Skip to content
Visiting or new to Scottsdale? Start here
Scottsdale.tips
Landmark day • Saturday, April 20, 2002

April 20, 2002: Pinnacle Peak Park Reopens the Mountain

Seven years after development closed the peak to hikers, the city cuts a ribbon on a trail that guarantees public access in perpetuity.

Illustrated plaque for April 20, 2002 in Scottsdale history APRIL 20 2002 THE RESORT METROPOLIS

What happened

Scottsdale formally opened Pinnacle Peak Park on April 20, 2002: about 150 acres around the granite spire that had been the far north's landmark since ranching days, with a 1.75-mile purpose-built trail, a staffed trailhead, and public access guaranteed by agreement with the surrounding golf communities. The peak had been closed since 1995, when luxury-home construction on all sides eliminated the informal routes hikers had used for decades.

Why it matters

Pinnacle Peak was the city's first test of whether it would hold a line for public land inside a luxury enclave. It did — and the same civic instinct, scaled up, was buying the McDowell Sonoran Preserve at the time, funded by the second Preserve tax voters approved two years later.

A mountain nobody could reach

Pinnacle Peak had been the far north’s landmark long before Scottsdale annexed it — a granite thumb rising above cattle country, dude ranches, and, from 1957, the mesquite-smoke haze of the Pinnacle Peak Patio steakhouse at its base. Generations of Valley residents had hiked it by whatever route they found. Then the city’s early-1980s annexations swept the desert around it into Scottsdale, and the master-planned golf communities followed: Troon, Troon North, Pinnacle Peak Country Club. By 1995 luxury-home construction had closed in on every side and the informal trails ran through private lots. The peak was closed to the public — “temporarily,” the city said — and the temporary closure ran seven years.

It took most of those years to negotiate a way back. The city acquired and pieced together roughly 150 acres around the summit, secured permanent access easements from the surrounding developments, and built a trail designed for the terrain rather than inherited from cowboys: 1.75 miles of switchbacks up the peak’s north side, with a staffed trailhead at the bottom. On April 20, 2002, Pinnacle Peak Park opened, and hikers walked onto their mountain for the first time since the mid-1990s.

What it signaled

The park was small and the point was large. At the same moment, a few miles east, the city was buying the McDowell Mountains outright with the Preserve sales tax voters had approved in 1995, and would go back to those voters for more in May 2004. Pinnacle Peak showed the same instinct at neighborhood scale: that Scottsdale would hold public ground inside private luxury rather than let the desert become a view amenity for the people who could afford the lots around it. It has become one of the most-hiked short trails in the Valley — open sunrise to sunset, staffed daily, free.

The park’s full story is in the parks guide. The rest of the year, including the Westin Kierland’s opening, sits at 2002, and the decade’s boom and bust in the 2000s chapter.