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.
The far north runs on two economies, and this guide has the older one. The luxury half, Troon Country Club, Troon North’s two courses and the Four Seasons’ adobe casitas on the far side of the peak, now has its own Troon guide; Estancia’s gated golf sits on this side of the summit, and the Boulders is up on the Carefree line. What’s left here is the peak, the road and the 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 eat one very good steak, and to stand where the cowboy steakhouses stood before driving thirty minutes home.
The peak and the park
Pinnacle Peak Park is 150 city acres wrapped around the 3,169-foot spire, with one well-built trail that runs 1.75 miles each way along the peak’s shoulder: steady climbing, granite steps, interpretive signs and a staffed trailhead with restrooms and water. It doesn’t summit; the last pitch belongs to roped climbers. The park keeps strict hours, sunrise to sunset, and allows no dogs or bikes. The fact that you can walk it at all is the story: development closed the public out in the mid-1990s, and the park reopened on April 20, 2002, after years of residents pushing the city to win access back. Do it on a weekday morning or in the last two hours before the gate closes.
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. Around the peak in Troon, Talavera at the Four Seasons is the resort fine-dining room and owns the sunset; that guide has the rest of the resort-side tables. 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 the hike, the steakhouses and the resorts around them, with every patio booked and the trailhead lot queuing. 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 in 1986, 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
Around the east and north sides of the peak is Troon: Troon Country Club, the Troon North courses, the Four Seasons and Dynamite Grille. South down Pima are Silverleaf and DC Ranch and McDowell Mountain Ranch, the master-planned communities below the Preserve. South and west are Grayhawk, the Princess, TPC and WestWorld and the Airpark. North up Scottsdale Road the boulders carry on into the town of Carefree, with the cowboy bars of Cave Creek next door; northeast up Cave Creek Road and Pima are the private clubs of Desert Mountain, and east past the Preserve the Rio Verde Foothills are where the pavement ends. For a walkable dinner, Kierland and Scottsdale Quarter is the closest place with a sidewalk, about twenty-five minutes away.