What it means
In Scottsdale hiking talk, Bell Pass and Windgate are less two places than one sentence: “We did Bell-Windgate Saturday.” It means the big loop, the roughly 9.5-mile, 2,000-foot circuit from the Gateway Trailhead that climbs over one saddle of the southern McDowells, drops into the range’s empty interior basin, and climbs back out over the other. It is the hike locals recommend when a visitor has done the Gateway Loop and asks for “something real,” and the Preserve’s unofficial fitness test: the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy runs it as a guided hike rated Very Difficult.
The two passes are also used separately. “Windgate” alone usually means the shorter out-and-back, about six miles from Gateway to the notch visible from the end of Thompson Peak Parkway. “Bell Pass” alone means the steeper climb toward Thompson Peak, and the staging point for the antenna summit. The full route, turn by turn, is in the Windgate Pass to Bell Pass Loop guide. This page is about the names.
Where you’ll meet it
Trail signs at every junction above the Gateway Loop, the Conservancy’s hike calendar, the Gateway protocols, and any winter Saturday in the Gateway lot before seven, where the people with poles and three liters are going over the passes.
Where the word came from
Bell Pass is a borrowed name. It sits at the mountain end of Bell Road, the east-west arterial that runs toward the range from Phoenix, and Bell Road was named for Harvey Bell, a farmer who in 1916 helped organize the Paradise Verde Irrigation District along with James Shea, whose name went on Shea Boulevard. The pass presumably inherited the road’s name by being the thing at the end of it. Presumably is the honest word: no survey, map or council minute has turned up to say when the saddle became Bell Pass, and the Preserve’s trail name followed common usage when the city built the trail over the old routes after the 1995 and 2004 Preserve tax votes.
Windgate Pass is murkier. The notch at the head of Thompson Peak Parkway carries a name that most Scottsdale residents now know first as a DC Ranch neighborhood, and it is not documented which came first, the pass or the subdivision marketing. The wind through the gap after sunset is real, and the name is plausible as description, but nobody has claimed it. Both saddles are what erosion does to a ridge of 1.7-billion-year-old granite: the low points where drainages on the Salt River side and the Verde side ate toward each other until a person could walk over.
People walked over them long before the signs: cattle trails and jeep tracks threaded the interior basin through the ranching decades, and prospectors worked the range’s minor copper showings on the east side, which the Prospector Trail remembers. The loop became a standard only after the Gateway Trailhead opened in May 2009 with the lot, restrooms and fountains that make a waterless 9.5-mile day practical.
What it is not
Windgate Pass is not Windgate Overlook, a viewpoint on the Tom’s Thumb side of the range, and Bell Pass is not on Bell Road, which stops miles short of the mountains. Neither pass is a summit; the loop touches none.
The fine print
The numbers vary because the loop has no fixed start. Bell Pass is about 3,200 feet, between Thompson Peak at 3,984 and McDowell Peak at 4,036; Windgate is about 3,030; the Gateway Trailhead is roughly 2,000, so each pass is a thousand-plus feet from either side. The Conservancy logs its loop at 9.3 miles, the site’s guide says 9.4 to 9.9 depending on where you rejoin the Gateway Loop, and everyone agrees on 2,000 feet and five hours. The direction is the one real argument. The site’s guide and most locals go counterclockwise, Bell first, because Bell’s upper switchbacks are decomposed granite over rock, the loosest tread on the loop, and better climbed in cool morning light than descended at noon. The Conservancy’s guided hike goes to Windgate first and around to Bell. Pick your trade: easier ascent or easier descent.
The hazards are the Preserve’s usual ones, multiplied by distance: no water after the Gateway fountains, no shade after the first mile, and an interior basin that is a web of signed junctions (Bell Pass, Windgate Pass, Prospector, Windmill, the Tom’s Thumb connectors) where the common error is drifting north and adding miles. The city’s rule for every Preserve trail applies with extra force here: turn around when half your water is gone, and above 90 degrees leave the dog home. From May through September the loop is a first-light expedition for experienced desert hikers under the summer rules, and an honest mistake for everyone else.
The upgrade, for the record: from the east side of Bell Pass, the Prospector Trail reaches Thompson Peak’s county service road, and the climb to the antennas turns the loop into about 12 miles and 3,500-plus feet. The passes are the McDowells as a mountain range rather than as scenery, and the interior you cross between them, with no rooftop in sight, is what the 1995 vote bought.