Look at a map of the Preserve and the shape explains the name: a big northern body and a mountainous southern one, joined by a thin neck near Dynamite Boulevard and Rio Verde Drive. The city’s 2024 ecological plan calls the Gooseneck the “wildlife linkage between the southern and northern parts of the Preserve.” The science bears that out. A 2012 Game and Fish study counted road kills on Rio Verde Drive and 128th Street, mule deer wore radio collars in 2016, and remote cameras from 2017 to 2019 recorded mountain lions, mule deer and mid-sized carnivores in every part of the Preserve. The Conservancy calls it “the narrowest part of the Preserve.” It’s also where the Preserve has burned. A 1990s fire went through it, and in June 2023 the Diamond Fire scorched about 270 acres of it, leaving the corridor, in the Conservancy’s words, “more vulnerable.” The Gooseneck Trail out of the Fraesfield Trailhead runs through it, and part of it carries the Maricopa Trail designation. Our Gooseneck field-science note has the details. Drive those two roads at dawn and dusk like the deer depend on it, because they do.
The Gooseneck: The Narrow Waist of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve
On a map of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, the Gooseneck is the thin neck joining the northern desert to the mountains. To biologists it is the Preserve's critical wildlife corridor, crossed by two roads; to hikers it is the Gooseneck Trail out of Fraesfield.
In one line
The Gooseneck: The narrow waist of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, crossed by Rio Verde Drive and 128th Street, that links the Preserve's northern desert to its mountains. Biologists treat it as the Preserve's critical wildlife corridor; hikers know it as the Gooseneck Trail.
The 30-second version
- The city's 2024 ecological plan calls the Gooseneck the 'wildlife linkage between the southern and northern parts of the Preserve.'
- Rio Verde Drive and 128th Street cross it; a 2012 Game and Fish study counted road kills on both.
- Mule deer were radio-collared there in 2016, and remote cameras from 2017 to 2019 recorded mountain lions and mid-sized carnivores across the Preserve.
- The Diamond Fire of June 2023 burned about 270 acres of the corridor, by the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy's count.
Shelf
Status
Still in use
In official or everyday use today.
Who said it first
Unknown; the name for the corridor's shape appears in the City of Scottsdale's Preserve plans and the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy's science work
Words that go with it
The lexicon entries this one leans on.
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Places · Still in use
The Preserve
The McDowell Sonoran Preserve, more than 30,500 acres of city-owned mountain and desert bought with voter-approved sales taxes. On weekends it is where Scottsdale hikes; at City Hall it is the third rail.
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Places · Still in use
The McDowells
The McDowell Mountains, the roughly 25-mile range on Scottsdale's northeast edge between the city and Fountain Hills, topped by East End at 4,069 feet. Most of the Scottsdale side is now the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. Locals just say 'the McDowells.'
Where you'll meet it on this site
The guides that carry the full story.
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McDowell Sonoran Preserve
The Gooseneck and the Field Science of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve
The Preserve's two halves are joined by a narrow neck of desert crossed by two roads. What radio collars, 60 trail cameras and GPS-tagged tortoises have shown about whether wildlife actually uses it, and the rest of the volunteer science behind the city's ecological plan.
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McDowell Sonoran Preserve
Fire in the McDowells: The TP Fire, the Rio Fire, the Diamond Fire and a Desert That Wasn't Built to Burn
The Sonoran Desert used to burn once a century or less. The McDowells have burned again and again since 1993: a surveyor's toilet paper at Lost Dog Wash, a lightning fire that took most of the county park in 1995, and a 2023 fire that forced 1,145 people out and scorched the Preserve's narrowest neck. What burned, what grew back, and what to look for on the trail.
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Rio Verde Foothills border / northern desert
Fraesfield Trailhead
A small, award-winning trailhead on an open plateau off Rio Verde Drive, built to disappear into a 360-degree view. Flat rolling trails, serious horse-trailer parking, no drinking water and almost nobody there — the quiet alternative to Brown's Ranch, ten minutes east.
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The McDowell Mountains & northern desert
McDowell Sonoran Preserve
The largest urban preserve in America: 30,500 acres of mountain and saguaro forest that Scottsdale voters taxed themselves — twice — to buy back from the bulldozers. Not a park. A preserve. The difference is the whole point.
Where this comes from
The record behind the entry.
Facts checked: October 3, 2026 • Curated by the Scottsdale.tips editors • Plain-English explainer. Usage changes faster than the record; corrections are welcome.
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Old Town (versus Downtown)
Officially, all of downtown Scottsdale is now 'Old Town.' To longtime locals Old Town is only the few blocks of 1920s storefronts on Main and Brown, and calling the Waterfront or the bar district 'Old Town' marks you as new.
Places · 1963
The Airpark
The 2,600-acre business district around Scottsdale Airport, home to more than 2,500 companies and some 48,000 jobs, the third-largest employment center in Greater Phoenix. 'Working in the Airpark' is the standard North Scottsdale commute, and the name covers the offices, hangars and car dealerships alike.
Places · 1919
Arcadia
The leafy former citrus district at the south foot of Camelback Mountain, between 44th and 68th streets, Camelback Road and the Arizona Canal. Nearly all of it is Phoenix; the strip east of 64th Street is Scottsdale, and the name gets borrowed well beyond both.