What it means
Pinnacle Peak Road is the 23400 North line of the Valley grid, and in Scottsdale it is the road that marks where the far north begins. South of it the city is subdivisions and shopping centers; north of it the land rises into granite boulders, saguaro forest and golf. When someone gives directions “up past Pinnacle Peak Road,” they mean you are leaving the suburbs.
Two corners define it. At Scottsdale Road, the west end of the Scottsdale stretch, stood Rawhide, the 1880s cowboy town that entertained tourists from 1971 until 2005 and is now a mixed-use development. At Pima Road, two miles east, is the far north’s old crossroads: the adobe Citadel, the first Mastro’s, the 1977 Pinnacle Peak General Store and, just west, Florence Ely Nelson Desert Park. East of Pima the road climbs toward the Pinnacle Peak and Troon neighborhoods, and the views open up.
The neighborhood guide covers the district. This page is about the road and its name.
Where you’ll meet it
Directions to the far north, the Pinnacle Peak Road exit on I-17 in north Phoenix, real estate listings in 85255, and the inevitable tourist question about why the road named for the peak does not go to it.
Where the word came from
The road was named by the people who made it. In the early 1930s J.B. Curry, who had land at the southeast corner of what became Scottsdale and Pinnacle Peak roads, and the Lewis brothers graded a dirt road from the spot known as Curry’s Corner out past the peak and named it Pinnacle Peak Road, according to the Scottsdale historian Joan Fudala. They graded it but did not pave it.
The name pointed at the obvious landmark. Pinnacle Peak, a 3,169-foot granite summit, was the guiding beacon for anyone heading into the northern desert, visible for miles. Naming the road for it was a way of saying where the road was going. The road you drive today follows the section line on the 23400 North alignment, while the peak sits about two miles north, nearer the Jomax Road line.
The road’s identity came from what grew along it. The Citadel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice Vern Swaback, opened at the Pima corner in 1985, when it was still empty desert. The La Mirada center opened across the road around 1995, Mastro’s arrived there in 1999, and Highlands Church opened just to the east in 1998. By the 2000s Pinnacle Peak and Pima was a suburban intersection like any other, with a better view.
What it is not
Pinnacle Peak Road is not the address of Pinnacle Peak Patio, the necktie-snipping cowboy steakhouse that ran from 1957 to 2015; that was on Jomax Road. It is not the way into Pinnacle Peak Park, whose entrance is two miles north on 102nd Way. And the Pinnacle Peak neighborhood, as locals use the term, mostly lies north of the road, not along it.
The fine print
The grid numbers tell the story of the far north. The City of Phoenix’s street-grid map puts Pinnacle Peak Road at 23400 North, Happy Valley Road at 25000, Jomax at 26600 and Dynamite Boulevard at 28200: one road a mile, the classic section-line pattern of the grid. Addresses in the Pima corner run in the 8700 to 8900 East block, The Citadel at 8700 and Mastro’s at 8852.
Jurisdiction splits at Scottsdale Road. Under the 1964 boundary agreement between Scottsdale and Phoenix, Scottsdale Road is the line from Cactus Road north to Jomax, so the land west of the corner is Phoenix and the land east is Scottsdale. West of Scottsdale Road, Pinnacle Peak Road continues across north Phoenix as a major arterial.
Long before any of this, the area was home to an Upland Hohokam village. Archaeologists examined the Pinnacle Peak Village site, about two miles east of Pinnacle Peak and Pima, in 1963 and again during the development of Troon Village in the 1980s, finding pit houses, pottery and cooking areas.