What it is
South Mountain is the long dark ridge that closes off the south side of the Valley, the one you see from a Camelback summit or an airplane window and assume is somewhere else. It is a city park, more than 16,000 acres of it across three small ranges called the Ma Ha Tauk, the Gila and the Guadalupe, bought by the City of Phoenix in 1924 and left largely as desert since. The city calls it one of the largest municipally managed parks in the country, and nothing in the Valley argues.
The thing that makes it different from every other mountain park here is the road. Summit Road leaves the Central Avenue gate and climbs a little over five miles of switchbacks to Dobbins Lookout, 2,330 feet up and the highest point in the park the public can reach. There is a stone shelter at the top, built in the Civilian Conservation Corps era, and from its ramada the entire metro lies flat in front of you: downtown, the airport, Camelback, the McDowells on the far horizon. Scottsdale has nothing like it; the Echo Canyon view costs you 1,200 feet of scrambling.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
For the view, which is the best drive-up panorama in Arizona south of Flagstaff, and for a hike that feels older than the Preserve. The McDowells are granite and clean; South Mountain is dark volcanic and gneiss, cut with narrow canyons, and the Hohokam left petroglyphs on the boulders along the Holbert Trail. More than a hundred miles of trail run through the park and almost none of the people on them are visitors.
The practical version
About forty minutes from Old Town, down the 101 and 202 to I-10 and Baseline Road, then two miles south on Central Avenue to the gate. Entry is free. The gates are open 5 AM to 7 PM, the trails until 11 PM. The drive to Dobbins takes fifteen minutes each way at the posted crawl, and the lookout has parking, a shelter and nothing else: no water, no food, no shade beyond the stone. Bring both. The visitor center by the entrance is open Thursday to Sunday, 9 AM to 3 PM, and worth ten minutes for the maps.
When to go
October through April is the season for anything on foot. The Holbert Trail to Dobbins is a thousand feet of climbing in full sun and the canyons hold the heat; our summer sunrise hiking rules apply here from May on, and the city closes trails on excessive-heat days. The drive to the lookout works all year, and in summer it is the one mountain in Phoenix you can be on top of at seven in the evening without having earned it.
Sunset is the reason most people come. Arrive forty minutes before and stay for the lights; the gate locks at seven, so in June that means watching the sun go and leaving before the city fully turns on, and in December it means the whole show. Silent Sunday, the fourth Sunday of every month, closes the road to cars from 5 AM to 7 PM and fills it with cyclists; if you ride, it is the best climb in the Valley, and if you drive, pick another day. The other Sundays the road is closed at the one-mile marker until 10 AM.
What to do
- Drive to Dobbins Lookout. Fifteen minutes up, stone shelter, the view. Walk east past the shelter to the quieter rocks.
- Hike the Holbert Trail. From the Activity Complex near the entrance, about two and a half miles and a thousand feet to the lookout, past the petroglyph boulders in the first mile. Go up Holbert and let someone drive down to meet you if you have two cars.
- Hidden Valley and Fat Man’s Pass. The park’s famous squeeze: from the Mormon Trail at the 24th Street trailhead on the north side, through a slot between boulders a thin person fits sideways, into a hidden basin on the National Trail. Children love it. Allow three hours.
- The National Trail. The spine of the range, end to end, for people who hike the Preserve’s long loops and want a bigger one.
With kids
The lookout drive is the obvious thing and it works at any age. Fat Man’s Pass is the best half day in the park for children over six who like climbing on rocks. Bring more water than feels reasonable.
The story
In 1924 the City of Phoenix bought 13,000 acres of what were then called the Salt River Mountains from the federal government for $17,000, a decision that looks like genius now and looked like an eccentricity then: the city had about 30,000 people and the mountains were several miles of farmland away. The idea was a mountain park on the model of the national parks, and in the early 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps supplied the labor: the road up, the stone shelters and ramadas, the trails, the lookout. Much of what you touch at Dobbins is their work, and the lookout shares its name with Dobbins Road along the park’s north edge, named for J.C. Dobbins, who chaired the city planning commission in those years.
The park grew by purchase and gift to more than 16,000 acres and the city grew to meet it. By the 1980s Ahwatukee had wrapped around the south side, the broadcast towers stood on the true summit, and the mountain had become what it is now: the largest piece of open desert in the middle of a metro of five million people, with coyotes, javelina and chuckwalla lizards within sight of a freeway. The centennial in 2024 was marked quietly, which suits the place.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s answer to South Mountain is the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, and the two parks are the two models of how a Valley city saves a mountain: Phoenix bought its range outright a century ago with no public vote, while Scottsdale taxed itself twice, in 1995 and 2004, to assemble 30,000 acres parcel by parcel. The Preserve is bigger and better built; South Mountain is older, rougher and more loved by the people who live under it. Both are the reason the Valley still has a horizon. On a clear winter evening from Dobbins you can pick out Thompson Peak’s towers in the McDowells, nearly thirty miles north, which is a useful way to understand how far you have driven.
Getting there
Loop 101 south to the 202, the 202 west toward downtown, then I-10 east toward Tucson; exit Baseline Road, go west to Central Avenue and south two miles to the gate at 10919 S Central. The 24th Street trailhead for Hidden Valley is off Baseline on the park’s north side instead. There is no transit worth using; see our stargazing note if you are tempted to stay past dark, because the trails are open until eleven and the sky on the south side of the range is the darkest within the city.