What it means
When a Scottsdale resident south of Shea says the lake, they mean Chaparral Lake, the ten acres of stocked water inside Chaparral Park at Hayden Road and McDonald Drive, and when they say Eldorado they mean the older, quieter park and ponds on Miller Road where the city learned how to build the Greenbelt. Together these are “the lakes” of the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt, the eleven-mile chain of parks that runs up the middle of the city, and they are where central and south Scottsdale fish, run, walk dogs, learn to swim and feed ducks they have been asked not to feed.
The lakes are flood control first and scenery second. Both sit in the bottom of the wash, and a few days a year they do their real job, taking storm water that would otherwise be in someone’s living room. The Greenbelt entry tells the story of the whole corridor; this page is about the two bodies of water people actually name.
Where you’ll meet it
Directions to the dog park, which is at Chaparral and is the city’s busiest. Fishing reports from the state’s community program. Swim-lesson schedules at the Eldorado and Chaparral aquatic centers. The dogs guide and every Greenbelt bike ride, which passes both.
Where the word came from
The names are the parks’, and the parks exist because of a flood channel nobody wanted. The Indian Bend Wash, which locals called the slough, was a brushy low channel that split Scottsdale roughly along today’s Hayden Road and flooded after every big monsoon. From 1959 the Army Corps of Engineers and the county’s new flood control district proposed the standard remedy, a concrete-lined channel 125 to 170 feet wide and more than 20 feet deep through the middle of town. Residents hated it. In a February 8, 1964, editorial, landscape architect Bill Walton proposed that the wash stay a wash, lined with grass and parks that would carry water only when it rained hard enough, and the city spent the next decade fighting the federal government for the right to do it that way.
Eldorado was the proof of concept. The city built it in 1967 on donated wash land at Miller Road and Oak Street as Scottsdale’s first community park, stocked its lake the same year, and held a naming contest that drew 600 schoolchildren; the winners got pool passes. The name is Spanish for “the golden one,” the legendary city of gold, which was the kind of name a 1960s park committee liked and which no source explains further. The Labor Day flood of 1970 and the June 22, 1972, flood, the worst on record to that point, made the argument for the rest of the plan, and in April 1973 voters approved the flood-control bonds by a seven-to-one margin.
Chaparral followed immediately. The lake at Hayden and McDonald was filled in July 1973, the aquatic center beside it opened Labor Day weekend 1974, and the 100-acre park grew up around them. The name is the desert’s: chaparral is the dense scrub of the dry Southwest, and the city applied it to the park, the lake and the high school a few blocks east. The finished $54 million Greenbelt was dedicated April 26 to 28, 1985, with five city parks, Vista del Camino, Eldorado, Indian School, Camelback and Chaparral, strung along it.
What it is not
The lakes are not the only lakes. McCormick Ranch has its own private chain along the paths north of Indian Bend Road, and Scottsdale Ranch is built around Lake Serena; those are homeowner-association water, and “the lakes” there means something different. Chaparral and Eldorado are the public ones, and they are not for swimming, boating or wading under any circumstances.
The fine print
Both lakes are working infrastructure. Chaparral Lake covers about ten acres inside a 100-acre park; the city buried a drinking-water treatment plant beneath the park’s northeast corner in the 2000s, so picnickers sit above one utility and beside another. Eldorado’s 60 acres hold two ponds, and in 2026 the city’s “Indian Bend Wash: Repair Lakes and Irrigation” project kept the north lake and ballfields closed for reconstruction, a reminder that 1967 liners do not last forever. The Greenbelt itself runs 11 miles with more than 24 grade-separated crossings, so a cyclist can ride from Tempe to Shea without a traffic light, and it still floods on purpose a few days a year, over grass instead of neighborhoods.
The fish are the state’s. Both lakes are in the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s community fishing program, stocked with channel catfish in the warm months and rainbow trout in winter; a state license is required at age ten and up, and the city’s park rules forbid boats and swimming. The dog park at Chaparral, three acres of real grass with separate small-dog and single-dog areas, runs 5:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. and closes Tuesday and Friday mornings for maintenance. The inclusive playground on the lakeshore opened January 15, 2018; the Wedge skatepark at Eldorado opened around the turn of the 2000s, and the sources disagree on the year by two.
The record’s soft spots are the names. No document this site has found explains who chose Eldorado or Chaparral, beyond the schoolchildren’s contest for the first, and the 1973 bond figure is given as $10 million by one history and $19 million by another, so the lexicon reports the seven-to-one margin and leaves the dollars to the archives. What is not in doubt is the result: in 1974, before the system was finished, the American Society of Civil Engineers named the Greenbelt one of the nation’s outstanding engineering achievements, and the lakes are the part of it you can fish.