What it is
Hayden Butte is the dark volcanic hill at the north end of downtown Tempe, between Mill Avenue and the football stadium, with the sixty-foot white A on its south face that gives it the name everyone uses. It rises about 330 feet above the street to a summit at 1,495 feet, and a trail from 5th Street, paved at the bottom and rocky steps above, gets you to the top in twenty minutes. From there you look straight down into the stadium bowl, across the lake and its bridges to the Papago buttes and Camelback, west to the Phoenix skyline and south over the campus. It is the smallest climb in the Valley that earns a view, and the only one with a college town at the bottom of it.
The hill is older than the town. The Hohokam, the canal-building people of the Salt River Valley, lived at its foot for centuries and carved figures into the dark basalt boulders on its slopes, which is why the city made it a preserve in 2002 and why you stay on the trail. Charles Hayden’s ferry and flour mill sat at its northwest corner from the 1870s; the city renamed it for him and his son the senator in 1961, and the United States Geological Survey, which does not take suggestions, still calls it Tempe Butte.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because every Scottsdale visitor wants a summit and most of them do not have the morning for Camelback. This is the twenty-minute version: a real climb, petroglyphs on the way, a view, and dinner at the bottom. It is also the right place to watch the sun set over the lake after an evening on Mill, which nothing in Scottsdale replaces. Our best hikes note ranks the city’s trails; this one is the short answer when the question is “something I can do tonight.”
The practical version
Eighteen minutes from Old Town by Scottsdale Road and the 202. Park downtown or by the lake and walk to the trailhead on 5th Street east of Mill, or start from the stadium’s west side. Twenty minutes up, fifteen down. Water in every month. Sunrise or the last hour before dark from May through September; any time of day the rest of the year, though sunset is still the best of it.
When to go
Sunset, any month. The trail faces west and south and the light on the lake is the point. October has the fresh whitewash and the football Saturdays, when the saddle between the butte and the stadium is a free seat for the warmups. Summer is dawn or dusk only: the dark rock holds the day’s heat and the climb at noon in July is a bad idea even at twenty minutes. Winter is perfect at any hour, and the hill is one of the few places in the Valley where a crowd at the top is part of the pleasure rather than the problem.
The trail
- Start on 5th Street east of Mill Avenue, where the paved path begins behind the office buildings, or at the stadium’s west side, where a second path climbs the saddle.
- The paved stretch switchbacks up the west face past the Hohokam petroglyph boulders; they are marked, and the figures are on the dark varnished faces.
- The steps. The pavement gives out and the last third is rock steps and a worn path, steep but short. Hold a child’s hand here.
- The summit is a flat of boulders above the A with the whole East Valley below. The A itself is just down the south face; you can stand at its top.
- Down the same way, or down the stadium side to Veterans Way if you parked on Rural.
After
Mill Avenue begins at the bottom of the trail and Pedal Haus is a five-minute walk south; Tempe Beach Park is the same five minutes north, under the bridges.
With kids
The best first summit in the Valley: short, steep enough to count, a letter at the top and a stadium to look into. Bring water, hold hands on the steps, and tell them about the dynamite.
The story
The letter came first as an N. Tempe Normal School’s class of 1918 laid it out in whitewashed rock on the south face, and when the school became a teachers’ college in 1925 the students reshaped it into a T. The A arrived in 1938, loose rock again, and the tradition of whitewashing it before the football season began then. In 1952 somebody blew it up with dynamite. The university replaced it in 1955 with the sixty-foot letter of reinforced concrete and steel that is there now, and rival fans have been painting it red and blue, and the students painting it white again, ever since. Frank Kush, ASU’s football coach from 1958 to 1979, made his players run the butte as punishment.
The hill’s longer history is in the rock. The Hohokam, who built the canal system that the Valley’s modern canals follow, lived around the butte’s base from roughly the eighth century until their culture dispersed after 1450, and left petroglyphs, pottery and grinding stones on its slopes; the O’odham name for it translates as Dead Field Mountain. Charles Trumbull Hayden’s ferry across the Salt River, and then his flour mill, sat at the northwest foot of the butte from the 1870s, and the mill’s 1918 concrete building still stands there. The city council renamed the hill Hayden Butte in 1961 for Charles and his son Carl, the senator; the designation as a preserve came in 2002, after decades of the hill being a shortcut and a party spot.
The Scottsdale connection
The butte is the southern end of the chain of volcanic hills that includes the Papago buttes on Scottsdale’s southern line, the same red-and-black rock in a smaller dose. The Hohokam who carved it are the same people whose canals cross south Scottsdale and whose villages sat along the Indian Bend Wash; the petroglyphs here are the easiest in the Valley to see without a guide, and the desert varnish entry explains how they were made.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road south to the westbound 202, one exit to Mill Avenue, then south across the bridge; the butte is on the left as you cross. Park in a downtown garage, the lots off Rio Salado by the lake, or on Rural Road by the stadium if you are starting from that side. The light rail stops at Mill and 3rd Street, three blocks from the trailhead. Our best hikes note covers the harder summits when this one is not enough.