What it means
Pima Road is Scottsdale’s eastern edge, and for once the edge is real. From south Scottsdale north to the Loop 101 crossing, the road is the boundary between the City of Scottsdale on the west and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community on the east, a sovereign nation set aside in 1879. Cross it and you have left one government for another: city zoning, building permits and the city sales tax stop at the centerline. The casino tower, the Pavilions, Salt River Fields and Scottsdale Community College, all with Scottsdale mailing addresses, are on the far side of Pima. The Community guide tells that story; this page is about the road and the word.
North of the 101, Pima changes jobs. The freeway named for it peels away west, and Pima Road becomes the far north’s main street: past Grayhawk and DC Ranch, across Pinnacle Peak Road and Dynamite at the Pima-Dynamite trailhead, and on to Cave Creek Road near Desert Mountain. Locals say “take Pima” to mean the quieter alternative to the 101 for anything between Indian Bend and Carefree.
Where you’ll meet it
Spring-training directions to Salt River Fields, every description of where Scottsdale ends, the “Pima Freeway” signs on the 101, the trailhead maps, and the names of a cotton and a county.
Where the word came from
Pima is what outsiders called the Akimel O’odham, the River People who have farmed the Salt and Gila valleys for centuries. The usual account traces it to the Spanish, who heard an O’odham phrase of refusal or incomprehension and took it for the people’s name; the O’odham themselves never used it. By the time the United States arrived it was fixed in English, and when the federal government set aside the Salt River reservation by executive order on June 14, 1879, for the Akimel O’odham and their Piipaash (Maricopa) neighbors, “Pima” went onto the legal name and, eventually, onto the road along its western line.
That road was the reservation boundary before it was a street. The 1879 order drew the reservation’s west edge along a surveyed line, and as Scottsdale’s farms spread east in the early 1900s the section-line road along it was the natural place to stop. Pima Road is the only one of Scottsdale’s north-south arterials whose position was fixed by a federal order rather than a developer’s plat, which is why it does not sit neatly on the grid: it runs a little under the 9000 East line, about a mile and three quarters east of Scottsdale Road at 7200 and under a mile east of Hayden at 8000.
The freeway came a century later. Talks among the state, Scottsdale and the Community about running the Loop 101 along the reservation’s edge began in 1982 and stalled for years; a 1990 agreement settled the alignment beside Pima Road, with the state paying for the right-of-way, and the Community then built the Pavilions, Casino Arizona, Talking Stick Resort and Salt River Fields along its frontage. ADOT named the Scottsdale stretch the Pima Freeway for the road it follows, and the last two-mile gap, between Scottsdale Road and Pima Road in the north, closed on April 7, 2002.
What it is not
Pima Road is not the Pima Freeway, though the two run side by side for miles and share exits. And “Pima” is not the people’s own name: the Community’s citizens are Akimel O’odham and Piipaash, and the word survives on the road and in the legal name as a historical label, the way “Papago” survives on a park.
The fine print
The boundary is exact only where the reservation is. South of the 101 crossing near Via de Ventura, Pima Road’s east side is Community land from the Salt River north to about Indian Bend; the Community’s western edge then bends, and the freeway, not the road, follows it north to around Union Hills. North of there, Pima Road runs through city land on both sides, and the eastern edge of Scottsdale is the McDowell Mountains and Fountain Hills. “Pima Road is the border” is true for the miles most visitors see and false for the ones residents drive.
The grid number is a reckoning, not a sign. Scottsdale Community College, immediately east of the road on the Community’s land, is 9000 East Chaparral; the Scottsdale and Hayden lines are 7200 and 8000. Pima therefore sits at roughly 8900 East, a mile and three quarters from Scottsdale Road rather than the two miles a grid road would be, because the 1879 survey line, not the township grid, placed it. The city does not publish an official address line for it that we could find.
The 101 agreement had a price and a payoff. The state paid for right-of-way across Community land, the Community kept control of its frontage and leased it on its own terms, and the result is the entertainment district east of the freeway: the Pavilions (1989), Casino Arizona (1998), Talking Stick Resort (2010) and Salt River Fields (2011). Scottsdale got a freeway it could not have built on its own side without demolishing neighborhoods; the Community got an economy. Both still argue about the sales tax that does not cross Pima Road, and about who pays for the road itself, which the two governments have widened in pieces since the 1990s.