What it is
Piestewa Peak is the 2,608-foot high point of the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, the range of brown schist hills that separates the Biltmore from north Phoenix, and its Summit Trail is the most-used hiking trail in Arizona after Camelback’s. Trail 300, as the city numbers it, climbs about 1,200 feet in 1.2 miles from a trailhead at the end of Squaw Peak Drive, a road that signs now call Piestewa Peak Drive. It is steep from the first switchback and never lets up, but it is built: stone steps, railings at the ugly spots, a wide tread worn smooth by thousands of climbers a week. The top is a jumble of rock with a 360-degree view, from Camelback and the McDowells in the east around to the White Tanks and the downtown towers.
The name is recent. For most of a century this was Squaw Peak, a name the O’odham, who called it Vainom Do’ag, Iron Mountain, never used and Native Arizonans had been asking the state to drop since the early 1990s. In March 2003 Army Specialist Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier from Tuba City, was killed in Iraq, the first Native American woman to die in combat in the U.S. military. The state names board approved Piestewa Peak on April 17, 2003; the federal board followed in 2008.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because it is the honest answer to the Camelback question. Camelback’s Echo Canyon is a scramble with a hundred-car lot that fills before dawn; Piestewa has the same gain, the same view, a trail you can walk the whole way up, and a dozen lots. For a visitor who wants the summit workout without the hand-over-hand, this is the hike.
The practical version
Twenty minutes from Old Town via Lincoln Drive. Gates open at five and close at seven; the trail stays open until eleven. No dogs, no bikes. Water and restrooms at the trailhead, none above. Allow 45 to 60 minutes up and a little less down. In summer, start at dawn or do not go; the city closes the trail from eight to five on excessive-heat days.
When to go
October to April, at first light. The lots open at five, the serious regulars are on the trail by 5:30, and on a winter Saturday the summit lot is full by seven. Sunrise from the top in December, with the McDowells going pink across the Valley, is one of the Valley’s free spectacles. Weekday evenings in the cool months are the local hour; the trail is open until eleven, and the lights of the city from the top at dusk are the other show.
Summer is a different sport, and the summer sunrise rules apply without exception: on the trail at 5:00, down by 6:30, a liter of water for a one-hour hike. The city closes the Summit Trail between eight and five whenever an excessive-heat warning is in effect, and the preserve has had too many rescues of visitors who started at ten.
The climb, in sections
- The first switchbacks. From the lot the trail climbs immediately through a series of steps and turns; this is where the unprepared decide. Settle into a pace.
- The saddle. About two thirds of the way, the trail crosses a saddle with a view both ways and the first flat ground. Most people stop here. Eight switchbacks remain.
- The upper mountain. Steeper, rockier, with railings. The trail narrows and the traffic jams on winter weekends; uphill has the right of way and nobody observes it.
- The summit block. A short rocky push where you use your hands, then the top, which is big enough for twenty people to sit on separate rocks.
The other trails
The Summit Trail is the one everyone does, but the trailhead is also the start of the Freedom Trail (302), a 3.74-mile loop around the base of the peak with far fewer people and leashed dogs allowed, and the short Nature Trail (304), which makes a quiet detour off the summit route. Trail 100, the long east-west spine of the preserve, is reached from Dreamy Draw on the far side.
With kids
A fit ten-year-old does the Summit Trail happily; younger kids are better on the Freedom Trail or the first stretch to the saddle and back. Our best hikes note has the Scottsdale options by age.
The story
The Phoenix Mountains were going to be subdivided. In the 1960s the ridgeline that runs from the Biltmore to Shaw Butte was being surveyed for houses, and a coalition of residents and the city’s parks director, Charles Christiansen, pushed Phoenix to buy it instead, creating the preserve through the 1970s. The Summit Trail was built and rebuilt as its use exploded; the stone steps and railings are the city’s answer to a trail that, by the 2000s, was being climbed thousands of times a week. Piestewa is the most popular trail in the Phoenix system and the reason the Phoenix Mountains have the most heavily used trailhead in the state outside Camelback.
The renaming fight ran a decade. A bill to drop the old name was introduced in the Arizona legislature in 1992 and every year after; a 1997 petition to adopt the O’odham-derived “Iron Mountain” was turned down by the state board in 1998 on the grounds that the old name had too long a history. Then came 2003. Lori Piestewa, 23, a Hopi mother of two from Tuba City, died in the ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company near Nasiriyah on March 23, the same attack that captured her friend Jessica Lynch. Within weeks Governor Janet Napolitano pressed the state names board to act, and on April 17 it approved Piestewa Peak ; the Squaw Peak Parkway became the Piestewa Freeway at the same time. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which had declined to rush, voted 11–2 for the new name in 2008.
The Scottsdale connection
Piestewa is Camelback’s sibling and its relief valve. On the mornings the Echo Canyon lot is full by six, this is where the Camelback crowd goes, and a fair number of Scottsdale regulars have quietly switched for good: the same workout, a safer trail, a lot you can usually get into. The McDowells visible from the top are the Preserve you have been hiking all week; from here you see the whole line of them at once.
Getting there
Lincoln Drive west from Scottsdale Road through Paradise Valley; past Tatum it becomes Glendale Avenue. At 24th Street turn south one block to Squaw Peak Drive (Piestewa Peak Drive on the newer signs), and enter the park; the summit trailhead is the first driveway on the left, with further lots along the road. About twenty minutes from Old Town, twelve from the Camelback corridor resorts. The gates close at seven; cars left inside are locked in.