What it’s actually like
Drive north on Pima past Pinnacle Peak Road and the city stops pretending. The strip malls thin out, the lots get bigger, the houses disappear behind boulder piles the size of apartment buildings, and a single granite spire — Pinnacle Peak — rises out of the desert to tell you where you are. This is Scottsdale’s far north: high-desert quiet, dark skies, saguaro forest so dense it looks planted, and golf courses threaded through it like green ribbon.
It runs on two economies. One is luxury — Troon North’s two courses, Estancia behind its gates, the Four Seasons’ adobe casitas below the peak, and the Boulders molded into 12-million-year-old rock on the Carefree line. The other is memory. For half a century this was cowboy Scottsdale, the place you brought out-of-towners for a mesquite-grilled steak, a gunfight and a necktie cutting, and the fact that all of that is gone is the thing longtime locals talk about first.
The honest appraisal: it’s beautiful, it’s expensive, and it’s a drive. There is no walkable anything, by design. You come here to hike the peak, to play the golf, to sleep somewhere the stars are the amenity, and to eat one very good dinner before driving thirty minutes home.
Where to eat and drink
The anchor is the one that started it all. Mastro’s Steakhouse opened its first-ever location near Pinnacle Peak and Pima in 1999 — the 1,500-degree broiler, the sizzling plates, the piano lounge — and built the template it later exported to Beverly Hills and New York. It’s still here and still the far north’s power dinner. Talavera at the Four Seasons is the resort fine-dining room, Spanish-accented steaks with the boulder field and Pinnacle Peak lit up outside the glass; it owns the sunset. For the neighborhood meal, Jalapeño Inferno has fed Troon and Pinnacle Peak green chile for decades, in a part of town where restaurants rarely last.
The ghosts are the better story. Pinnacle Peak Patio seated crowds by the thousand from 1957 to 2015 and cut the necktie off anyone who wore one. Reata Pass Steakhouse was built on an 1880s stagecoach stop and run by the Cavalliere family until 2012. Greasewood Flat, next door to Reata, was the open-air burger-and-beer roadhouse where bikers, cowboys and CEOs shared picnic tables around fire barrels for forty years, until the land sold in 2015. Fine dining had its own lost era: Michael’s at the Citadel and its waterfall courtyard, 8700 at the Citadel before it, and Sassi, the hilltop Italian villa that hosted half of Arizona’s dream weddings until its owners retired in 2018. Nothing has replaced any of them. That’s the far north.
Getting there and parking
Loop 101 to Pima Road, then north. Pima carries you past DC Ranch to Pinnacle Peak Road; Alma School Parkway continues north from there toward Troon and the Four Seasons, and Dynamite Boulevard runs east-west across the top. From Old Town it’s thirty to forty minutes; from the Airpark, fifteen to twenty.
Parking is free everywhere and abundant everywhere except Pinnacle Peak Park, whose lot fills on winter weekend mornings and turns into a controlled queue. Arrive at opening or come in the last two hours before dusk. The resorts valet and self-park; Mastro’s has a lot that gets tight at 7 p.m. on a Saturday.
When to go
Peak season is peak season: January through April for golf and the resorts, with the Four Seasons and the Boulders at full rate and Troon North tee times booked well ahead. February and March are the busiest, and the Pinnacle Peak trail is a conga line on Saturday mornings. Go on a weekday or at the edges of the day.
The far north’s best month is October, when the heat breaks, the resort rates haven’t climbed yet, and the light on the granite goes gold by 5 p.m. Summer is the shoulder-season bargain of the whole city — the resorts discount hard in July and August, the monsoon storms over the peak are the best show in Arizona, and the hike is fine if you’re on the trail at sunrise and off by eight.
How it got this way
The far north was ranch and stagecoach country long before it was Scottsdale — Reata Pass was a stop on the road to Fort McDowell in the 1880s — and it stayed that way until the 1950s, when a couple of steakhouses discovered that tourists would drive an hour into the desert for a mesquite-grilled steak and a cowboy show. Pinnacle Peak Patio opened in 1957, Reata Pass in 1958, and Rawhide built a whole 1880s town on Scottsdale Road in 1971. For a generation, “north Scottsdale” meant this: dirt lots, fire barrels, neckties on the rafters.
The 1980s changed the equation. The Boulders opened in 1985 and proved that luxury could sit in the rock without paving it. Then came the golf: Troon, Troon North in the 1990s, Estancia, and the Four Seasons in 1999, and the same year Mastro’s decided the far north could support a steakhouse with a piano bar instead of a gunfight. Land that had been worth almost nothing was suddenly worth everything, which is why Rawhide left in 2005, Reata Pass closed in 2012, and Pinnacle Peak Patio and Greasewood Flat both went in 2015.
The city fought back for the mountain, at least. When development locked the public out of Pinnacle Peak in the 1990s, residents spent seven years getting it back, and the park reopened in 2002 as a city-run trail with a ranger station. George “Doc” Cavalliere Park, opened in 2012 near Troon and named for the family that ran Reata Pass, made the point in a different way — 34 acres of native stone and native plants that refused to fight the desert. Out on Scottsdale Road, CIVANA reborn from the old Carefree Resort and the tiny Florence Ely Nelson Desert Park with its splash pad in the saguaros are the two faces of what the far north is becoming: quieter, more careful, and still faintly haunted by mesquite smoke.
Nearby
South down Pima are DC Ranch and McDowell Mountain Ranch, the master-planned communities below the Preserve. South and west is the working heart of North Scottsdale and the Airpark, with the Princess, TPC and WestWorld. For a walkable dinner, Kierland and Scottsdale Quarter is the closest place with a sidewalk, about twenty-five minutes away.