What it means
Camelback Mountain is the landmark Scottsdale looks at. It fills the western view from the Greenbelt, the Waterfront and every north-facing resort balcony, a long red and gray animal lying down with its head toward Arcadia and its hump toward Paradise Valley, and newcomers assume it is Scottsdale’s mountain. It is not. The summit, the trails and both trailheads belong to the City of Phoenix, with the Town of Paradise Valley wrapped around the north and east sides; the Scottsdale line is a mile away. Locals say “Camelback” for the mountain, “Echo” or “Cholla” for the route, and “the Camel’s Head” for the sandstone block on the west end where the helicopters hover.
Two things make it the Valley’s defining hill. It is the highest point in Phoenix at 2,704 feet, and it is hard: the final half mile of either trail is a hands-on scramble that the city rates extremely difficult, which is why it is also the most-rescued mountain in Arizona. The Echo Canyon and Cholla guides cover the routes, and the comparison note covers how not to need a hoist.
Where you’ll meet it
Hotel concierge desks, where it is the default answer to “where should I hike.” The news in June and July, when the rescues come daily. The Camelback Corridor resorts named for it, and Camelback Road, which points at it for 34 miles.
Where the word came from
The name describes the shape and nobody is recorded coining it. From Scottsdale the profile is unmistakable: the camel’s head is a block of red sedimentary sandstone roughly 25 million years old, and the hump behind it is Precambrian granite about 1.5 billion years old, two rocks of absurdly different ages sitting against each other in what geologists call an unconformity. The Hohokam, who farmed the valley below until the fifteenth century, regarded the mountain as sacred and left evidence in a cave on its north face; whatever they called it did not survive their departure. Anglo settlers were using “Camelback” by the time the first Phoenix maps were drawn, and the road that runs toward it took the name too.
The modern mountain dates from a fight. Through the 1950s Phoenix grew from 106,000 people to 439,000 and houses climbed the slopes; the Garden Club of Phoenix petitioned in 1959 against building above 1,600 feet, and high school students circulated their own petitions in 1963. In May 1965 the Preservation of Camelback Mountain Foundation organized with Senator Barry Goldwater as chairman. Goldwater and his mother each gave what would be about $185,000 today, he mailed more than 4,000 letters and personally telephoned landowners, and he supplied the line that made the case: “If we ruin Camelback, ever afterward people will think of Phoenix as the city that made something ugly of the most beautiful thing it had.” A $211,250 federal Bureau of Outdoor Recreation grant in 1968, matched by the foundation’s money, bought the land above 1,800 feet and gave it to the city; Lady Bird Johnson came to celebrate. Camelback became a Phoenix park in 1968, and Echo Canyon Park, with a public trail, opened in 1973 through the efforts of Gary Driggs and his brother John, then mayor.
What it is not
Camelback is not in Scottsdale, not in the McDowells and not the same as Mummy Mountain, the lower, privately held hill just north of it in Paradise Valley. Nor is “Camelback” a neighborhood; the resorts and estates around it belong to Paradise Valley, Arcadia and the Biltmore district, each of which borrows the mountain’s name for its own purposes.
The fine print
The numbers come from two trails that meet at one summit. Echo Canyon, from the trailhead at 4925 East McDonald Drive, is 1.14 miles one way with about 1,400 feet of gain; the city rates it extremely difficult, and steel handrails are bolted into the slabs where the grade stops being a trail. Phoenix rebuilt the trailhead in 2013 with a real lot, restrooms, water and a gate that closes when the lot fills, which happens by late morning on weekdays and stays that way all weekend; idling on McDonald Drive earns a ticket or a tow. Cholla, from 5150 North Invergordon Road, is 1.5 miles with a graded first mile along the camel’s spine before the boulder work. It closed in 2020 after a hiker was struck by a loose boulder, reopened on September 29, 2022, with a relocated trailhead, and in 2023 survived a campaign to rename it for Goldwater. The summit elevation is 2,704 feet by the city’s measure; Wikipedia gives 2,706, and the two-foot argument is the kind locals enjoy.
The rules are Phoenix’s. Trails open at sunrise and close at sunset, dogs are prohibited on the mountain year-round, and under the city’s trail heat program both routes close from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on days the National Weather Service issues an Extreme Heat Warning, as the heat closures entry explains. Storms close them too: in October 2025 erosion and three loose boulders shut Echo Canyon until engineers grouted the rock and replaced the old rope with cable, and it reopened on December 14.
The rescues are the mountain’s other statistic. Phoenix Fire runs roughly 200 mountain rescues a year across the city’s preserves, and Camelback takes a heavy share, most of them heat and dehydration cases and falls on the way down. In December 2025 crews used a drone to drop water, a radio and a blanket to a man stranded overnight on the Camel’s Head, then hoisted him by helicopter at dawn; the park rangers cited him. That sequence, hoist and citation, is routine enough that the best hikes guide lists Camelback with a warning rather than a recommendation.