It started, as Scottsdale’s best ideas often have, with volunteers. In 1991 a band of residents — hikers, scientists, retirees with stubborn streaks — founded the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust, dedicated to a mission that sounded preposterous on its face: persuade a tax-averse boomtown to buy a mountain range at retail. The rooftops climbing the bajadas had made the stakes plain, and the Trust set out to reframe the McDowells not as developable acreage but as the city’s shared infrastructure — skyline, watershed, wildlife corridor, and the scenery underwriting every resort rate and home price in town.
Nobody at the founding meetings could have known how fast it would work. Polling soon showed overwhelming support; within three years the movement had a council resolution establishing the Preserve, and within four, a dedicated tax to fund it. The 1991 founding is the acorn of what became the largest urban preserve in the United States — ultimately more than 30,000 acres, roughly a third of the city, still managed with an army of volunteer stewards descended from the original Trust.
The same year brought a quieter act of preservation: the Scottsdale Historical Museum opened in the Little Red Schoolhouse, giving the small downtown museum effort of 1989 its permanent landmark home. A city getting ready to buy its mountains was also, at last, curating its own story — two versions of the same instinct, and both belong to the 1990s chapter.