What it is
Gila River Resorts & Casinos – Wild Horse Pass is the casino hotel you see from I-10 south of Chandler, two towers on the west side of the freeway at the Wild Horse Pass Boulevard exit, and the flagship of the Gila River Indian Community’s gaming business. It opened in 2009 as the Wild Horse Pass Hotel & Casino, and a $180 million expansion finished in January 2022 added the eleven-story Sunrise Tower, 205 rooms, two pools and a rooftop steakhouse, bringing the hotel to 446 rooms and the company to a new name. The casino floor runs around the clock with slots, table games and a showroom; the hotel carries AAA’s Four Diamond rating.
It is the anchor of a resort district, not a casino in a parking lot. Within two miles along the boulevard are the Sheraton Grand at Wild Horse Pass with Kai, the only Forbes Five-Star restaurant in Arizona, Aji Spa, 36 holes at Whirlwind Golf Club, Koli Equestrian Center and Rawhide, and across the freeway Phoenix Premium Outlets.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Not for the casino alone, because Talking Stick on the Salt River Community does the same thing ten minutes from Old Town, and We-Ko-Pa does it in Fountain Hills. The reasons are the neighbors and the newness. The Sunrise Tower is the newest casino hotel in the metro, the pools are good, and a Saturday here assembles into a real weekend: a trail ride at Koli in the morning, the outlets or golf in the afternoon, Kai at the Sheraton at night, a rodeo at Rawhide if the calendar cooperates, the floor afterward. Nothing on the Scottsdale side strings together like that.
The practical version
Forty minutes down the 101, 202 and I-10. The casino never closes. Hotel rooms are cheapest in summer and the pools are the reason to take one then. Prime Shula’s on the roof has the view west to the Sierra Estrella and a steakhouse menu; the casual restaurants and food court cover the rest of the hours. Shuttles connect the casino, the Sheraton, the golf and Rawhide. Parking is free. You are on a sovereign nation’s land with its own police and rules, which in practice means behave as you would anywhere, and leave the cannabis at home.
When to go
Weekends from October to April are the casino’s season, when the showroom calendar fills and the hotel runs near capacity; book the Sunrise Tower ahead. Summer is the local’s play: rooms drop to a fraction of their winter rate, the Oasis and Serenity pools are the point, and the 24-hour floor is air-conditioned by definition. Sunset from a west-facing upper-floor room or the rooftop restaurant is the best fifteen minutes on the property any month.
What to do
- The Sunrise Tower. Ask for it, and for a west-facing room high up; the Sierra Estrella fill the window.
- The pools. The Oasis for families, the Serenity for adults; both are 2022 vintage and better than the age of the original hotel suggests.
- Prime Shula’s. The rooftop steakhouse from the expansion, with the view. Good steak, serious prices, and the honest advice is in the tip above: Kai is two minutes away.
- The showroom. Concerts, comedy and tribute acts on most weekends; check the calendar and buy ahead for the names.
- The floor. Slots, blackjack and the Las Vegas-style table games the expansion brought. It is a casino. You know how this goes.
With kids
The pools are the answer, and the Sheraton’s Koli rides and Rawhide’s family events fill a day. Children cannot be on the casino floor, and the hotel’s layout keeps the two apart better than the older casino hotels in the Valley do.
The neighborhood
Wild Horse Pass Boulevard is the spine: casino at the freeway, the outlets across it, golf and the Sheraton two miles west, Rawhide beside the Sheraton, Koli at the far end on Broken Ear Road. The Sierra Estrella close the view to the west and Community farmland runs in every other direction. There is nowhere to walk to and no reason to; the shuttle and a car cover it.
The story
The Gila River Indian Community came to gaming the way the Arizona tribes did, through the compacts of the early 1990s, and opened Vee Quiva in Laveen in 1994 as its first casino. Lone Butte in Chandler followed, and the Community’s planners set aside 2,400 acres at Wild Horse Pass, where I-10 crosses the reservation’s northern edge, as a resort district: the Sheraton came first, in the early 2000s, built around O’odham and Pee Posh design; Rawhide arrived from Scottsdale in 2006; and in 2009 the Wild Horse Pass Hotel & Casino opened as the flagship, with a hotel tower and the largest floor in the Community’s portfolio.
It ran unchanged for a decade. In August 2020, with the pandemic closures barely behind it, the Community broke ground on a $143 million expansion, the first since opening: an eleven-story, 150-foot tower with 205 rooms, 18,000 square feet of meeting space and a rooftop restaurant looking west. By the time it opened in January 2022 the cost was reported at $180 million and the scope had grown to two new pools, Prime Shula’s Steak House on the roof and new table games on the floor, and the company marked it with a new name, Gila River Resorts & Casinos. Larger plans for the 3,300 acres around the district, with a developer partner, a stadium and more hotels, have been announced in stages since and will take a decade or more.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale knows the Community through Rawhide, the cowboy town it lost to Wild Horse Pass in 2005, and through the constant confusion with the Salt River Community across Pima Road, whose people are the same Akimel O’otham and Piipaash and whose casino, Talking Stick, is Scottsdale’s own. The two nations built nearly identical resort districts twenty-five miles apart, each with a casino hotel, a golf course, a spring-training ballpark on the Salt River side and a Western town on the Gila River side. A Scottsdale visitor who has done Talking Stick will recognize Wild Horse Pass immediately; the difference is Kai and the Sierra Estrella.
Getting there
Loop 101 south to the 202, the 202 west to I-10, I-10 east toward Tucson to the Wild Horse Pass Boulevard exit, then west; the casino is the first thing on the right. Forty minutes from Old Town with no traffic, an hour on a Friday at five. The hotel runs shuttles to the Sheraton, Rawhide and the golf courses. There is no transit. A rideshare from Old Town is a casino-sized expense each way, which is one more argument for the room.