What is Cave Creek Rodeo Days?
Scottsdale has two professional rodeos and neither is in a town that still looks like one. Cave Creek is: an old mining and ranching camp that incorporated in 1986 to stay rural, with a saloon strip on Cave Creek Road and a dirt-floor arena on 28th Street that the town’s rodeo built.
Cave Creek Rodeo Days started in 1977 as a fundraiser for a municipal swimming pool. The pool idea gave way to the rodeo itself, and before long the money was going to build Cave Creek Memorial Arena, which the volunteer nonprofit Cave Creek Rodeo Days, Inc. still maintains with the proceeds. It has been PRCA-sanctioned from the start: a county-fair rodeo with pro stock.
The week has a fixed shape. The Saturday before, a parade rolls down Cave Creek Road at 9 a.m., mutton bustin’ prelims follow, and the Buffalo Chip hosts the kickoff dance that night. Thursday brings All Bulls, All Night at 7:30; Friday and Saturday are full PRCA performances at 7:30 under the lights; Sunday closes with a 2 p.m. matinee, the mutton bustin’ finals and a patriotic theme. In 2026 that meant March 21 through 29.
How to do it
Buy early, buy right. Tickets sell only through rodeoticket.com. Recent pricing: about $35 for a rodeo performance, $45 for All Bulls, All Night, $20 for kids 5–12. Seating is first come, so gates at 5 p.m. is a real deadline on Saturday, which has sold out. VIP tables in the Ropers Roost, Stockmans Club and Skybox tiers ran roughly $120 to $240 in 2024 and come with a chair and shade.
Getting there. The arena is at 37201 N 28th Street, a mile east of Cave Creek Road; from central Scottsdale plan 40 to 50 minutes up Scottsdale Road or Pima. Parking is a dirt lot the rodeo has expanded by two acres, with shuttles working the far rows.
Dress for the desert at night. A March evening up here starts in the 70s and finishes in the 50s: boots, a jacket, cash for the beer line, sunscreen for the Sunday matinee.
Make a day of the parade. Stand near an announcing station, then walk into the Buffalo Chip for lunch and stay for the 8 p.m. dance. Mutton bustin’ prelims are free to watch. To ride before you watch, see horseback riding near Scottsdale; to two-step after, see country bars and line dancing. It lands in the same March as spring training; an afternoon game and an evening rodeo is a legitimate plan.
How it compares to Scottsdale’s rodeos
Scottsdale’s Parada del Sol Rodeo is older, going back to 1956, and has wandered from a lot where Fashion Square now stands to Rawhide to WestWorld; it is a good pro rodeo in a big-city facility. The West’s Most Western Rodeo is a September event in WestWorld’s air-conditioned Equidome that exists because nothing else can happen outdoors that month. Neither has a dirt parking lot, a saloon a mile away with live bull riding a couple of nights a week, or a crowd where the contestants’ families take up a bleacher.
Cave Creek is the version where the rodeo and the town are the same thing. Volunteers park you, sell you the beer and run the royalty pageant whose queen and teen queen ride in the parade. The proceeds fix the arena and fund local charities. As a PRCA stop it is also a place for pros to pick up points early in the season, so the roughstock is real. For how the north Valley kept its horses, see our Western heritage guide.
Why it lasted
Rodeos in growing suburbs usually die of real estate: the arena land gets too valuable, the neighbors complain about dust, the volunteers age out. Cave Creek’s survived because the town’s founding argument was against exactly that kind of growth, and because the arena is maintained by the rodeo rather than held by a developer. Nearly fifty years in, the formula holds: one week in March, a parade, four nights of stock, and a dance at the Chip.