What it means
A mesa is a table of rock: broad, flat on top, steep on the sides, standing above the land around it because a hard cap layer protected it while everything softer eroded away. A butte is what is left when a mesa keeps eroding, a tower that is taller than it is wide. That is the whole distinction, and geographers admit it is a rule of thumb. Both words are everywhere in the Southwest, on maps, subdivisions and beer labels, used loosely for any flat-topped lump of desert rock.
In Scottsdale you hear them mostly in two names. The Papago Buttes are the red, hole-pocked rocks of Papago Park at the city’s southern edge, the ones with the Desert Botanical Garden and the zoo tucked between them. Red Mountain, on the eastern horizon past the Community, is a butte too, though almost nobody says so; its official name is Mount McDowell. The city of Mesa, down the Salt River, took its name from the raised tableland its founders settled on. What Scottsdale itself does not have is a true mesa: its skyline is the McDowells, which are mountains of granite and schist, and Camelback, which is its own odd thing.
Where you’ll meet it
On a Papago Park trail map, at a Salt River Fields ballgame with Red Mountain behind the outfield, in any geology talk at Hole-in-the-Rock, and in the names of half the housing developments east of the 101.
Where the word came from
Mesa is plain Spanish for table, applied to the flat-topped landforms of New Spain centuries before Anglo surveyors arrived. Butte came from French; it means a small hill, and French trappers carried it across the northern plains, where it attached to the isolated towers of the Dakotas and Montana. American geographers inherited both and sorted them by size: plateau, mesa, butte.
The local examples are older than any word. The Papago Buttes began as debris eroding from a long-vanished granite highland, cemented into red arkosic sandstone and conglomerate somewhere between 6 and 15 million years ago and stained by iron oxide. Water and salt weathering then ate hollows into the rock, the cave-like openings geologists call tafoni, the largest of which is Hole-in-the-Rock. The park around them has had more names than most: a reservation set aside for Maricopa and Pima people in 1879, Papago Saguaro National Monument from 1914 until Congress abolished it in 1930, a fish hatchery, a prisoner-of-war camp in the 1940s, and finally 1,496 acres of city park split between Phoenix and Tempe. The name Papago is itself an outside word for the Tohono O’odham, which that entry explains.
Red Mountain is the same kind of rock at a larger scale: tilted red beds of conglomerate and sandstone that glow at sunset, which is why the Community’s own publications call it the sacred mountain that symbolizes home for the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash, and why the Yavapai and O’odham have their own names for it. The federal name honors General Irvin McDowell, the Civil War officer whose name is also on Fort McDowell, McDowell Road and the McDowell Mountains, none of which are near each other.
What it is not
Red Mountain is not McDowell Peak, which is eleven miles northwest in the McDowells. The McDowells are not buttes or mesas but a fault-block range. And Camelback, despite the red head that looks like Papago rock, is not a butte: its hump is Precambrian granite about 1.5 billion years old, its head sedimentary rock about 25 million years old, and the line between them is the point of the hike.
The fine print
The rule that a butte is taller than it is wide is a convenience, not a standard; the National Park Service version is more useful: a butte is what a mesa becomes. Both exist because of caprock, a resistant upper layer that shields the softer rock beneath. Once the cap is breached the landform goes quickly, in geologic terms.
Papago Park’s buttes are Tertiary in age, the same red beds that show up at the west end of Camelback and in scattered outcrops around the Valley; the SRPMIC geology notes describe them as basin-fill deposited before the modern Salt and Verde rivers cut their courses. The tafoni hollows that make them famous are still forming. The Hohokam may have used light through Hole-in-the-Rock to mark solstices, a claim the Papago Park guide treats with due caution.
Red Mountain’s numbers are 2,832 feet of elevation and about 1,260 feet of prominence, with a deep cleft on its west side called the Gunsight. The closure since the early 1980s is a Community decision after vandalism, and it holds: no trail, no permit, no photography on the mountain. The respectful way to see it is from the Beeline, from Salt River Fields, or from the river below, where the Community’s guide explains what you are looking at. If you want to stand on a butte, Papago Park is open sunrise to sunset and the hiking guide has the short routes.