Stuff your canteen and a handy lunch into your fanny pack, jump in your car and take Williamson Valley Road out of Prescott. Yeah, the pavement ends at mile marker 22, but the dirt & gravel road is in good enough shape for a passenger car - at least, when it’s dry. Just past mile marker 36 the road splits; take the left fork, marked County Road 125. It’s another 1.6 miles to the wooden “Juniper Springs Trail” sign; turn right at the cattle guard into the parking area.
This is the head of the Prescott National Forest Juniper Springs Trail. It climbs something like 800 feet up Juniper Mesa to - go figure - Juniper Spring. (PNF hasn’t tested the spring water, so you imbibe at your own risk.) The official PNF trail guide says this trail is 3.7 miles of “steep and difficult,” but that’s only in spots and I don’t think it’s anything for a reasonably healthy person to worry about. If you’re operating on half a lung from 30 years of smoking, though, you might want to pass this one up.
 Juniper Springs Trail offers plenty of view while restin' the dogs... There are plenty of crows (ravens, actually) and hawks to see, as well as mule deer and the usual assemblage of Arizona wildlife, but Juniper Springs Trail is mostly about vista, and its got plenty of that. There are large numbers of the namesake trees (mostly shaggy juniper) in the area; I’ve seen enough juniper berries blanketing the ground to make me think about whipping up a few barrels of gin. There are also quite a few alligator junipers; not so much the big, gnarly 2,000 year-old guys, mostly just the young whippersnappers in their 50's and 100's. An aj just three feet in diameter can be 800 years old but, because they frequently branch into multiple trunks at an early age, even the smaller trees may be older than you’d think. The aj is a remarkable tree deserving of the respect we should show our elders; ever since the glaciers retreated, the only place they grow are on “sky islands” of the higher elevations in the southwest. We are truly fortunate to live among these sequoias of Arizona.
PNF recommends Juniper Springs Trail during spring, summer and fall which, by process of elimination, obviously means they don’t recommend it in the winter. If that’s because winter rains create endless acres of slick and gluey mud, they’ve got a point. I’m not sure of the physics behind the phenomenon, but hiking in the mud there is like walking on oiled glass, even while it builds up on your boots so that you’re clumping around with six pounds of the stuff clinging to your soles.
While at the parking lot, note that there are two trailheads nearby - the one that winds upward is Juniper Springs Trail, intended for feeties only. If you happen to have your mountain bike on the rack or in the back, you’re in luck: this is also the head of the Old Military Trail (#1), which permits “hiking on a bike.” Trail #1 is the lower trail, to the right.
 Got a recipe for making gin? In season, barrels of juniper berries blanket the ground at Juniper Springs Trail. See our Get Out There hiking section. You can pick up a trail information sheet with a simple map on the back at the PNF office on Cortez Street in Prescott (928-443-8000). For more detail get a USGS topo map of the Indian Peak quadrangle at Granite Mountain Outfitters on Gurley Street 928-776-4949.
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