What it means
Four Peaks is the mountain with the four teeth on the eastern horizon. From a Scottsdale patio it is the farthest thing you can see, a blue-grey ridge beyond Fountain Hills, white after a winter storm while you sit outside in a shirt. Locals treat it as a compass point and a weather gauge: “snow on Four Peaks” is a sentence that gets said with real pleasure every January.
The name does three jobs. It is the massif itself, the southern crown of the Mazatzal Mountains in the Tonto National Forest, topped by Brown’s Peak at 7,659 feet, the highest point in Maricopa County. It is the Four Peaks Wilderness, 60,740 roadless acres around the summits. And in a bar it is Four Peaks Brewing Company, the Tempe brewery that borrowed the name in 1996 and whose Kilt Lifter is on more Arizona taps than any other local beer.
Where you’ll meet it
Looking east from Shea Boulevard or the upper floors of anything in north Scottsdale; on the standard Arizona license plate, where it is the mountain behind the saguaro; on the drive up the Beeline to Payson, which passes beneath it; and at Fountain Park, where the fountain and the peaks line up for photographs.
Where the word came from
The name is plain description, which is why nobody has claimed it. The massif’s summit is a north-south ridge with four distinct high points, and English-speaking surveyors and ranchers called it what it looked like. The Yavapai, whose country this was, call it Wi:khoba; the Yavapai and Tonto Apache ranged these mountains until the army drove them to San Carlos in the 1870s, and the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation sits at the mountain’s foot today. The summits are Brown’s Peak, Brother, Sister and Amethyst, north to south, the last named for the stone inside it.
The amethyst is the strangest part of the story. A vein of deep purple quartz runs through the mountain near 7,000 feet, between the third and fourth peaks, in a spot reachable only by helicopter or a three-to-four-hour climb. A legend repeated by the mine’s owners and by local jewelers holds that Spanish prospectors worked it in the 1700s and that stone from it reached the Spanish crown jewels; no document supports that, and the first recorded claim dates to a Phoenix prospector around 1900. Today a husband-and-wife team works it by hand about half the year and sells the best stone in Fountain Hills and beside OdySea.
The wilderness came in 1984, when Congress added Four Peaks to the national system. The fire came in 1996: an abandoned campfire on April 27 started the Lone Fire, which burned about 61,000 acres in eleven days and held the record as Arizona’s largest wildfire until Rodeo-Chediski in 2002.
The brewery borrowed the name the same year. Andy Ingram, Jim Scussel and Randy Schultz founded Four Peaks in 1995 in Tempe’s 1892 Borden creamery and opened the doors on December 11, 1996. They sold 32 barrels of Kilt Lifter the first year; the breweries guide covers where to drink it now.
What it is not
Four Peaks is not part of the Superstitions, which are the lower, more jagged range to the south across the Salt River canyon; from Scottsdale the Superstitions sit to the right of Four Peaks and well below it. It is not in the McDowells either, and it is not visible from Old Town, where the McDowells and the buildings block it. And Four Peaks Brewing is in Tempe, not on the mountain; its Scottsdale taproom, opened in 2004, closed in 2020.
The fine print
The elevations are from the USGS and are not in dispute: Brown’s Peak 7,659 feet, Brother 7,644, Sister 7,574, Amethyst 7,526. The county line runs up the Mazatzals and takes in the summit, which is how a desert county gets a 7,659-foot high point. The distance from Phoenix is about 40 miles east-northeast as the crow flies and closer to 60 by road, up the Beeline and in on Forest Road 143 to Lone Pine Saddle, a route that wants high clearance.
The wilderness designation (1984) is federal law; the Tonto National Forest manages it, and there is no permit system for day hiking, no water and no cell signal worth trusting. The Brown’s Peak route ends in a loose, steep chute that has required rescues. The day-trips guide covers the drive and the Bush Highway alternative along Saguaro Lake, where the peaks rise straight over the water.
Two facts about the brewery are worth getting right. AB InBev announced its purchase of Four Peaks on December 18, 2015, so a beer that reads as local on every Scottsdale menu has been corporate for a decade, a point Arizona beer people make with some heat. And the Kilt Lifter numbers are the brewery’s own: 32 barrels in year one, more than 800,000 barrels cumulatively by the thirtieth anniversary. The mine’s production figures, roughly a ton of rough and 50 pounds of gem-grade stone a year, come from the owners through ABC15 and are not independently audited. Nobody has published a date for when “Four Peaks” first appeared on a map.