What it means
Reach 11 is a park that kept its paperwork name. It is a long, skinny strip of desert on the north bank of the CAP canal, running about seven miles from Cave Creek Road east to Scottsdale Road, less than half a mile wide, threaded with flat trails through mesquite and palo verde. A sports complex and a horse park sit inside the same corridor.
Locals say the name without noticing how odd it is. “Meet at Reach 11” can mean a run, a ride, a horse event or, most often, a youth soccer game, and parents from across the Valley know it as the place with eighteen fields and not enough shade. North Scottsdale residents near the Airpark use it as a backyard trail system even though it belongs to Phoenix.
For trail access, parking and what the corridor looks like on foot, read the Reach 11 Recreation Area guide. This page explains the name.
Where you’ll meet it
Youth sports schedules and tournament weekends, horseback riding listings, trail-running groups, and directions on the west edge of North Scottsdale near Princess Drive and the Scottsdale Airport.
Where the word came from
The name comes from the canal, and the canal came from Congress. The Colorado River Basin Project Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968, authorized the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile aqueduct to lift Colorado River water from Lake Havasu across the desert to Phoenix and Tucson. The Bureau of Reclamation started building in 1973 at the lake and finished south of Tucson in 1993, at a cost of more than $4 billion.
A project that long gets built in pieces, and engineers called the pieces reaches, numbered as they went. The CAP still uses the vocabulary: its own history describes Reach 1, the first section out of Lake Havasu, as wider and deeper than the rest and holding about a fifth of all the water in the canal at any moment. The stretch across north Phoenix carried its own number, and when the City of Phoenix turned the land along it into a park, the engineering label became the name on the sign.
Nobody has published a record of anyone proposing a better name, and at this point a rebrand would confuse every soccer parent in the state. Reach 11 is an accidental name that stuck because it was on the maps first.
What it is not
It is not in Scottsdale, though it touches Scottsdale Road. It is not part of the Greenbelt, Scottsdale’s flood-control park system, and it is not a canal path in the sense of the paved Arizona Canal and Crosscut paths; its trails are dirt and wander through the desert beside the water.
The fine print
The City of Phoenix calls Reach 11 a 1,500-acre district park with 18 miles of multi-use trails. Its two named venues are the Reach 11 Sports Complex, with 18 soccer fields and four baseball diamonds, and Horse Lovers Park, built for equestrian events. The rest is open desert: dense, low mesquite and palo verde, unusually green for the north Valley and almost perfectly level, which makes it a different experience from the rocky climbs of the McDowells a few miles east.
The canal next door is a big piece of the state’s water story. The CAP carries Colorado River water uphill about 3,000 feet over its length through 15 pumping plants, and the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, created in 1971, runs it and repays the federal government. When people talk about the drought on the Colorado, this is the pipe the cuts come out of.
A practical note on rules: because Reach 11 is a Phoenix park, Phoenix sets its hours, its trail regulations and its rescue protocol. The city reports more than 200 hiker rescues a year across its desert parks and preserves and asks visitors to read its safety guidance first, which applies even on a trail this flat in July.