be found just below the rim. Be sure to leave everything where you find it for others to enjoy.
Over the side of the mesa there are some nice looking petroglyphs. They are situated in a bit of a precarious place on the side of the hill so we didn't venture to scramble down for a closer inspection. Notice the boulder in the upper left of the photo with the 3 circles and dotted square.
