What is the Parada del Sol?
Every town has a founding myth; Scottsdale’s rides down Scottsdale Road once a year at a walk.
The Parada del Sol is a horse-drawn parade — riders, stagecoaches, buckboards, marching bands, folklórico dancers, and exactly zero motorized floats in the starring roles — held each winter since the early 1950s. It’s the longest-running event in the city, the anchor of what’s now branded Western Week, and the one morning a year when “The West’s Most Western Town” stops being a slogan on a sign and becomes traffic.
The parade runs south down Scottsdale Road into Old Town and empties into the Trail’s End Festival, a free street party with live music and food that carries the crowd through the afternoon.
It costs nothing, requires no strategy beyond arriving early with sunscreen, and remains the single most kid-friendly event on the Scottsdale calendar. If you have one weekend to understand why this town looks the way it does — the hitching posts, the covered sidewalks, the cowboy kitsch that’s not entirely kitsch — this is the weekend.
The mail still comes by horse
The parade’s opening act is the part that deserves to be famous. Since 1958, the Hashknife Pony Express — riders of the Navajo County Sheriff’s Posse, named for a historic ranch brand — has carried sacks of genuine U.S. Mail on horseback roughly 200 miles from Holbrook, in northern Arizona, down to Scottsdale. Each rider gallops a stretch and hands the mailbags to the next, relay-style, over several days.
This is not reenactment theater with prop letters. The U.S. Postal Service sanctions it; the mail is real, postmarked accordingly, and anyone can route a letter through it (local post offices publicize the how-to each winter). It’s considered the last officially sanctioned Pony Express ride in the United States, and watching dusty riders lope into a town of resort spas to deliver the mail is peak Arizona.
Watching it well
- Timing: The parade steps off mid-morning. The route along Scottsdale Road fills unevenly — the reviewing areas near Old Town pack early, while stretches farther north stay livable until step-off.
- Sun: You’ll face east or west depending on your curb. Winter sun here still burns; shade trees near the route’s south end are the veterans’ choice.
- With kids: Horses, candy, marching bands, and no gate — it’s built for them. Bring ear protection for toddlers; the sheriff’s posses do like their salutes.
- After: Follow the crowd into Trail’s End. Eat from a vendor, watch the dance stages, and let the kids burn out on the kids’ zone. Everything worth seeing is within three flat blocks.
From farm-town gamble to 75-year institution
In 1951, Scottsdale was a few dusty blocks of about 2,000 people with a new slogan — “The West’s Most Western Town,” adopted in 1947 — and a merchant community that needed winter visitors to survive. Their answer was the Sunshine Festival: a celebration selling the one commodity the town had in unlimited supply. (That first festival has its own story.)
In 1953 the Scottsdale Jaycees took it over, gave it the Spanish name Parada del Sol, and built it into a full Western week: parade, street dances, barbecues, and eventually a professional rodeo (which grew into its own event, still running today). Through the decades that followed — as dude ranches became golf resorts and the town’s population multiplied a hundredfold — the parade kept rolling essentially unchanged: horses, wagons, kids on curbs.
The modern era hasn’t been effortless. The Jaycees disbanded in 2009 and a volunteer nonprofit stepped in, and since 2021 the Scottsdale Charros have run it; sponsorship, insurance, and street-closure costs are a yearly fight; the 2021 edition fell to the pandemic. That it exists at all — 72 parades by 2026, the 73rd on February 6, 2027 — is a small civic miracle powered by people who believe a town should remember what it was.
Why it still matters
Scottsdale’s Western identity gets dismissed as marketing, and plenty of it is. The Parada is the counter-evidence. The families driving stagecoaches are often third- and fourth-generation Arizona ranching families. The Mexican charro riders and folklórico troupes represent communities that were here before the town had a name. The Native American color guards and dancers connect to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, whose land borders Scottsdale along the Pima corridor. For one morning, the town’s actual layered history — Indigenous, Mexican, ranching, Anglo boomtown — is all on the same street in the right order of arrival.
Go once and you’ll understand Old Town’s architecture forever after. Go twice and you’ll find yourself explaining the Hashknife riders to a stranger, which is how locals are made.