What it means
Camelback Road is the 5000 North line of the Valley grid and the street that introduces most visitors to Scottsdale. The resort shuttle from Sky Harbor comes up it; Fashion Square sits on its corner with Scottsdale Road; the Phoenician, the Royal Palms and the Hermosa Inn face it from the foot of the mountain that named it. When a local says “Camelback” without “Mountain,” they mean the road, and usually the stretch between the 51 and Scottsdale Road where the Biltmore, Arcadia and the resorts line up under the hump.
The name is the mountain’s. Camelback Mountain, 2,706 feet and shaped like a kneeling camel, is the highest point in the Phoenix area, and the road runs directly along its southern foot before continuing 33 miles west through Phoenix to Litchfield Park and Luke Air Force Base. The Camelback Corridor guide covers the resorts; the Fashion Square guide covers the mall. This page is about the road and its name.
Where you’ll meet it
Every set of directions to Old Town from Phoenix (“Camelback east to Scottsdale Road”), the addresses of the Phoenician (6000 East) and Fashion Square (7014 East), the 101’s Camelback exit, and the Valley Metro Route 50 bus, numbered for the 5000 block it runs on.
Where the word came from
Camelback Road borrowed its name from the mountain, and the mountain borrowed its name from its silhouette. Nobody has claimed the coinage of either. The peak appears as Camelback on territorial maps, and the section-line road that ran along its south side at five miles north of Washington Street took the name as Phoenix laid out its grid; ADOT’s history of I-17’s cross streets simply records that the road is “named after Camelback Mountain,” which is as far as the record goes.
What the name came to mean in Scottsdale is a 1930s invention. When Jack Stewart and John C. Lincoln opened the Camelback Inn in December 1936, they put the mountain’s name on a resort, and the resort trade that followed, the Jokake Inn, Mountain Shadows, the Phoenician, made “Camelback” shorthand for the whole luxury strip between the Arcadia citrus groves and Scottsdale Road. The mountain, the road and the resorts fused into one brand, which is why hotels miles from the road still work “Camelback” into their names.
The Scottsdale corner came later. Sixty-four acres of farmland at Scottsdale and Camelback Roads became an open-air shopping center that held its grand opening on October 9, 1961, the modest start of Scottsdale Fashion Square. The mall grew into the Southwest’s largest and, in the 1990s, bridged Camelback Road itself to swallow the rival Camelview Plaza, so the road now runs under the mall for a block. The Phoenician, which opened in October 1988 on 250 acres at the base of the mountain, gave the Scottsdale end of the road a resort to match the Phoenix end’s Biltmore.
What it is not
It is not the Camelback Corridor, or not only. Phoenix uses that name for the office towers and Biltmore Fashion Park around 24th Street, its premier business district since the 1980s. Scottsdale and Paradise Valley use it for the resort row under the mountain. Same road, different corridor, five miles apart.
The fine print
The grid number is 5000 North, which puts Camelback a mile north of Indian School Road at 4100 and three and a half miles north of McDowell at 1600; the odd spacing comes from Phoenix’s half-mile offsets south of Camelback. The Valley Metro route numbering confirms it: Route 50 runs Camelback because it is the 5000 block.
The road’s east end is less tidy than its west. Wikipedia’s arterial survey says it runs “from Scottsdale in the east,” and in practice Camelback continues past Scottsdale Road, across the Arizona Canal at the Waterfront and on to Hayden Road, where Indian School Park sits at the corner on the Greenbelt. East of Hayden it dissolves into the Indian Bend Wash. In Scottsdale, then, “Camelback Road” means about two miles: the Phoenix line near 64th Street, the Phoenician, Fashion Square, the canal and Hayden.
The jurisdictional seam is the Phoenician itself. The resort carries a Scottsdale address at 6000 East Camelback but straddles the Scottsdale and Phoenix line, and its Lincoln Drive neighbors are in the Town of Paradise Valley, which incorporated in 1961 to keep the resort land low and quiet. Along Camelback Road you can pass through three municipalities in a mile without a sign telling you so.
One more number: the mountain. The 2,706-foot summit is reached by the Echo Canyon trail from McDonald Drive, not from Camelback Road, which is why the road named for the mountain has no trailhead on it.