What it means
Hole-in-the-Rock is exactly what it says: a low red butte in Papago Park with a hole through the top. You walk a short path around the back, step into a chamber the size of a living room, and look west through a ragged window at downtown Phoenix, the airport and the sunset. Locals use the name for the butte, for the ten-minute walk up it and for the ritual, as in “we did Hole-in-the-Rock with my parents,” which every south Scottsdale family has said at least once.
The thing is in Phoenix. The buttes stand just south of McDowell Road at Galvin Parkway, across the city line from south Scottsdale, inside the 1,496-acre Papago Park that Phoenix and Tempe share. Scottsdale claims it anyway. The Papago Park guide covers the whole park: the lagoons, Hunt’s Tomb, the Desert Botanical Garden and the zoo. This page is about the hole.
Where you’ll meet it
From every eastbound landing at Sky Harbor, where the red buttes are the landmark out the right window; at dusk any clear evening, when the chamber fills; in the Hohokam story, where it is one of the few surviving instruments of their calendar; and along the Crosscut Canal path, which runs past the park’s east side.
Where the word came from
Nobody coined it; the butte named itself. “Hole-in-the-Rock” is the kind of frontier description that attaches to a landmark before anyone writes it down, and the record shows it already in use when the Papago buttes were set aside as Papago Saguaro National Monument in 1914. Congress abolished the monument on April 7, 1930 and split the land among the state, Tempe and the Water Users’ Association that became SRP. The Hole stayed what it had been, a place to climb on a Sunday.
The older name for the place is the one that matters. The Hohokam, who farmed the Salt River valley from their canals for a thousand years, used this chamber as a calendar. A small opening in the ceiling admits a shaft of sunlight that creeps across the floor as the seasons turn; archaeologists found a ground slick, a smoothed patch like a metate, and boulders set to mark where the light fell at the solstices and equinoxes. The dating runs roughly 450 to 1450 CE. What the Hohokam called the butte is unrecorded, and the Akimel O’odham, their descendants, have not published a name for it.
The park’s name is a separate tangle, covered on the Papago page: it carries an outside name for the people who now call themselves Tohono O’odham, attached to land that was never theirs. The 1879 federal reservation here was for the Maricopa and Pima. Through the twentieth century the buttes served as a bass hatchery site, a Second World War prisoner-of-war camp, whose December 1944 escape is the park’s most famous day, and a National Guard post, before Phoenix bought the state’s share on February 25, 1959 and made a city park. The zoo opened on the hatchery grounds in 1962.
What it is not
Hole-in-the-Rock is not Hunt’s Tomb, the white pyramid on the butte to the south where Governor George W. P. Hunt is buried, though both are reached from the same parking lots. It is not a cave; the openings are tafoni, weathering hollows in sandstone, and the chamber is open to the sky on one side. And it is not in Tempe, despite the park being shared: the butte sits on the Phoenix side of the line.
The fine print
The geology is settled. The butte is arkosic conglomeratic sandstone, red from iron, laid down six to fifteen million years ago from the debris of a Precambrian granite that has since eroded away. The holes are tafoni, hollows that form where water weakens the cement between grains, and a steady wind blows through the main opening most evenings. The city rates the trail at 0.2 miles and 200 feet of gain and calls it easy, which is true of the path and not of the ledge; the Wikipedia record notes fatalities, including a 40-foot fall, from people climbing the face or the rim.
Papago Park’s dimensions are from the city: 1,496 acres, about 1,200 in Phoenix and 296 in Tempe, at 625 North Galvin Parkway. The east side of Galvin opens at 5 a.m. and closes at 7 p.m.; the west side runs sunrise to sunset. The park charges nothing; the Desert Botanical Garden and the zoo inside it charge their own admission.
The calendar claim rests on archaeological fieldwork summarized in secondary sources rather than on a single published excavation report we could open, and the specific dates (450 to 1450 CE) are the span of Hohokam occupation in the Valley rather than a date for the chamber’s use. Camp Papago Park, the POW camp at the buttes’ foot, is the other history here: the Great Papago Escape of December 23, 1944 sent 25 Germans through a 178-foot tunnel, and the last was recaptured on January 28, 1945. Our kids guide ranks the Hole as the first hike for anyone under eight.