What it means
Jomax Road is the north Scottsdale cross street between Happy Valley and Dynamite, the road you take east from the 101 to reach DC Ranch, Market Street and the Silverleaf gate. Newcomers assume the name is Spanish, or Native, or an acronym. It is two people. Jo is Josephine Durham; Max is Maxine Durham; the road is a trail a man built to his golf course in 1950 and named for his sister and his wife. Say it JOE-max.
For Scottsdale the word also marks a line. When the city and Phoenix called a truce on the map on January 30, 1964, they agreed that Scottsdale Road would be the boundary between them from Cactus Road north to Jomax Road, and that agreement, more than any other single decision, sent Scottsdale growing north and east into the desert rather than west. Jomax was as far north as anyone bothered to draw, which tells you what the road was in 1964: a dirt track past a nine-hole golf course and a steakhouse that cut off neckties.
Where you’ll meet it
Directions to DC Ranch and Silverleaf, the address of the late Pinnacle Peak Patio (10426 East Jomax), the Scottsdale Road rebuild now underway from Jomax to Dixileta, and the city’s annexation history.
Where the word came from
In 1950 Fitzgerald Durham, a retired executive of Union Carbide, bought 80 acres of Maricopa County desert well north of anything called Scottsdale: the quarter-section between today’s Pinnacle Vista on the north, Jomax on the south, 64th Street on the east and 62nd on the west. There was no road. He built a trail to the property and, according to the Pinnacle Peak area’s local history magazine, named it for his wife Maxine and his sister Josephine: Jo-Max. The sign at the junction said only “Golf Course,” because that is what he had built.
The course was Durham’s hobby and, by the magazine’s account, the area’s first desert golf course: nine holes, par three, with greens made of fine sand poured over with silicon oil to hold it in place and fairways kept playable with a drag. You needed a seven iron and a putter; some people played it with the putter alone. Through the 1950s it drew winter visitors at a dollar for the whole day. When Durham aged he sold to Nenver Rietveld, who drilled wells and started the Ironwood Water Company; after Durham’s death the course passed through several hands, was abandoned, and by 2004 lay under houses and apartments. ADOT’s 2024 history of the north Valley’s cross streets confirms the essentials: Jomax Road, named for sisters Josephine and Maxine Durham, led to a golf course Maxine owned with her husband. The two accounts differ on whether Josephine was Fitz’s sister or Maxine’s; the Pinnacle Peak magazine, which is closer to the family, says Fitz’s.
The name outlived the course because the county adopted it for the section line, and when Scottsdale extended the Phoenix grid north in the 1960s it kept it. The area did not become part of Scottsdale until the annexations of the mid-1980s.
What it is not
Not Spanish, not O’odham, not a developer’s brand. And Pinnacle Peak Patio, which everyone remembers as being “on Pinnacle Peak,” was on Jomax.
The fine print
The 1964 agreement deserves its footnote. Through the early 1960s Scottsdale and Phoenix were racing to annex the same farmland, and the matching council resolutions of January 1964 settled it: Scottsdale Road would divide the cities from Cactus Road north to Jomax, with Phoenix taking the west side and Scottsdale the east. Wikipedia’s description of Scottsdale Road today reflects it exactly: north of Cactus the road “forms the border between the Paradise Valley urban village of Phoenix to the west and Scottsdale to the east.” Scottsdale later annexed far past Jomax, reaching the Tonto National Forest line in 1984, and the Scottsdale Road boundary continued north with it, so the “Jomax” in the 1964 deal is now a historical marker rather than a limit.
Jomax’s own grid number is one we could not confirm from an official source, so we leave it out; it is a mile north of Happy Valley and a mile south of Dynamite, and addresses on it run from the 6000s East at Scottsdale Road past 10000 East at Pima. The road breaks at the Preserve and the McDowells east of Thompson Peak Parkway.
The Scottsdale Road rebuild from Jomax to Dixileta, with its $43.7 million roundabout approved in September 2024 and then redesigned as a signalized intersection in April 2025, has made “Jomax” a construction word for the 2020s. The Durham sisters would be pleased to know the name is in the news; nothing we found records what either thought of having a road.