"If you wanted to have a beginner trail, you basically had to send someone up to the Pinetop Country Club to do the Country Club Trail in Pinetop." Jason Moore, vice president of the Save the Buena Vista Foundation, said this to the Show Low City Council on September 15, as reported by the White Mountain Independent. His quote describes what changed this summer. Show Low now has two green-circle loops a few miles south of town. They sit inside a trail system that was rebuilt from the ground up to shed water. This October, with its muddy roads and storm-felled trees, has been the first real test of the redesign.
The Buena Vista Trail System was officially opened at a ribbon-cutting in early October. The Save the Buena Vista Foundation called the event "well attended," and District Ranger Charlie Denton was among the speakers.
The Old Trail Was a Logging Road
Before this summer, the Buena Vista trail was mostly old Forest Service road. Moore said the trails around Show Low designated in the late 1980s and early 1990s "were never designed to be trails for recreational users. They were designed to be roads to get logs in and out, and so they don't make very good trails." According to the White Mountain Independent, the steep grades eroded, upkeep was hard, and hikers and riders shared the old roadbeds with motorized traffic.
The land itself also changed. The Show Low South Land Exchange was proposed in 2009 and finalized in 2023, and it moved about 2½ miles of the northern Buena Vista Trail from Forest Service land into private ownership. The planners treated the loss as a reason to start over. Their goals were to drop the road sections, keep the user-made paths that worked, separate motorized and non-motorized users, and build every new segment to move water off the tread.
The Forest Service approved the plan on May 22, and construction began June 1. The old layout was a 9¾-mile loop plus a 2½-mile loop. The new network is close to 20 miles, about six of them newly built, and Moore calls it "100 percent single-track trail." The City of Show Low's trails page still lists Buena Vista as a 12-mile trail, so that figure describes the system before the rebuild.
A Stacked-Loop Map Changes Who Can Use It
Moore called the new layout a "stacked-loop" system, the modern way trails are designed. Instead of one long route that commits you to the full distance, short loops branch off a central spine. You pick a loop by difficulty and length, then add more if you feel like it. The roughly 7½-mile Buena Vista Trail is the spine, and the other loops connect to it.
Trails carry the green circle, blue square, and black diamond ratings used at ski areas. Some of the named segments:
- Rainbows: about 1.87 miles, green circle
- Sunshine: about 1.13 miles, green circle
- Petrified Loop: about 2 miles, roughly 1½ of them newly built this summer
- Flintstone: recently rerouted
- Buena Vista Trail: about 7½ miles, the spine of the system
Rainbows and Sunshine were among the first trails built, and the names come from mountain bikers' slang for an easy ride. Moore said the two loops have no major obstacles, rocks, or big elevation changes. That makes them the closest beginner option for Show Low households. A new rider, a child, or a visiting friend no longer needs a drive up to the Pinetop Country Club area for their first ride on dirt.
The system is open to hikers, trail runners, mountain bikers, and equestrians. One former user-built downhill trail has what Moore described as a "6-foot mandatory air off of a cliff." That trail is not closed to horses, but a sign warns riders not to bring one, and a second sign nearby reads "Look before you leap." The beginner loops and the expert drop are part of the same network. The color ratings are how you tell them apart.
Built to Drain, Then Tested by a Muddy Week
The design choice that matters most this time of year is water control. The new construction uses diversions that get runoff off the trail quickly, so it doesn't run down the tread and carve it out. Steve Dobbs, president of White Mountain TRACKS, told the council, "So we look to see this as a full 12-month use of the trail." Moore added that the area may still close at times because of weather, but its sandy soil drains relatively fast. "There are always windows open to use that area because sand, that's the benefit of sandy soil," he said.
Dobbs also described what the crew learned while building. The ground ranged "from very, very sandy to peanut butter mud," and at first the crew built about a quarter mile a day. TRACKS normally maintains trails rather than building new ones, and it looks after about 230 miles of them across the White Mountains.
October has already tested the design. In an October 15 update, the Save the Buena Vista Foundation said wet conditions had made it hard to get work done since early in the month. It said roads in the Buena area were muddy enough that the next work crew would carpool rather than drive in. The same update reported several trees downed by storms earlier that week:
- On Buena Vista, in the old Uncle Tom's and Trailfairies sections
- One on Grindstone
- More on Flintstone, around marker FL3
The Foundation said it would try to clear the snags by the end of that weekend.
The Map Is Still Being Built
Two pieces are unfinished, and both change how the system will work.
The first is the Chihuahua Pines Connector, which runs from the Buena Vista area toward the Los Caballos trails. TRACKS scheduled what it called a final day of trail building on Monday, October 19, and planned to open the connector once that work was done. Recently finished bermed corners already appear in the Foundation's photos. Weather has pushed this schedule around all month, so check the latest TRACKS map before planning a ride that uses it.
The second is a new trailhead. Plans that date back to the land exchange call for a trailhead and parking area on a roughly 2-acre parcel near the northern part of the system. It would sit closer to town than the current entrance, and Moore expects it to become the busier of the two. The parking layout still has to be worked out with the city, the Forest Service, and the developer.
Further out is Los Caballos. TRACKS has a design to turn about 12 miles of what Dobbs called "crazy rough trail" into more than 20 miles of connected loops, at an estimated cost of about $750,000 to build mechanically. If Los Caballos, Chihuahua Pines, and Buena Vista are eventually linked, Moore puts the total at roughly 45 to 55 miles. He sees that as the scale needed to compete with Flagstaff, Prescott, and Sedona. The first step is Forest Service approval to start the archaeological review, which Dobbs estimated at $50,000 to $60,000 on its own. Buena Vista's own review and approval cost more than $20,000, out of more than $30,000 spent on the project overall.
Before You Park on FR 300 This Week
The rest of late October also affects a trip to Buena Vista, starting tomorrow.
- Find the trailhead. TRACKS gives directions from the Show Low Post Office: take AZ 60/77 south for 4.5 miles and turn left onto FR 300. The Forest Service trail page puts the trailhead 300 yards up FR 300 on the left, lists hiking, horseback riding, and mountain biking, and notes that no water is available. TRACKS says the parking area has room for trailers.
- Download the current map. TRACKS posts a Buena Vista kiosk map and a GPX file on its Buena Vista Trail #637 page, which is linked from its trail maps page. About 85% of the new signs were installed as of the September council update, and a large map stands at the U.S. 60 trailhead. Pinetop Bike Shop also stocks TRACKS maps.
- Note the quarter-mile markers. The trails use the White Mountain Trail System's quarter-mile location markers. Moore described them as a safety feature, because a caller to 911 can give the trail name and the exact marker number.
- Check the deer hunt dates. Arizona Game and Fish's 2026-27 hunting regulations list a general deer hunt in Units 3A and 3C from October 23 through November 1, 2026. Part of Unit 3C's boundary follows U.S. 60 southwest of Show Low, the same highway that leads to the trailhead.
- Look for burn notices. The Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests' fall prescribed fire plan includes Morgan Tank 5, a 1,465-acre unit about one mile southwest of Show Low. Burning is expected to continue through spring 2027 as weather allows. The Forest Service says burn areas may close to the public for several days and that warning signs go up on nearby roads.
- Confirm fire restrictions. The forest's alerts page currently shows no fire restrictions, under an alert that began July 17, 2026. That status can change, so check it again before you go.
If you'd rather ride with a group, the Save the Buena Vista Foundation runs a Saturday morning ride that meets at 8 a.m. The location changes week to week. In early October it covered 12 to 15 intermediate miles at Buena Vista, and on October 17 it went to Los Burros for the aspens. The Foundation's weekly posts announce where each ride meets.
For more on weekends in and around town, the Show Low neighborhood guide and our August piece on weekends at the arena and raceway while Fool Hollow ran low cover other parts of the local calendar.
If you're weighing which part of town fits the way you like to spend a morning outside, Jennifer M Knaust is glad to talk through how far each area is from trails like these. Let's Connect.
