The Saguaro National Park East District has a couple of small trails that are easy and very family friendly. One is the Desert Ecology Trail and the other is the Freeman Homestead Trail, which is a little bit longer. While the Freeman Homestead Trail is only about 1 mile, it can offer a lot of bang for your buck in terms of wildlife and I will tell you everything you need to know about the trail below.
Freeman Homestead Trail Overview
The Freeman Homestead Trail trail is an easy 1-mile trail that offers encounters with a variety of desert vegetation along with helpful interpretive signs and panels along the way. It can also be a great trail to encounter some wildlife including great horned owls.
- Distance: 1.1 miles
- Elevation Gain: 108 feet
- Route Type: Loop
- Pets: No
- Difficulty: Easy
Getting to the trailhead
The trailhead is located right off the Cactus Loop Drive. If you are entering in the main entrance, simply take a right when you see the picnic area sign. (This is the only two-way portion of Cactus Loop Drive.)
After you pass the trail head for the Cactus Forest Trail, you will see the sign for the trailhead on the right and then there will be a small parking area adjacent to the trail head. You can’t miss it.
Trail conditions
The trail is well-maintained and clearly defined. The only slightly tricky part is that it moves along a wash and there are intersections with other smaller trails or washes in the area. But even in those cases, many times you will see arrows pointing you along the way so this is a pretty easy trail to follow.
Route description
You will start off the trail from the parking lot. (When I first saw the stone path, I thought this might be a paved trail but I soon realized that was not the case.)
For the first few moments you will be next to the roadway but don’t worry — shortly after that you will descend into a more secluded setting.
Immediately, you will encounter many of the common Sonoran desert plants like prickly pear cactus, staghorn cholla, teddy bear cholla, palo verde, and others.
The cool thing about this trail are the little interpretive panels that give you some insight into the different flora that you encounter which is why I think this is a great intro trail.
The saguaros will come into view shortly so don’t get discouraged if you don’t see them right away.
In spring, you can catch some pretty sweet wild flowers on the trail and we came across quite a few blooming prickly pears.
But the coolest bloom that we saw had to be the saguaros.
We had seen a few blooming over the past week or so but the blooms were always out of reach and pretty far away. Because those saguaros are so tall and the flowers are usually on top, it’s hard to get up close to their flowers.
But towards the end of the hike, there was a saguaro just a few feet taller than we were and we had the close-up view that we had been waiting for.
At about .4 miles into the hike, you will see the remnants of what was once the Homestead of Safford Freeman. In 1933, he acquired 640 acres under the Homestead Act and it was here that he built a three room adobe house. The house has long been flattened but you can still see some of the bare remnants of the Homestead that exist up on the mound when you get to this point in the hike.
There are also a couple of benches for you to relax on that are located right underneath an athel pine tree?
Only a few steps after passing the Homestead, I saw a long black snake slithering across the trail.
We stopped to check it out and watch it from a safe distance as it hung out in the shade under a tree. I’m pretty sure this long black snake was a king snake which is a non-venomous snake.
Shortly after passing the Homestead, about half a mile into the hike, you’ll notice a cliff side which is where you can find great horned owls.
It was pretty funny since seconds after I mentioned to Brad about the possibility of seeing one, a big great horned owl swooped from the cliffs and into a tree!
It was the first time either of us had seen a great horned owl in the wild and it was pretty awesome. I was not able to get a good shot of it but you can see the dark clump in the middle of the photo below sitting perched in the tree — that is the owl.
At that same time, we also heard what sounded like a hammering sound and it turned out to be a Gila woodpecker going at it on a large saguaro cactus. Again not the best picture below but you can see it in the middle perched on the cactus.
This short hike was truly packed with a ton of wildlife (other sightings included several bunnies and many lizards, a few of which were quite large).
After you arrive to the cliff, follow the cliff to the left and north up the wash where are you will start to return back to where you started.
The wash will meander a little bit until you encounter the trail on the left that you will take and start your ascent back up to the trailhead with some good sightings of saguaros.
It was on this portion of the trail that we came across a blooming saguaro cactus that wasn’t a 40-foot tall skyscraper.
Once you finish your uphill portion, you will join the trail back where you started and make your way back to the trailhead.
We spent 52 minutes on this trail because we were taking our sweet time and taking a lot of photographs. We also spent a little bit of time watching the snake and great horned owl. This could easily be a 30 minute hike.
Final word
Overall, this was a short hike that over delivered. It was really cool to see a great horned owl in person for the first time and also to see the woodpeckers and what I believe was a king snake. I’ve done hikes five times this length and seen only a fraction of the wildlife so this was very rewarding for such minimal effort.