What it means
Ask a Scottsdale local about hiking Camelback and the reply is a question: “Echo or Cholla?” Echo Canyon and Cholla are the two trails to the mountain’s 2,704-foot summit, and the pair has become the city’s shorthand for a choice of temperament. Echo Canyon, from the west side on McDonald Drive, is the short, steep, famous one: 1.14 miles that start as built stairs and end as slabs and boulders with steel handrails bolted into the rock. Cholla, from the east side on Invergordon Road, is the longer, quieter one: a mile of graded ridge with Paradise Valley’s rooftops falling away beneath you, then a half mile of hands-on boulder work that takes nearly as long as the mile before it.
The phrase is used by concierges, by hiking apps, by the Phoenix Fire Department when it announces where the helicopter went this time, and by locals settling a Saturday plan. The site’s Echo Canyon vs. Cholla note makes the choice for you; the Echo Canyon and Cholla guides carry the turn-by-turn. This page is about the two names and what they have come to mean.
Where you’ll meet it
Every “best hikes near Scottsdale” list, the Phoenix heat-closure notices on summer mornings, resort concierge desks on the Camelback corridor, and the posted street signs around both trailheads, which are the first thing most visitors learn about the mountain.
Where the word came from
Both names predate the hiking boom and neither has a documented author. Echo Canyon is the name Phoenix attached to the recreation area it created when the mountain’s upper elevations became a city park in 1968, after a preservation campaign that Barry Goldwater lent his name to in 1965, when houses were climbing the flanks toward the summit. The canyon on the mountain’s north face, below the sandstone pinnacle called the Praying Monk, is where the trail begins, and the name is presumably descriptive. Cholla is the cactus, and it was also the name of the residential street, Cholla Lane, where the east-side trail used to start from a scruffy pullout, with hikers walking the shoulder to reach the ridge. Whether the trail was named for the plant or the street is not recorded; locals say CHOY-uh either way, and the spiny jumping cholla along the ridge makes the point for the plant.
The two names acquired their modern meanings in the 2010s and 2020s as the mountain’s popularity outran its infrastructure. Phoenix rebuilt the Echo Canyon trailhead in 2013 with a real lot, restrooms, water and a gate that closes at capacity. Cholla’s turn came the hard way: in 2020 a hiker was struck by a loose boulder, the city closed the trail for more than two years, pulled the unstable rock, rebuilt the tread and moved the trailhead off Cholla Lane to a new facility on Invergordon Road with restrooms, water, bike racks and a rideshare zone. It reopened on September 29, 2022. In 2023 a group of regulars campaigned to rename the rebuilt trail for Goldwater; the name Cholla stuck. Echo Canyon had its own closure in late 2025, when storm erosion and three loose boulders shut it from mid-October until engineers grouted the rocks and replaced the old rope with cable, reopening December 14.
What it is not
Camelback is not in Scottsdale. Both trailheads are in Phoenix on the Paradise Valley line, and nobody here cares about the technicality. Echo Canyon is also not a canyon hike in the shady sense; the trail leaves the canyon almost immediately and climbs exposed rock. And Cholla is not the easy option, only the longer one: the summit block is a real scramble with exposure.
The fine print
The city’s own numbers set the terms. Echo Canyon gains about 1,400 feet in 1.14 miles; Cholla gains about 1,420 in 1.5. Phoenix rates both “extremely difficult,” its top grade, and keeps both open sunrise to sunset with no dogs. Since 2021 both have been part of the Phoenix Trail Heat Safety Program: whenever the National Weather Service issues an Extreme Heat Warning, the trails close from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., a rule that began at 11 a.m., moved to 9 and then to 8, and has been triggered as early as March. Rescues on the program’s trails fell from 57 in its first year to 35 in 2024. Phoenix as a whole rescues more than 200 hikers a year from its desert parks, and the heat closures entry explains the mechanics.
The pattern behind the rescues is consistent enough to be a genre: a visitor, a trail that looked short on the map, a mid-morning start, one bottle for the group, and a call that comes on the way down. The descent is where Camelback hurts people. Quads are cooked, the same slabs must be reversed facing the drop, and loose grit on granite behaves like ball bearings. The site’s rule of thumb, start at first light, a liter per person minimum and two when warm, real shoes, hands free, turn around at the halfway mark if the climb is miserable, is in the summer rules.
Parking is the first crux and the one the names cannot fix. Echo’s gate shuts when its small lot fills, with no queue, and McDonald Drive and Tatum Boulevard are posted and patrolled. Cholla has no lot, only a short row of legal spaces in posted sections of Invergordon that are gone by sunrise in season; everything else gets towed. Both trailheads have marked drop-off zones, and from a Camelback-corridor resort a rideshare costs less than a tow. The mountain is public because of a 1960s fight; the trails are open because of a decade of rebuilding; getting to them is harder than ever.