What it means
Granite Mountain is where Scottsdale hikers go when they say they want to get away from Scottsdale hikers. The mountain itself is not tall. It is a heap of weathered granite blocks, slabs and pillars sitting in open saguaro country in the far northeast corner of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, with the Tonto National Forest and the Mazatzals beyond it. The trailhead named for it, at 31402 N. 136th Street, is the last stop in the system: six miles east on Dynamite Boulevard and two miles north, past the point where most people would have turned around.
In conversation the name carries that distance. “We did Granite Mountain” means a long, nearly flat loop, the 5.6-mile circuit around the peak with about 400 feet of gain, and a parking lot with a handful of cars. The other names you hear out here, Balanced Rock, Bootlegger and Saddlehorn, are its trails and features. The trailhead’s design, amenities and the full how-to are in the Granite Mountain Trailhead guide; this entry is about the name.
Where you’ll meet it
Preserve trail maps, the northern hikes in our beyond-Gateway guide, mountain bike route plans that link west to Brown’s Ranch and south to Fraesfield, and Instagram, mostly from Balanced Rock.
Where the word came from
The name explains itself the moment you see the mountain. Writers describing the loop keep reaching for the same words: a boulder-strewn peak, curiously stacked boulders, boulders leaning on one another around big cavernous voids. The rock is granite, weathered over a very long time into rounded blocks, and the peak is named for it. Who first called it Granite Mountain, and when, is not on record that we could find. It was the far end of E.O. Brown’s cattle country, a landmark riders steered by, long before it was a destination.
The trailhead brought the name into daily use. Scottsdale’s 2004 Preserve tax vote pushed land buying north and east toward the national forest, and by the 2010s the city owned tens of thousands of acres the public could reach only from dirt shoulders. In 2014 it commissioned a pair of northeast trailheads, Granite Mountain and Fraesfield, designed together by SmithGroup. Granite Mountain’s building spans an existing wash and stages the arrival so the mountain appears only at the end of the path. The pair started collecting architecture and landscape awards in 2019.
Balanced Rock, the area’s other famous name, is just as literal: a multi-ton boulder balanced on its narrow end, as writer Roger Naylor put it, a stone mushroom that has no business still standing. It sits at the end of a 0.3-mile spur off the trail network.
What it is not
This is not the Granite Mountain near Prescott, the wilderness peak that gave its name to the Granite Mountain Hotshots, the crew that lost 19 firefighters in the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire. Scottsdale’s Granite Mountain is a low desert boulder pile. Nor is it Brown’s Mountain, a separate peak in the Brown’s Ranch network to the west.
The fine print
The numbers people quote for this corner are consistent. The Granite Mountain Loop is about 5.6 miles with roughly 400 feet of gain. The Bootlegger Trail is 0.7 miles; paired with part of the loop and the Saddlehorn connector it makes an easy circuit of two to three miles. Phoenix Magazine puts Balanced Rock at about 4.2 miles round trip from the trailhead, or 5.6 if you make a loop of it. Conservancy-led hikes that link the trails north and east run past ten miles with only a few hundred feet of climbing, which tells you what kind of country this is.
The trailhead has restrooms, shade ramadas, interpretive signs and horse-trailer parking, and no drinking water. The usual Preserve rules apply: sunrise to sunset, free, dogs on a handheld leash no longer than six feet and left home when the day will top 90 degrees, no electric bikes. Bikes yield to hikers and everyone yields to horses.
Two cautions specific to the place. The drive out is long enough that forgetting water means doing without it. And the flat, open loop feels easy until the sun is high; there is almost no shade. On a cool weekday morning, though, you may have the whole mountain to yourself.