The question we get most about the McDowells that we won’t answer is “where are the petroglyphs?” They’re there, a lot of them. The city’s own plan says their locations should never be made public, and we agree. Here’s what we can tell you: what’s out there, why it’s kept quiet, the law, how to behave if you come across a panel from the trail, and where to go if you want to stand in front of rock art with a clear conscience.
What’s out there
The best public summary is the City of Scottsdale’s McDowell Sonoran Preserve Cultural Resource Master Plan, prepared by Logan Simpson (draft June 2015, approved by the City Council in 2016). Its numbers:
- 76 recorded archaeological sites inside the Preserve: 52 purely prehistoric, 18 purely historic, 6 with both.
- The prehistoric sites include 14 artifact scatters, 11 rock shelters, 9 lithic scatters (some with evidence of quarrying stone for tools), 6 rock features, 5 habitation sites (one with a Hohokam ballcourt), 5 sites with bedrock mortars, 4 petroglyph sites, 2 thermal features, and a couple of others.
- Only about 22,461 of the Preserve’s roughly 30,000 acres had been systematically surveyed, about three-quarters.
That count of four petroglyph sites is badly misleading, and the plan says so. A volunteer inventory, Kalish and Nightwine’s The McDowell Mountain Rock Art Inventory (2007), identified up to 333 formally unrecorded petroglyph sites in one mountainous portion of the Preserve alone. It was a selective survey, not a full sweep, so the real number is higher.
Petroglyphs here are pecked or ground into the dark coating of desert varnish on boulders and cliffs, exposing lighter rock underneath. The city’s 2003 archaeology overview (Meserve) describes designs ranging from geometric patterns to animals and human figures, and notes that what they meant, whether decoration, signs, communication or sacred images, is still debated. Recorded petroglyph sites in the Preserve carry affiliations from the Archaic, Hohokam, Yavapai and Apache, a span of thousands of years, and one recorded historic-period site is a petroglyph. In 2015, people consulting on the plan asked for documentation of a type they described informally as “mug men,” shapes like a “double-handled beer stein mug,” which they considered unique to the Preserve. That work was still on the to-do list when the plan was written.
The rock art sits in a much longer story. The oldest evidence of people in the Preserve is almost 10,000 years old. Archaic hunters and gatherers used rock shelters. Hohokam farmers lived in villages along the washes, and in the centuries after 1450 small bands of Yavapai (Kewevkapaya) used the northern McDowells seasonally, again living in rock shelters. Our history of Scottsdale before 1450 covers the villages.
Why nobody will give you directions
The master plan is direct: archaeological sites are “nonrenewable resources that are highly sensitive to both intentional vandalism and unintentional damage,” so “locational information should always be protected from public disclosure.” It adds a second reason. Many cultural resources on public land have sacred values to tribes, and restricting access to site information “not only preserves the resource, but honors tribal values.”
The people who know these sites told the city what goes wrong. The 2015 stakeholder notes list damage from foot traffic, bicycles and unauthorized campfires; a growing “tagger” culture and the copycat vandalism that follows a first graffiti incident; and geocaching, which Preserve rules forbid. They named a specific rock shelter and a rock formation as endangered by visitation. They asked that guided tours avoid sensitive details “to minimize chance for looting,” and that site locations stay in confidential files. The plan’s own guidance goes further: remote sites are often more vulnerable, because nobody is around to see what happens. Sites with possible buried human remains, such as village sites, should never be on tours at all.
That’s why every responsible map, book and guide, including this one, stops at “in the Preserve.” A geotagged photo on social media undoes all of it.
The law, briefly
The Preserve code. Chapter 21 of the Scottsdale Revised Code requires everyone to stay on designated, posted trails. It forbids anyone to “remove, deface, damage, disturb or excavate” any historical, prehistoric, archaeological or geologic site or feature, “such as petroglyphs,” and to inscribe anything on any natural feature. In the version reprinted in the 2015 master plan, those violations are class 2 misdemeanors, and the court must also order restitution of the city’s costs to repair the damage.
State law. Arizona Revised Statutes § 13-3702 makes it a class 2 misdemeanor to knowingly deface, damage, remove or otherwise harm petroglyphs or pictographs without the owner’s written permission. That applies anywhere in Arizona. The Arizona Antiquities Act (A.R.S. § 41-841 and following) bars excavating archaeological sites and collecting archaeological specimens, petroglyphs included, on land owned or controlled by the state without a permit from the Arizona State Museum. Violations are class 2 misdemeanors, and everything taken is forfeited to the museum (§ 41-846). The city’s master plan reads the permit requirement as covering all cultural-resource work on municipal land, which is why it says any city- or Conservancy-run site-monitoring program would need to be supervised by an archaeologist holding a state permit. If human remains turn up, state law (§ 41-844) sets out notice to tribes and descendants.
Federal law, and where it doesn’t reach. The Archaeological Resources Protection Act, the federal law people usually cite, covers federal public lands and Indian lands. It applies on the Tonto National Forest at the Preserve’s northern edge, and not on city land in the Preserve itself, where the city and state rules above do the work.
Etiquette, if you see a panel from the trail
You may. Some sites are close to trails, and the plan discusses watching the most exposed ones, including petroglyph sites along designated or social trails, with motion-activated cameras. If you notice one:
- Stay on the trail. Off-trail travel is illegal everywhere in the Preserve, and the approach is what wears a site down.
- Don’t touch. No hands on the rock, no chalk, no rubbings, no tracing, no wetting it for a photo. The plan lists “no chalking or rubbings at petroglyphs” among the basics docents should teach.
- Don’t add anything. No cairns, no memorials, no geocaches, no stacked rocks. The plan treats all of them as intrusions to be removed.
- Don’t take anything, including potsherds and stone flakes, which are part of a site.
- Strip the location before you post. Turn off geotagging, and don’t name the trail.
- Report damage to the city’s Preserve office (480-312-7013, the number printed on the city trail map) or a Conservancy steward.
If you’d like to do more than avoid harm, the Arizona Site Steward Program, run by Arizona State Parks since 1987 with more than 800 volunteers, trains people to monitor archaeological sites for land managers. The master plan recommends that the city plug into it.
Where to see rock art legally
McDowell Mountain Regional Park. The county park on the Preserve’s eastern edge has “geometric and zoomorphic petroglyphs throughout the park,” according to its 2019 master plan, and its interpretive ranger “occasionally leads educational hikes to some petroglyphs located closer to the MMRP Nature Center.” That’s the legal way to see rock art in the McDowells. Check the county’s program calendar; see our McDowell Mountain Regional Park page for the park itself.
Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve, Phoenix. Arizona State University has operated and protected this site at 3711 W. Deer Valley Road since 1994. A self-guided gravel trail of about a quarter mile passes petroglyphs, with a small museum and a free audio tour. As of this writing (fall 2026) it’s open mornings a few days a week, with hours that change by season, and it charges admission; check deervalley.asu.edu before you drive. Its rules are a good model for anywhere: stay on the trail, don’t climb on or touch the petroglyphs, and don’t remove rocks, plants or artifacts, because, as the site puts it, this is “a respected site to many Native American communities.”
There’s also the Empie site, outside the Preserve. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the city’s archaeology overview says it holds markings for the summer and winter solstices. A National Register listing doesn’t make it a place to visit, and we won’t treat it as one.
The point
Plenty of hikers pass within sight of McDowell rock art without ever noticing it, and that’s the system working. The panels have lasted centuries because they were hard to find. Enjoy the ones that are meant to be seen, and leave the rest to the archaeologists, the site stewards and the descendant communities whose history they are.