What it means
Western Week is the name on the banners in Old Town for roughly nine days at the turn of January into February, when the city’s cowboy events stack up in one stretch: mail carried in by riders on horseback, galleries pouring wine under Western art, Native dancers on the Civic Center lawn, and a parade of horses, wagons and marching bands down Scottsdale Road. It is the one week a year when the old slogan, the West’s Most Western Town, stops being a sign and becomes a schedule.
Locals use it as a calendar marker more than an event. “Let’s do dinner after Western Week” means after the parade crowds clear. Restaurant owners talk about it the way they talk about spring training: a known surge with a known end. And because the WM Phoenix Open usually follows the next week, the two together make up the city’s busiest winter fortnight.
The day-by-day program, parking and what is free are in the Western Week event guide. This page explains the name.
Where you’ll meet it
On city and tourism calendars from December on, on light-pole banners in Old Town, in gallery mailers for the Western ArtWalk, and in parade-week news coverage.
Where the word came from
The pieces are decades old. Merchants started a winter festival in 1951 to give the new slogan an event to point at, and it became the Parada del Sol in 1953. The Hashknife Pony Express, the Navajo County Sheriff’s Posse riding postmarked mail from Holbrook, has arrived for it since 1958. The Arizona American Indian Tourism Association brought its Arizona Indian Festival to the Civic Center lawns in the 2010s.
What was new in 2017 was the wrapper. The city’s tourism and events office, looking for a way to tie together the major events it already hosted, packaged them as Western Week, with a name, a schedule and a single marketing push. Karen Churchard, the city’s director of tourism and events, has described it as a way to incorporate events the city was already putting on. Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West, which had opened on January 15, 2015, gave the week an institutional anchor with free admission days and film programs.
The record is clear on the start date. When the city announced the 2018 edition, February 3 to 11 with the 65th parade on February 10 and the theme “Scottsdale: Past, Present and Future,” it called it the second consecutive Western Week.
What it is not
It is not the rodeo. The Parada del Sol Rodeo, now billed as Rodeo Scottsdale, is a separate ticketed event at WestWorld, usually in March. And it is not 70 years old, whatever a headline says.
The fine print
The numbering causes the most confusion. The parade has its own count, the 73rd falling on February 6, 2027, and some coverage simply attaches that number to the week: a 2023 Arcadia News headline announced the “69th annual Western Week” for what was the city’s sixth or seventh edition. The parade’s own count has gaps, including the pandemic cancellation of 2021, so even its number is a tradition more than an audit.
The schedule moves with the parade. The 2026 week ran January 24 to February 1 and was the city’s 75th-anniversary edition, ending with the parade on January 31. Organizers sometimes shift the week to avoid colliding with the NFL’s championship weekend or the Phoenix Open, so the city posts each year’s schedule in December rather than fixing a formula.
Who runs what is a partnership. The city’s tourism office owns the brand and the overall schedule. The Scottsdale Charros run the parade and Trail’s End Festival, the sheriff’s posse runs the Pony Express, the Indian tourism association runs its festival, and the galleries run the ArtWalk. Most of it is free, which is the point: the week was built to get residents downtown as much as visitors.