What it means
Saguaro Lake and Bartlett Lake are where Scottsdale goes boating. Neither is in the city. Saguaro sits east of the Valley in a canyon of the Salt River, about where the desert starts to fold into mountains; Bartlett lies northeast of Carefree on the Verde River. Both are reservoirs built and run by the Salt River Project, both sit inside the Tonto National Forest, and both fill with ski boats, pontoons and paddleboards from spring through fall.
Locals rarely say the full name. “We’re taking the boat out Saturday” or “going to the lake” means one or the other, and the choice tells you something. Saguaro is the quick trip: closer, smaller and busier, with a marina, a restaurant and the old Desert Belle tour boat. Bartlett is the bigger outing: a longer drive up Cave Creek Road and out a winding forest road, more water, more beaches and fewer people.
Where you’ll meet it
Spring and summer weekend plans, boat-storage ads, the Salt River tubing drive past Saguaro’s turnoff, motorcycle routes through Cave Creek, and the day trips guide.
Where the word came from
The lakes are side effects of the Valley’s water system. The Salt River Project built a staircase of dams down the Salt River below Roosevelt Dam to store water and make power, and Stewart Mountain Dam, built from 1928 to 1930, formed the fourth reservoir on the river. The reservoir behind it became Saguaro Lake, named, without much mystery, for the cactus on its banks; we found no record of who formally chose it. The dam itself takes its name from the Old Stewart Ranch that once stood nearby. The workers’ camp built below it in 1927 later became the Saguaro Lake Guest Ranch.
The Verde was dammed next. SRP built Bartlett Dam from 1936 to 1939, the first dam on the Verde River, and named it and its lake for Bill Bartlett, a government surveyor. Its reservoir is more than twice the size of Saguaro’s, with about 33 miles of shoreline.
Recreation followed the water. The Forest Service manages the shore, and in 1964 a tour boat called the Desert Belle began cruising Saguaro Lake, which it still does, so for two generations of visitors “Saguaro Lake” has meant a narrated boat ride between towering canyon walls.
What it is not
Neither lake is a natural lake; Arizona has very few. Saguaro Lake is not Canyon Lake, the next reservoir up the Salt along the Apache Trail, and Bartlett is not Horseshoe Lake, the smaller reservoir upstream on the Verde.
The fine print
These are working reservoirs first. Their levels rise and fall with snowmelt, releases and the demands of the canal system downstream, so a beach that was underwater in April can be a long walk to the water by September. SRP operates a 13-megawatt generating unit at Stewart Mountain Dam, run mostly in summer. Saguaro Lake holds about 73,613 acre-feet at capacity, averages about 90 feet deep and sits at an elevation of about 1,506 feet. Bartlett can hold about 178,186 acre-feet and reaches 174 feet at its deepest.
The water is not always healthy for fish. Golden algae caused documented fish kills at Saguaro Lake from 2017 to 2019 and again in 2022. Both lakes are still popular for bass, catfish and crappie.
Rules come from the Forest Service. A Tonto Pass is required at most developed sites, and Stewart Mountain Dam was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017, a reminder that the quickest boat lake to Scottsdale is also nearly a century old.