Santan Mountain Regional Park

Friendly staff found us on the trail and replenished our water supply! Easy trail, beautiful views. $ 6/​car per day. They have classes and group hikes, too.

Visiting relatives who wanted to do something just before we would start our 7±hour trek back home, we ended up wandering this way. Mr. D’s mother had wanted to hike South Mountain, but frankly, we’d already been there many times and wanted to try something new.
On the way to the parking lot, you pass a house shaped like a pyramid with a matching, pyramid-​shaped garage. Parking a car in the dirt lot is $ 6, on the honor system, with envelopes for putting the money into the slot and a stub you tear off to display on your dashboard. Even if you just walk in, you’re supposed to slip $ 2 per person into the box. We watched a few hikers just walk on through. Again, it’s on the honor system.
Like most places, the trails go rocky after a while. Mr. D’s mom ended up bowing out early and going to back to sit in the car in the 95 degree heat. We walked some of the Gold Mine trail. Various cacti were in bloom, with fat, magenta blossoms. This time of year and the wash areas were filled with explosions of yellow flowers.
One of the main things to see is a small graveyard, consisting of two prospectors, Mansel Carter and Marion Kennedy. Looking up information on them, you get lots of pictures of Carter — known in local legend as the Old Man of the Mountain — feeding birds from his hand. Kennedy was a Cherokee from Oklahoma and together they were considered prospecting hermits, living up in the mountains, putting dynamite in the ground, and collecting silver and copper to have smelted and maintain their lifestyle. Their graves are behind a big black fence.
There are apparently open mine shafts to look out for or you may fall in, though we didn’t get far enough to see any.