What is the MacDonald’s Ranch Pumpkin Patch?
The MacDonald’s Ranch Pumpkin Patch is the October festival at MacDonald’s Ranch, the Richardson family’s horse ranch at 26540 N Scottsdale Rd, just south of Jomax below Pinnacle Peak. For one month the front pasture of a working trail-ride outfit becomes a pumpkin patch with a petting zoo, gold panning, a hay-bale maze, a pedal-car track, two trains, a pony ring and rows of pumpkins set out among the creosote and saguaros. The ranch has been open to the public since Easter 1970; the patch has been an annual event since at least 2011, and the ranch says Reader’s Digest named it Arizona’s best pumpkin patch five years running, 2018 to 2022.
The 2026 patch runs Saturday, October 3 through Saturday, October 31, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (last ticket at 5, grounds close at 5:45), closed every Tuesday, and closing at 3 p.m. on Halloween. Admission is $15 per person at the door any day, free under 23 months, with $2 discounts for veterans, military, first responders, teachers, seniors and clergy. Pumpkins are extra, $2 to $60 by size, trucked in weekly from farms in northern and southern Arizona, since nothing orange grows in this soil.
It is the north side’s answer to the city’s October calendar, a short drive from the Troon, Grayhawk and DC Ranch neighborhoods and twenty-five minutes from Old Town, and it belongs on any Scottsdale with kids list for the month. The trick is timing: early October is still hot, the lot is dirt, and the shade is whatever you bring.
How to do it
Tickets. Buy at the gate; there is no advance ticket for general admission, and same-day re-entry is allowed. The only pre-purchase worth considering is the $50 season pass, five visits on any day plus a free small pumpkin on the first, which pays off for a family that lives nearby and comes three times. Thursdays take $2 off for parents and grandparents, and a canned-food donation takes $1 off for anyone. On Thursday, October 15, 2026, the ranch and FOX 10 ran a half-price early-bird hour from 8 to 9 a.m., rescheduled from October 12 after a weather day; watch the ranch’s social feeds for anything similar late in the month. Cards and cash are accepted everywhere on the ranch and there is no ATM.
Getting there and parking. Scottsdale Road north past the Loop 101, past the Promenade and Pinnacle Peak Road, and the split-rail fence and the lot are on the east side just before Jomax. Parking is free in a dirt lot with overflow farther from the admissions gate. From Old Town it is about 25 minutes with no traffic; from the Princess and Kierland resorts 15. Weekend lots are full by late morning in the back half of the month.
When to go. The 9 a.m. opening on a weekday is the best version of the patch: cool, uncrowded, the animals awake and the pumpkin rows intact. Early-October afternoons still hit the 90s and the grounds are open ground, so a 2 p.m. Saturday visit on the 10th is a slog. By the last two weekends the mornings are in the 60s and the crowds are at their worst. Halloween itself closes at 3 and is not the day.
What is included and what is not. The gate covers the petting zoo (goats, sheep, pigs, chickens), panning for gold, the hay-bale maze, the pedal-car track, corn sensory pools, lawn games, carnival games (cow milking, duck races, Conk the Crow), photo spots and a scavenger hunt. The extras are $5 each: pony rides for children 52 inches and under, the barrel train, the big train that leaves on the hour and half hour from 9:30 to 5:30, and the mechanical bull for riders 48 inches and up; lap children ride the trains for $3, and a cone of animal feed is $3. There is no hayride on the public patch; the trains took that job. Food is a snack shack and rotating vendors, announced weekly.
What to bring. A wagon, hats, water, sunscreen and closed shoes for the dirt. Dogs stay home; only service animals are admitted.
Pair it. Spook-Track-Ula at McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park runs nightly all month for the evening half of a kids’ day, and the Carefree Enchanted Pumpkin Garden, fifteen minutes north, is the carved-pumpkin display for the grown-ups. The late-October Spooktacular Hot Air Balloon Festival at Salt River Fields is the other big family night. The whole month is on our October page.
A pumpkin patch where nothing grows
The ranch’s own history is on the park guide: Richardsons on this ground since 1956, open to the public as Old MacDonald’s Farm on Easter Sunday 1970, renamed MacDonald’s Ranch under Robby Richardson in 1994, and today the last working guest ranch on Scottsdale Road, run by Robby, his wife Silvia and their daughters. The pumpkin patch is the newer tradition, and the ranch does not say when it began. The earliest record we found is a local blog in October 2011 describing the “annual Pumpkin Patch” opening on October 1 that year, which means it was established by then; the ranch’s 1990s and 2000s are not well documented online, and we would rather say the first year is unknown than guess at it.
What is clear is what kind of patch it is. There is no field. The Sonoran desert at 2,000 feet does not grow pumpkins in a Scottsdale September, so the ranch buys them from farms in northern and southern Arizona, has them picked off the vine and trucked down weekly, and sets them out in rows on the pasture, priced by size from a two-dollar gourd to a sixty-dollar giant. The honest comparison is not a Midwestern farm but a Western fair: the gold panning, the cowboy football, the mechanical bull and the pony ring are the ranch’s year-round party kit, and the petting zoo animals are the same ones that work its booked cookouts. The hay-bale maze is low enough to see over, which is the right height for the four-year-olds it is built for.
Weekday mornings in October also belong to school field trips (weekdays only, ten-child minimum, reserved in advance), which is one more reason to be at the gate at 9.
The corner the rest of the year
The patch is also the easiest introduction to a corner of Scottsdale that most visitors drive past. The split-rail fence at Scottsdale and Jomax is the same one the trail riders leave from every morning from September to May; the one-hour desert ride is the ranch’s actual business, and October is the month to book one for later in the season, when the sunset slots are not yet gone. From mid-January through March the big white tent of the Arizona Fine Art Expo goes up on the same corner, January 15 to March 28, 2027, with a hundred working artists in studios; the pumpkin lot and the art tent share the dirt a season apart. Pinnacle Peak Park is ten minutes east for the family that still has legs after the maze, and the Pinnacle Peak and Troon guide has the breakfast and steakhouse options.
Why it belongs on a Scottsdale calendar
Because October is the month Scottsdale comes back outside, and this is the first outdoor thing the city does with its children every year. It is not cheap for what it is, fifteen dollars a head before a single ride or pumpkin, and the heat and the dirt lot are real. It is also a month-long, no-reservation, open-at-nine family morning on a piece of ground one family has held since Eisenhower, with the McDowells behind the pumpkin rows and a horse looking over the fence. Go early, go on a weekday, and buy the pumpkin last.