Saguaro National Park (Tucson Mountain District)
National park · Tucson & the Sky Islands
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This is the Tucson Mountain District ("Saguaro West") of Saguaro National Park, one of the densest saguaro forests in the Sonoran Desert. The scenic 6-mile Bajada Loop Drive is unpaved but graded for ordinary vehicles, winding past cactus-covered slopes to Signal Hill, home to over 200 Hohokam petroglyphs pecked into the rock roughly 550 to 1,550 years ago. Entrance costs $15 for cyclists and pedestrians, valid seven days across both park districts.
This corner of the Sonoran Desert survived by lobbying, not scenery alone. In the 1920s, local hunters organized as the Tucson Game Protective Association persuaded the Department of the Interior to withdraw roughly 30,000 acres of these foothills from mining and homestead claims, and Pima County turned the reclaimed land into Tucson Mountain Park. President Kennedy folded 16,000 of those acres into Saguaro National Monument in 1961, splitting the park into the eastern and western districts that flank Tucson today. The district sits lower and drier than its counterpart in the Rincon Mountains across town, its elevation dropping as low as 2,180 feet.
What you see
Squat picnic shelters built low into the boulders along the loop, shaped from quarried native stone by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s to blend into the desert rather than stand out against it.
Practical
Bicycling is allowed on the paved roads, the Bajada Loop Drive, Golden Gate Road, and the Belmont multi-use trail; no overnight camping in this district.
naturedesertpetroglyphsnational park