What it means
McDowell Mountain Ranch is the family suburb on the mountain. It fills the west slope of the McDowells between Bell Road and Thompson Peak Parkway, east of Pima Road and south of DC Ranch: about 3,200 acres of 1990s and early-2000s houses in 26 neighborhoods, with a city park, a public library and a golf course in the middle and the Preserve as the back fence. Nobody says the whole name. In north Scottsdale it is MMR, three letters that mean the neighborhoods, the pool and the trailheads at the top of the hill.
The pool is what the rest of the city knows. The McDowell Mountain Ranch Park and Aquatic Center, a City of Scottsdale facility and not an HOA perk, has a 600-foot lazy river and sells day passes, which makes “MMR” the answer to “where can we swim without a resort fee” from June through September. The DC Ranch and McDowell Mountain Ranch guide covers both communities; the park page covers the pool. This page is about the name.
Where you’ll meet it
On McDowell Mountain Ranch Road, which is also the name’s address; at the Sunrise Trailhead at the top of the neighborhood; in the public pools guide, where it ranks first; and at the Reata Sports Complex, whose soccer fields have the Preserve as backdrop.
Where the word came from
The name is two borrowings stacked. The first is the mountains: the McDowells were named for Fort McDowell, the 1865 army post on the Verde named for General Irvin McDowell, and the range had lent its name to McDowell Road and the regional park long before any developer arrived. The second is the suffix. By the early 1990s “Ranch” was the Scottsdale formula for a master-planned community, established by McCormick Ranch in 1970 and copied by Gainey Ranch, Scottsdale Ranch and DC Ranch. Put the mountain in front of the formula and you had a name that said exactly where the place was and exactly what kind of place it was. No single person is credited with it.
The development followed the pattern closely. The plan was conceived in 1992, as the city was annexing and zoning the desert north of Bell Road and voters were beginning the fight that produced the McDowell Sonoran Preserve in October 1994. The first homes opened in 1995. Fourteen builders put up 26 distinct neighborhoods, almost 4,000 houses in all, most of them between 1998 and 2003, under a master association that still counts more than 23,000 residents. The city built its facilities inside the plan: the Arabian Library, the park, and the aquatic center whose present building, 24,000 square feet of wood, glass and steel by Scottsdale architects Weddle Gilmore, was completed in 2007.
The Preserve made the name stick. When voters funded the Preserve in May 1995 and expanded it in 2004, the land above MMR went from “future development” to permanent open space, and the community’s eastern edge became one of the richest trail networks in the country. Sunrise Trail and Sunrise Peak start at its top; the Gateway Trailhead is a short drive north. A neighborhood that had been sold on golf became one sold on hiking.
What it is not
McDowell Mountain Ranch is not DC Ranch, though they share a slope and a guide on this site; DC Ranch is north, newer and pricier, with Market Street and Silverleaf. It is not McDowell Mountain Regional Park, the Maricopa County park on the far side of the range near Fountain Hills, a confusion that sends people forty minutes the wrong way. And it is not “the Ranch”: that word, unmodified, still belongs to McCormick.
The fine print
The community’s own figures are the only ones available: about 3,200 acres, 26 neighborhoods, 14 builders, almost 4,000 homes, more than 23,000 residents. The last number sits oddly against the home count, implying nearly six people per household, and probably counts the apartment and condominium parcels along the edges; the association does not explain it. The 1992 conception and 1995 opening dates come from real-estate histories rather than city records, and the city’s zoning cases for the area carry case numbers rather than the community name.
The aquatic center’s chronology has a wrinkle. Sources give opening years of 2001 and 2007; the resolution is that the park and its first pools predate the architect-designed park building, which ArchDaily dates to 2007. The pool specifications are the community’s: a 6,000-square-foot zero-depth leisure pool, a heated 25-yard lap pool, a 12-foot diving well with one- and three-meter boards, slides and a 600-foot lazy river. Day-pass prices change; check the city.
What the name leaves out is older. The slope the neighborhoods sit on was open-range cattle country into the 1980s and State Trust Land before that; Brown’s Ranch, whose name survives on the Preserve’s northern trailhead, ran cattle across much of it. The Hohokam left petroglyphs in the washes above, and the Yavapai knew the range before the fort did. “McDowell Mountain Ranch” honors none of them; it honors a general who never saw the mountain and a real-estate formula from 1970.