Camelback is the mountain every Scottsdale concierge sends you to, and it isn’t in Scottsdale. Both trailheads are in Phoenix, pressed against the Paradise Valley town line, ten to fifteen minutes west of Old Town. Nobody here cares about the technicality. It’s our home mountain, and it has two ways up.
They end at the same place — a 2,704-foot summit with the whole Valley laid out below it — and they make for very different mornings.
Echo Canyon: the short, steep one
Echo Canyon starts from the lot at 4925 E. McDonald Drive and runs 1.14 miles one way, gaining roughly 1,400 feet. The first stretch is stairs and built tread. Then the trail runs out of ideas and becomes slabs and boulders, with steel handrails bolted into the steepest pitches because there is no other way to get a tourist up that rock.
Pick Echo Canyon if you want the shortest line to the top, you’re comfortable using your hands, and you don’t mind company. There will be company.
Cholla: the long, pleasant one with a sting
Cholla climbs the mountain’s east end from the rebuilt trailhead on Invergordon Road: 1.5 miles one way and about 1,420 feet. The first mile is a graded ridge walk with Paradise Valley’s rooftops and the Phoenician’s fairways dropping away beneath you — the rare Valley climb you can do while holding a conversation. The last half mile is where the conversation stops. The summit block is boulder scrambling with real exposure, and it takes nearly as long as the mile before it.
Cholla spent two and a half years closed after a hiker was hit by a loose boulder in 2020. The city pulled the unstable rock, rebuilt the tread, moved the trailhead off Cholla Lane, and reopened it on September 29, 2022. It’s the route we send friends on: longer, prettier, quieter, and the ridge is a respectable place to turn around.
Both trails carry Phoenix’s “extremely difficult” rating. Neither is a stroll. If your group wants a real climb without the scrambling, drive north to Pinnacle Peak instead — it and the rest of the north end are in north Scottsdale’s other hikes.
Parking is the first crux
On both sides of the mountain, the parking is harder than the hike.
- Echo Canyon has a small gated lot. When it fills, the gate closes — no queue, no circling. In season that’s late morning on weekdays and most of the day on weekends. McDonald Drive and Tatum Boulevard are posted and patrolled, and the neighbors call it in.
- Cholla has no lot at all, just a short row of legal street spaces in posted sections along Invergordon. They’re gone by sunrise in season, and anything parked outside the signs gets towed.
- The answer is rideshare. Both trailheads have marked drop-off zones, and from a Camelback-corridor resort like Sanctuary or the Camelback Inn it’s a short ride. A drop-off costs less than a tow and removes the worst variable of the day.
The rules
- Sunrise to sunset. Both trails keep those hours.
- Heat closures. When the National Weather Service issues an Extreme Heat Warning, Phoenix closes both trails from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and the program has been triggered as early as March. From May through September, Camelback is a sunrise mountain or no mountain; the summer sunrise rules apply to the letter.
- No dogs. Not on either trail. The slabs are too hot and too technical for paws.
- Unscheduled closures happen. Storms loosen rock, and the city shuts a trail for boulder and gate work when it has to — Echo Canyon was closed for about two months at the end of 2025. Check the city’s Camelback trails page the morning you go, not the week before.
Why the helicopters fly
Camelback is one of the most-hiked and most-rescued mountains in the country. Phoenix Fire runs roughly two hundred mountain rescues a year across the city’s preserves, and a heavy share of them happen here. The stories have a pattern: a visitor, a trail that looked short on the map, a 10:00 AM start, one bottle of water for the group, and a call that comes on the way down.
The descent is where Camelback hurts people. Quads are cooked, the same slabs have to be reversed facing the drop, and loose grit on granite behaves like ball bearings. Our protocol:
- Start at first light. In summer, be walking before the sun clears the McDowells.
- Carry a liter per person minimum, two when it’s warm. There’s water at the trailheads and none above them.
- Wear real shoes with grip. Fashion sneakers are how ankles go.
- Keep your hands free — a small pack, not a bottle you have to hold.
- Turn around at the halfway mark if you’re not enjoying the climb. If the up is miserable, the down will be worse.
- Descend slowly, facing in on the steep slabs, with three points of contact.
Why it’s worth it anyway
The mountain is public at all because of a fight. Houses were climbing its flanks through the postwar boom, and in 1965 Barry Goldwater put his name behind the campaign to buy the high ground; in 1968 it became a Phoenix park. The 1960s page has the wider story of the decade the Valley started deciding what it wanted to keep.
The payoff is the best summit view in the Valley: the Papago buttes and downtown to the southwest, Four Peaks and the McDowells to the east, and Scottsdale’s grid shining between them.
The version we’d do
A weekday in November. Rideshare to Invergordon at first light, Cholla up the ridge, a slow and honest scramble to the top, and back down by 8:30. Breakfast at Lon’s at the Hermosa, ten minutes away. Save the Gateway Loop for tomorrow; your legs will have opinions.