The Foothills Trail That Caught Fire Reopened Faster Than the One That Didn't

If you live near Skyline and Alvernon, Finger Rock is your trail. It's the 35-space lot at the end of the pavement, the one that fills up before 7 a.m. on a Saturday, the one where friends who don't live here ask why you'd voluntarily climb 4,000 feet before breakfast. If you're the type who drives up the Catalina Highway every July to remember what 75 degrees feels like, Marshall Gulch near Summerhaven is your trail too, even though it's an hour and 7,000 vertical feet away.

This summer, both trails changed on you at once, and not in the way you'd expect. The one that actually caught fire came back first.

A Lightning Strike, 67 Acres, and a Trailhead at the End of Alvernon Way

Lightning hit the Santa Catalinas at 10:33 p.m. on August 7, sparking what the Coronado National Forest named the Finger Ridge Fire in the steep terrain near Finger Rock Canyon, southwest of Mount Kimball. By Saturday morning it was estimated at 20 acres and 0% contained. By Monday it had grown to 67 acres and reached 50% containment, with forest officials reporting the fire had stopped spreading overnight as monsoon moisture settled over the burn area.

The trailhead itself, the Richard McKee Finger Rock Trailhead at the north end of Alvernon Way, closed to the public not because hikers were in danger on the trail, but because firefighters needed it as an access point into the canyon. Once that operational need passed, the closure lifted. Coronado National Forest confirmed the trail reopened for public use by Monday afternoon, August 10. No structures were threatened. No evacuation orders were issued for the surrounding area.

Run the clock: spark to public trail again, roughly three days.

The Trail With No Fire That's Harder to Reach Until December

Marshall Gulch never burned. Nothing is currently on fire there. What closed it was a maintenance and reconstruction project that the Forest Service had been planning since a 2018 environmental review, funded through the Legacy Restoration Fund under the Great American Outdoors Act. The picnic area and trailhead shut down completely from July 6 through July 26 for tree remediation work, the first phase of a rebuild that will eventually replace the old one-way, dead-end parking layout with a loop road and two new bridges over Sabino Creek engineered to handle 100-year flood events.

Here's where the schedule gets stranger than most hikers expect. When the initial closure lifted on July 27, it didn't reopen the way Finger Rock did. Instead, a formal Forest Service closure order now allows pedestrian access to the Arizona Trail, Marshall Gulch Trail #3, Aspen Trail #93, and Sunset Trail #90 only on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and federal holidays. Monday through Thursday, the entire site closes for active construction. That order runs through December 17, 2026.

Do the math from today. We're roughly six weeks into a schedule that still has about three and a half months left to run, at a trailhead that Coronado National Forest says draws close to 160,000 visitors a year, more than any other single access point in this stretch of the forest.

Here's the comparison side by side:

A trail with real flames on it was back in three days. A trail with no active hazard at all is on a weekday blackout that runs into the holidays. The difference isn't danger, it's paperwork and construction sequencing, and it's worth knowing before you plan a Tuesday hike expecting the same access you had in June.

The Parking Lot That Finished While Everyone Was Watching the Fire

While the fire story was playing out on the evening news, a separate, much less dramatic project quietly wrapped a few miles away. The Federal Highway Administration's Central Federal Lands Highway Division, working with Pima County and the Coronado National Forest, finished a $4.99 million overhaul of Sabino Canyon Park Road near Summerhaven in June 2026, on schedule, after breaking ground in October 2025 and pausing for the winter. Atkins/Conway Construction Company built a new 75-space paved lot, added 21 on-street parking spaces, put in a public restroom and an Arizona Trail information kiosk, resurfaced roughly half a mile of road, and laid a five-foot pathway for the trail's wilderness bypass.

That lot isn't a footnote to the Marshall Gulch story, it's the workaround. Forest Service guidance now points hikers to that same Summerhaven parking area during the Monday-through-Thursday closures at Marshall Gulch. The fix for a problem that's still unfolding was finished and open to the public before the current phase of the problem even started.

What This Actually Means for This Week's Hike

If you're deciding where to go this weekend, the practical version looks like this:

• Finger Rock and Pontatoc: fully open, no lingering fire restrictions reported. The 35-space lot at the end of Alvernon Way still fills fast on weekend mornings, same as it always has.
• Marshall Gulch, Aspen, and Sunset trails: fine on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or federal holiday. Show up on a Tuesday and you'll find the gate closed, construction crews working, and the site off-limits until the weekend cycle comes back around.
• AZT thru-hikers passing through: the Mint Spring Trail detour connecting Carter Canyon Road to Marshall Saddle is the official bypass on weekdays, not the direct route through Marshall Gulch.
• Parking near Summerhaven on any day of the week: the new lot on Sabino Canyon Park Road is open regardless of what's happening at Marshall Gulch itself, and it's the spot the Forest Service is actually pointing people toward right now.

None of this shows up if you just search "best hikes near Tucson" and skim a list built in 2023. It changes month to month, sometimes week to week, and the only way to know what's actually true on a given Tuesday is to follow the agencies running these sites directly, not the review sites quoting each other.

That kind of granular, this-week knowledge is the same instinct that matters when you're trying to understand a neighborhood you're about to buy into, not just visit. Knowing which trailhead is open on a Tuesday is a small thing. Knowing why a listing on one side of Sunrise commands a different price than one three streets over, or which enclave actually delivers the mountain views the photos promise, takes the same kind of paying-attention that doesn't come from a national portal. If you're weighing a move into the Catalina Foothills, or you already live here and want a read on what your home is worth in the current market, Old Pueblo Estates is built around exactly that kind of local detail. Reach out to schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk through it.