What it is
The Adero Canyon Trailhead is the Town of Fountain Hills’ way into the McDowell Mountains, at the top of Eagle Ridge Drive on the town’s western edge, about 30 minutes from Old Town. It is the trailhead for the town’s own McDowell Mountain Preserve, the strip of mountain Fountain Hills set aside on its side of the range while Scottsdale was assembling the McDowell Sonoran Preserve on the other. The trailhead opened in 2018 after more than twenty years of planning, land purchases and a road that had to be built through a half-finished subdivision, and it has the things a modern trailhead has: a paved lot, restrooms, shade, maps, and dawn-to-dusk hours.
The trails climb from the canyon into the ridges. The Adero Canyon Trail runs just under two miles from the lot and keeps going into McDowell Mountain Regional Park, the county’s 21,000 acres on the back of the range, with about 330 feet of climb along the way; the Sonoran Trail and the preserve’s loops take you higher toward the ridgeline and the Scottsdale boundary. What you see from up there is the east-side set: Four Peaks, Red Mountain, the Superstitions, the Verde country, and the fountain firing on the hour in the lake below.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because on a January Saturday the Preserve’s Gateway lot is full by eight and Tom’s Thumb is turning cars away, and this lot, into the same mountains, has a dozen cars in it. Our best hikes note ranks the Scottsdale side; this is the overflow valve, and it is a good hike in its own right, with a view the Scottsdale trailheads cannot give you because they are facing the wrong way.
The practical version
Shea east, left on Palisades, left on Eagle Ridge Drive, uphill to the end. Free, dawn to dusk. Two hours for the canyon trail and back, three or four for the ridges. ADERO, the resort on the ridge just below, is the lunch and the pool afterward; our Fountain Hills guide has the town below.
When to go
November through March is the season for the full climb; the east slope gets the first sun of the day, which makes a seven o’clock start pleasant in January and brutal in May. Summer is first light only and off the mountain by nine; the summer sunrise hiking rules apply with extra force on an exposed east-facing slope that holds the heat into the evening. After rain the canyon runs and the Adero Canyon Trail crosses it; in a wet March the wildflowers on the lower bajada are the best on the range because they face the morning sun.
The hikes
- The canyon trail, out and back. Just under two miles from the lot into the regional park, about 330 feet of climb, two hours with stops. The right first visit, and the one with the fountain view at the hour.
- Up to the ridges. The Sonoran Trail and the preserve’s loop trails climb from the canyon to the ridgeline, where the view opens west toward Scottsdale and east over everything. Half a day, with real exposure.
- Into the regional park. The county park’s trail system (the Pemberton loop, the competitive tracks) is reached on foot from here without paying the park’s gate fee, which the mountain-bike crowd has long known.
- The link to Scottsdale. The Andrews-Kinsey Trail from the Sunrise Trailhead at the end of Via Linda comes over the same ridge from the Scottsdale side; a car at each end makes a long, exposed traverse for experienced hikers.
With kids
The lower canyon trail is fine for school-age children, with a destination (the park boundary, the fountain view) and shade at the lot. The ridges are not. Fountain Park’s splash pad and the fountain itself are ten minutes down the hill as the reward.
Afterward
ADERO on the ridge for lunch with the Four Peaks view, or down to the Avenue of the Fountains for Phil’s Filling Station Grill and a plate-sized pancake, which is the correct meal after a desert hike and nobody will argue.
The story
The McDowell Mountains are one range with two owners. In the 1990s Scottsdale voters taxed themselves to buy the west and north slopes, which became the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, thirty thousand acres and the largest urban preserve in the country. Fountain Hills, a town of twenty-odd thousand people on the east slope with a fraction of the budget, did a smaller version of the same thing: it set aside its own mountain land as the Fountain Hills McDowell Mountain Preserve and began, slowly, to plan a way in. The way in was Adero Canyon, a drainage on the town’s western edge that a developer was building houses up. The trailhead needed the developer’s road, the road needed the houses, and the houses needed a housing market, which did not cooperate for years at a time.
It took more than twenty years. The trailhead finally opened in 2018, with weekday access limited at first while the road was finished through the subdivision; the paving was complete by 2020 and the restrictions ended, and the trailhead has been dawn-to-dusk, seven days, since. The resort on the ridge below it, CopperWynd when all this began, was rebuilt and renamed ADERO after the canyon, and now sells the dark sky and the trailhead as amenities. The town’s preserve, with the county’s 21,000-acre park beside it and Scottsdale’s preserve over the ridge, closed the ring: the McDowells are now protected from almost every side.
The Scottsdale connection
It is the same mountain. The Scottsdale trailheads face the city and the sunset; this one faces the sunrise and Four Peaks. Scottsdale’s Preserve stewards and Fountain Hills’ Sonoran Conservancy volunteers each keep their side of the ridge, and the connecting route over the saddle from the Sunrise Trailhead is the only place a hiker can walk from Scottsdale into another town through a mountain range. Our McDowell Sonoran Preserve page covers the west side; this is the east.
Getting there
Shea Boulevard east from the Loop 101, over the saddle into Fountain Hills; turn left (north) on Palisades Boulevard, then left on Eagle Ridge Drive, and follow it uphill past ADERO and through the Adero Canyon neighborhoods to the trailhead at the top. Thirty minutes from Old Town, fifteen from the Shea corridor, 35 from the Camelback resorts. From North Scottsdale, McDowell Mountain Road through the regional park and down Fountain Hills Boulevard is the scenic alternative. No transit; carry water from the car.