What it means
The McDowells are Scottsdale’s mountains. They run along the city’s northeast edge like a long brown wall, separating Scottsdale from Fountain Hills, and they are the backdrop for half the city’s real estate photos: granite boulders, saguaro slopes and, on Thompson Peak, a cluster of radio towers that makes the range easy to find from almost anywhere in town.
Locals drop “Mountains” and the first name. “Look at the McDowells tonight” means the sunset glow on the range from your patio. “We hiked the McDowells” means a trail in the Preserve. “North of the McDowells” is a vague direction for the far north country around Tom’s Thumb and Rio Verde. The range also gives its name to a road, a master-planned community, a county park and the city’s signature land preserve.
For trails, trailheads and rules, read the McDowell Sonoran Preserve guide; for the hardest hike in the range, the Thompson Peak guide.
Where you’ll meet it
Real estate listings selling “McDowell views,” the Preserve’s ballot history, and on the far side of the range at McDowell Mountain Regional Park in Fountain Hills.
Where the word came from
The name is a soldier’s. In 1865, California Volunteers set up an Army post on the Verde River, east of the range, to protect travel routes through the Salt and Gila valleys. They called it Camp McDowell, after Major General Irvin McDowell, the Union commander beaten at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861 who later commanded the Army’s Department of the Pacific. It became Fort McDowell in 1867. Supply trails linked it to Fort Whipple at Prescott, and the post’s name spread across the map: to the mountains on its western horizon and, later, to McDowell Road, which ADOT confirms is named for the general.
We found no record of who first wrote “McDowell Mountains” on a map, or exactly when. The most likely path is the obvious one, from the general to the fort to the range the soldiers looked at every evening. McDowell himself never lived here.
The range had names long before the Army arrived. In the Yavapai language it is Wi:kajasa, and Wikipedia describes it as a sacred marker for the Yavapai people, whose Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation now holds the land around the old post.
What it is not
The McDowells are not Camelback, the red-and-gray hump in the middle of the Valley, and not Four Peaks, the four-pointed ridge farther east that often holds winter snow. Fort McDowell, the Yavapai community and casino on the Verde, is a separate place east of the range, covered under Camp McDowell and Fort McDowell.
The fine print
The range is about 25 miles long, framed roughly by Saddleback Mountain to the south and Granite Mountain to the north, and its rocks date back roughly five million years to the Miocene, according to Wikipedia’s summary. Its high point is East End, at 4,069 feet. Thompson Peak, at 3,984 feet, is lower but owns the skyline because of the county’s communications towers. McDowell Peak, Sunrise Peak and Rock Knob fill out the ridgeline.
Most of the Scottsdale side is now public. Voters taxed themselves to buy it, the city says the land has been protected since 1994, and the McDowell Sonoran Preserve has grown past 30,500 acres with more than 230 miles of trails and ten developed trailheads. The nonprofit McDowell Sonoran Conservancy, founded in 1991, is the city’s official partner in caring for it. The east slope is Maricopa County’s regional park, which charges for entry.
Pronunciation is not a trap, for once: mick-DOW-ul, like the general.