| Town | Mile | Notes |
| Nogales / Southern Terminus | 0 | Start at the Coronado National Memorial border monument. |
| Patagonia | 51 | Small town, small grocery store, good restaurants. Trail access from mile 44 with about 11 miles of road walking round-trip into town. |
| Colossal Cave Mountain Park | 126 | Mail drop. The park accepts packages. On-trail access. Closes at 6pm — plan your arrival timing. (16721 E Old Spanish Trail, Vail AZ 85641) |
| Oracle | 211 | Small town with a grocery store and hardware store. On-trail alternate gets you into Oracle without a hitch. There’s also biosphere 2 nearby! Which is a trip! |
| Superior | 306 | Former mining town, full grocery store, trail-friendly with a great trail angel! Good stop before the Roosevelt Lake stretch. Can overnight here with the trail angel. |
| Roosevelt Lake Marina | 350 | Mail drop. Marina store has limited supplies. Can be worth sending a package to avoid the hitch into Globe (15+ miles). (28085 N. Hwy 188, Roosevelt AZ 85545) |
| Pine | 462 | Great trail town. Grocery store in Pine, about 2 extra miles of walking to get there. Pine is effectively on-trail. Zero-friendly. |
| Flagstaff | 570 | Full service city. REI for gear. Big grocery options. Trail passes near Happy Jack at mile 500 where you can hitch. Or hike to the trail access at mile 570 and walk 5 miles into town. Have microspikes shipped here if needed for the north rim. |
| Grand Canyon South Rim (Maswik Lodge) | 700 | On-trail. Maswik Lodge store is expensive but functional. You need your Grand Canyon backcountry permit by this point. Apply months in advance if you tend to camp in the bottom. Otherwise you can do it as a day hike down and up. |
| Jacob Lake Inn | 772 | On-trail (2 miles of highway walking). Small store and lodge. Last resupply before the Utah terminus. Stock up here. |
| Northern Terminus | 799 | Utah state line north of the North Rim. Remote — arrange a shuttle to Kanab in advance. |
Hiking the Arizona Trail
Mile for mile, the Arizona Trail might be the prettiest long trail in the country. It runs 800 miles from the Mexican border to the Utah border at the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, through desert, sky islands, ponderosa forests, the Grand Canyon, and the Colorado Plateau. I thru-hiked it in March-April 2023 in 32 days.
The AZT is dramatically underrated. Most people know the Grand Canyon is world-class terrain. Fewer realize how spectacular the trail is in its other sections. I strongly recommend this trail to anyone who can do it.
What You Should Know Before Starting
Season and Timing
The AZT is a spring and fall trail. The desert sections in southern Arizona are too hot to hike in summer, and the mountain sections in the north can be snow-covered in winter.
Best northbound start: Late February to mid-March. Starting here gives you the best weather in the southern desert and lets you arrive at the Grand Canyon in late March or April when conditions are good. I started March 26, 2023 and had excellent conditions.
In 2023, the Grand Canyon section was partially closed due to exceptional snowfall that triggered rockslides on the North Kaibab trail. This forced a semi-technical alternate through the inner canyon. Snow year variability in the northern sections is something to monitor before your start date.
How Long Does It Take?
Most thru-hikers finish in 30-45 days. I finished in 32 days, which required consistent 25-mile days. The trail is more rolling and runnable than something like the CDT or PNT, and the spring desert conditions make for fast hiking in the mornings before the heat builds.
Permits
The major permit concern is the Grand Canyon. Camping below the rim requires a backcountry permit from the National Park Service. These are limited and popular — apply early at recreation.gov or call the backcountry office at (928) 638-7875. Apply 4-6 months in advance for a spring thru-hike.
There is also a permit required for crossing the Navajo Nation (for some approaches or alts into or out of the canyon).
Navigation and Apps
FarOut (formerly Guthook) has an AZT guide that is essentially required. Water sources in the desert are critical planning information — the FarOut app has current water reports from other hikers. Download maps before heading into the Grand Canyon and Mormon Lake areas where cell is spotty.
The Grand Canyon Section
In 2023, a 7-mile stretch of the official AZT was closed through the Grand Canyon because extreme snow had triggered rockslides on the North Kaibab trail. Most other thru-hikers ended their trip at the South Rim. Instead, I led a group of four hikers on a 3-day, 15-mile semi-technical alternate through the inner canyon that let us cross from the South Rim to the North Rim with a continuous footpath.
This alternate required routefinding through unmaintained terrain and some minor technical scrambling. It’s not something I’d recommend to unprepared hikers. But the canyon from that angle — away from the tourist corridor, down in the side drainages — was genuinely extraordinary.
Planning and Resupply
The AZT is reasonably straightforward to resupply without sending packages, though the desert sections have some long gaps between towns. My complete travel itinerary with resupply notes is linked here.
Miles are approximate. Water carries between resupply points can be significant in the desert sections — always check FarOut for current water reports before a desert stretch.
Why I Navigate With a Garmin Watch
A Garmin Fenix is the best navigation upgrade I’ve made to my backpacking kit. It does four things my phone can’t.
- It sips power. The battery is tiny, so a typical power bank tops it up 10+ times. In my experience it runs about 4 whole days of solid navigation between charges.
- Built-in flashlight. The Fenix 7X (and some other Fenix models) has an LED flashlight. It’s one of the features I use most on trail.
- More time in nature. The course lives on my wrist, so my phone stays in my pocket.
- Off-course alerts. It pings you when you drift roughly 150 feet off the course. It has saved me MANY miles of unnecessary backtracking.
Garmin Fenix 7X Solar Sapphire on Amazon Read my Garmin watch review
Affiliate link: if you buy through it I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That’s how this site pays for my gear-testing habit.
Garmin Courses: AZT Resupply Splits
10 Garmin courses (799 miles), one per resupply stretch. Download the ZIP, import the TCX files into Garmin Connect, and send them to your watch. They include water points along the way.
Each file is one stretch between resupply stops from my plan, with the start and end loaded as named course points. I split them up because Garmin Connect chokes on whole-trail files. Follows the official passages and matches official AZT miles. The urban Flagstaff alternate (Passage 33) isn’t included. The Flagstaff stop is the point on the main route nearest town, so expect a hitch or a few extra miles of road.
TCX files include water waypoints, which I optimized to reduce water carrying concerns
Every TCX course file has water course points built in, picked to keep carries short and the odds of finding water high.
- Reading the names: each name starts with the route mile, then the source, like
101 Twin Tanks. A~in front (~244 Stock Tank) means decent odds, 60 to 85%. A?means it’s the best option in a thin stretch and may be dry. No symbol means 85% or better odds of having water, which is about 9 in 10 of them. Names get cut at 15 characters. - What the odds mean: the chance the source isn’t dry for a northbound hiker leaving the border around March 25, using the worst case within three weeks of when you’d arrive. A pool or stock tank counts as water, so check the note on each point for its chance of flowing, and plan to filter tank water.
- Gates and junctions: a few points are listed as a gate or junction. Hikers report water there or nearby, and the note on the point says so.
Heads up: I hiked the AZT before I owned a Garmin watch, so I never ran these on trail. They’re built from my resupply plan, not from a course I carried. The tracks come from third-party sources, so accuracy isn’t guaranteed. Carry backup navigation, and check the course against your own maps. If a long course won’t import, split it smaller with the Trail GPX Converter. The converter’s AZT preset now loads with these same water points.
↓ Download all 10 courses (ZIP)
Or grab individual courses (10)
Water Data and Analysis for the AZT
I built a model to better visualize and assess water availability on the AZT, the same way I did for the CDT. It estimates how water changes through the year, so it covers the spring northbound season and the fall southbound season. I used it to pick the water waypoints on the Garmin courses linked above.
Summary
For a typical year, water breaks down roughly like this. Northbound assumes leaving the border around March 25, southbound assumes leaving Utah around October 1, both at about 16 miles a day.
| Section | Spring NOBO | Fall SOBO | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dry | Flowing or better | Dry | Flowing or better | |
| Border to Green Valley | 14% | 51% | 15% | 57% |
| Green Valley to Summerhaven | 11% | 58% | 15% | 50% |
| Summerhaven to Kearny | 17% | 63% | 20% | 59% |
| Kearny to Tonto Basin | 10% | 62% | 21% | 53% |
| Tonto Basin to Pine | 10% | 53% | 21% | 48% |
| Pine to Flagstaff | 11% | 62% | 18% | 54% |
| Flagstaff to Grand Canyon | 23% | 52% | 27% | 49% |
| Grand Canyon to Utah | 15% | 60% | 23% | 52% |
| Whole trail | 14% | 57% | 20% | 52% |
- Spring is the better season. A source is dry about 14% of the time on a northbound spring schedule and about 20% of the time on a southbound fall one. Between Kearny and Pine the gap is biggest, with fall about twice as dry (10% against 21%).
- Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon is the dry part. About 23% of sources there are dry in spring and 27% in fall, the highest anywhere on the trail. It’s also where the longest planned water carries are, at 16 to 20 miles between stock tanks.
- The year matters. The odds that a source is dry were about 12% in the wet winter of 2023, and about 24% in 2018 and 20% in 2021, against 15% in an average year.
- A few water sources are highly variable. Roughly the top 10% of sources by year-to-year swing are mostly stock tanks, ponds, and seasonal springs. They can be dry one year and fine the next. The tool marks them with a “varies a lot year to year” note and a wider shaded range.
- Summer is mostly a guess. Very few people hike the AZT from June through August, so the model has little to go on, and the curves show it with wide bands.
Explore it yourself
You can look at a part of the trail on the heatmap to see when it tends to run dry. You can also select a single source to see its seasonal curve and the model uncertainty.
The listed probabilities describe typical conditions for a date, not what’s actually flowing. Recent hiker logs will be more accurate.
Methods and discussion on how I modeled the water data can be found here. The AZT uses the same model, with a longer season so it covers both spring and fall.
Getting to and from Trail
Southern Terminus
You’ll want to arrange a shuttle to the Southern terminus from Tucson. If you’re flying in, Tucson International Airport is your closest hub — it’s about 90 miles north of the terminus..
Northern Terminus (Utah Border)
The northern terminus is at the Utah state line, a few miles north of the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. Getting out from here requires planning — it’s remote. Most hikers arrange a shuttle to Page, AZ or Kanab UT, and then fly home (from Las Vegas if going to Kanab). Call ahead to Page for shuttle operators.
Gear Notes
The AZT covers wildly different environments, so gear choices involve real trade-offs. A few things I learned:
- Pack: I brought the ULA Photon custom pack for this hike and found it genuinely frustrating — the side pockets are poor for water access and the hipbelt pockets require two hands to close. I’d go back to the Granite Gear Crown2 without hesitation. Don’t overthink the pack for a 30-day trip — use what you know works.
- Solar: I ran a solar panel setup on the AZT. It worked decently but I damaged the setup within the first 100 miles. The sun exposure in Arizona makes solar genuinely useful here. More on this can be found in my smartphone and battery setup post or solar post.
- Snowshoes: I brought snowshoes in 2023 due to the exceptional snow year. In a normal year, these are unnecessary. Check conditions before you go.
- Water capacity: Carry more than you think in the desert sections. The desert stretches south of Tucson and in the northern plateau can have long water carries. 4+ liters of capacity is reasonable for desert sections.
My Packing List (2023)
Photographs
video from the trail