What it means
Mummy Mountain is the mountain in the middle of Paradise Valley that nobody climbs. It rises 2,260 feet directly north of Camelback across Lincoln Drive, a long rocky ridge with estates built up its flanks as far as the town’s hillside rules allow and bare granite above them. From the Camelback Inn, which has sat on its southern slope since 1936, it is the backdrop; from Echo Canyon’s summit it is the thing you look at while you catch your breath.
Locals use the word two ways. As a landmark it is a compass point (“the house is on the north side of Mummy”) and the second half of the Camelback-and-Mummy pair that defines the Paradise Valley skyline. As an address it is money: “Mummy Mountain” in a listing means a hillside lot in the 85253 ZIP code with a view and a price to match. What it is not, in either use, is a hike. There is no trail, no trailhead and no plan for one, which is the single most useful thing to know about it.
Where you’ll meet it
Across Lincoln Drive from the Echo Canyon trailhead; from the grounds of the Camelback Inn and Sanctuary; in every Paradise Valley real-estate listing; and in the best hikes guide, under the heading of mountains you cannot do.
Where the word came from
The mountain had two names before it had this one. Nineteenth-century maps and ranchers called it Windy Gulch and Horseshoe Mountain, descriptive names for a ridge with a notch in it. The change came in the 1940s with Charles Mieg, a Swiss-born miner and businessman who bought the Van Benscoten Ranch and with it most of the mountain, by Wikipedia’s account for about $12,000. Mieg looked at the ridge in the low light of sunrise and saw an Egyptian mummy lying on its back. He also saw that “Mummy Mountain” would sell building lots better than “Windy Gulch,” and when he began parceling the slopes he marketed them under the new name. It stuck within a decade; the Camelback Inn, which Jack Stewart had opened on the southern slope in 1936, became “at the foot of Mummy Mountain” in its own brochures.
The name’s second life came with the fight to keep the top of it empty. By the 1990s Paradise Valley’s hillside ordinance had slowed but not stopped building up the flanks, and the summit ridge, unlike Camelback and Piestewa Peak, lay outside the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. In 1997 residents formed the Mummy Mountain Preserve Trust, a 501(c)(3) charity, to buy or receive about 320 acres along the ridge; with private donations and a transfer of county land it controlled 218 acres by August 1999. State historian Marshall Trimble, broadcaster Joe Garagiola, novelist Clive Cussler and cartoonist Bil Keane lent their names to the campaign. The town later folded the effort into its own Mountain Preserve Trust, which now holds roughly 320 acres on Mummy and parcels on Camelback, with seven trustees appointed by the mayor and council.
What it is not
Mummy Mountain is not part of the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, and it is not Scottsdale’s Preserve either; it belongs to the Town of Paradise Valley and its trust. It is not Camelback, though visitors conflate the two from the freeway. And it is not “Mummy Mountain Park”: there is no park, only a preserve that is preserved by keeping everyone out.
The fine print
The elevation, 2,260 feet with about 820 feet of prominence, is from the USGS by way of Wikipedia. The renaming story rests on the town’s own history page and on Wikipedia, which agree on Mieg, the sunrise, the mummy and the marketing; the $12,000 price and the “most of the property” claim appear only in the latter, and we found no deed. Mieg’s dates are not given in either source.
The access rule is unusual and worth quoting in substance. The Paradise Valley Mountain Preserve Trust’s governing document bars conveying, selling or leasing any trust land, and states that no access or use may be permitted on it except as required for police and public utility functions. That is stricter than any Phoenix or Scottsdale preserve, where public trails are the point. The result is a mountain in the center of a metropolitan area of five million people with no legal route to the top, which Paradise Valley residents regard as a feature. The Paradise Valley entry explains the town’s founding bargain, one-acre lots and no commerce, that makes this consistent.
What is on the mountain is private: estates up to the hillside limit, the Camelback Inn’s upper grounds and water tanks. What is on top is granite, a few antennas and, from the right angle, a mummy. For the view you are allowed to have, cross Lincoln Drive and climb the Echo Canyon trail; from Camelback’s summit the whole profile reads the way Mieg saw it, and you will understand why he changed the name.