What it is
Arizona Falls is the one place on the Arizona Canal where the water does something. For most of its seventy miles the canal is a flat, brown, purposeful ditch, which is why the path along it is so good for cycling and so bad for sightseeing. At 56th Street in Arcadia, four miles downstream of the Scottsdale Waterfront, the canal reaches a ledge of hard rock that William J. Murphy’s crews chose not to blast in 1884, and it drops twenty feet.
The drop made it the valley’s picnic ground in the 1890s, then the site of the first hydroelectric plant in Phoenix in 1902, then an SRP power station from 1913 to 1950, then a concealed concrete box nobody looked at for fifty years. In 2003 the Salt River Project, the City of Phoenix and the city’s public art program reopened it as something that does not quite exist anywhere else: a working 750-kilowatt hydro plant with a public artwork wrapped around it. A footbridge crosses the canal above the falls. Below, a shaded deck sits in a room with water falling down three of its walls, and the fourth wall is the view back up the canal toward Camelback.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because the canal is Scottsdale’s oldest piece of infrastructure and this is the best thing on it. Our Arizona Canal path guide says the five best miles are the ones that leave town; this is where they end. The Waterfront’s own water art, catalogued in the public art on the water note, is about water; the falls are water, with a turbine in it.
The practical version
Ten minutes by car from Old Town, west on Indian School Road, north side of the street between 58th and 56th. Free. Small lot. No gate, no hours posted on the site we could confirm, so treat it as a daylight stop. Twenty minutes is enough; bring the kids, leave the dog in the shade, and do not expect a snack bar. The best way to arrive is on the canal path, from above.
When to go
Summer afternoons are, oddly, the case for it. The water room was designed for exactly the July day that drives everyone indoors; the mist off the falls knocks the temperature down enough that the neighborhood treats the deck as a porch. Go late afternoon when the sun is behind the plant.
Winter mornings are the case for the ride. The canal path is at its best from November to March, and the falls make a destination at the right distance from Old Town: four miles out, four back, with a stop in the middle.
The dry-up. SRP drains sections of the canal for maintenance most years, usually for a few weeks in late fall or winter. When the Arizona Canal is down the falls stop, the plant idles and you can see the whole structure, which is interesting once. Check the SRP canal page before you make the trip for the water.
What to look at
Start on the footbridge, which puts you over the canal just above the drop. The rock ledge Murphy left in place is under the concrete now, but the geometry is his. Cross to the viewing platform and go down into the water room: two twenty-foot falls and a ten-foot water wall around a shaded deck, with lines about the canal and the valley cast into the floor and walls. The artists, Mags Harries and Lajos Heder, built the whole thing around the idea that you should hear the falls before you see them.
Along the walkway are five boulders, one from each of the dams on the Salt River that make the canal possible: Roosevelt, Horse Mesa, Mormon Flat, Stewart Mountain and Granite Reef. It is a small, dry joke about where the water comes from, and the only place in the valley you can touch all five dams at once.
With kids, with bikes
Kids like the bridge and the water room and are done in fifteen minutes, which is the right length. The canal path is stroller-flat and the Arcadia stretch is shaded. Cyclists from Scottsdale should know the path surface changes from concrete to packed dirt west of 64th Street and that the underpasses flood briefly after a monsoon storm.
The neighborhood
You are in Arcadia, the citrus-grove district under Camelback’s south face, which is why the lawns around you are flooded on purpose. Arcadia’s restaurant row is a mile west on Indian School and 40th Street; the falls make a good first stop on an evening that ends there.
The story
The Arizona Canal Company hired a railroad grader named William J. Murphy in 1883 to cut a canal along the highest ground north of the Salt River, above every earlier ditch, so the land between it and the river could be sold as farms. His crews reached a ridge of hard rock near what is now 56th Street and, rather than blast through, ran the canal over it. Water arrived in 1885, dropped twenty feet, and Phoenix had a waterfall. Murphy built the Ingleside Inn nearby and the falls became the picnic spot of territorial Phoenix, prized for the mist and the shade in a town that had neither.
In 1902 the Phoenix Light and Fuel Company, an ancestor of today’s APS, built a hydroelectric plant on the drop, the first in the city. Drought and then the floods of 1905 left it idle. The new Salt River Project took the plant over in 1911, rebuilt it, and had it generating by the spring of 1913; it ran until October 2, 1950, when the maintenance bill outgrew the output and SRP shut it down. The canal kept flowing through a concrete structure that hid the falls, and for half a century the neighborhood walked past a fenced box.
The campaign to bring it back came from Arcadia residents in the 1990s. SRP agreed to rebuild the power station, the City of Phoenix put up money with the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture commissioned the artists Mags Harries and Lajos Heder, with Steve Martino as landscape architect, to make the plant a place rather than a fence. The station came online in April 2003 and the park opened on June 21 of that year. Our SRP versus APS entry explains why the same drop has belonged to both companies.
The Scottsdale connection
The water that falls here flowed past Winfield Scott’s 640 acres a few minutes earlier. The Arizona Canal is the reason Scottsdale exists, and the canal path is the straightest line between the town’s history and Phoenix’s. The Crosscut Canal path joins the Arizona Canal a few miles upstream, so a loop from south Scottsdale through the falls and back along the Crosscut is a real afternoon ride.
Getting there
By car: west on Indian School Road from Scottsdale Road, about four miles; past 64th Street the road enters Phoenix, and the falls are on the right just after the canal, with a small lot and street parking on 58th Street. By bike: the Arizona Canal path from the Waterfront, westbound, four miles, flat; the getting around note covers the bike-share options.