Why it matters
Scottsdale bought its mountains instead of zoning them, and the reason is a volunteer group that first met in a library meeting room on November 17, 1990. The McDowell Sonoran Land Trust, incorporated two months later, set a target that sounded absurd, roughly a third of the city held as desert forever, and then did the one thing that made it possible: it stopped trying to buy land and persuaded the city to.
The council established the McDowell Sonoran Preserve on October 3, 1994, voters funded it on May 23, 1995 and again on May 18, 2004, and the Trust, renamed the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy in 2005, took a second job. Since 1998 it has trained the blue-shirted Preserve stewards who patrol the trails, staff the trailheads, build tread, lead free hikes and run a citizen-science institute. More than 650 of them gave about 72,000 hours in fiscal 2025. The Conservancy owns none of the land. That is the arrangement, and the arrangement is the story.
Where to find it today
The trailheads. On cool-season mornings a steward sits at the Gateway Trailhead table and at Brown’s Ranch, where the half-mile Jane Rau Interpretive Trail carries a founder’s name. The best hikes guide covers what lies behind them.
The programs. Free guided hikes and bike rides, school programs, and the research of the Parsons Field Institute, all listed on the Conservancy’s site.
The partner. The city’s Preserve staff and the seven-member Preserve Commission are the other two legs; the Preserve and the voters guide explains who decides what.
How it started
In 1990 Scottsdale sprawled across 185 square miles and the McDowells were being graded from the bottom up. The range was a checkerboard: private ranch land, failed subdivisions and State Trust land, which the state must sell or lease for the schools, usually to the highest bidder. Jane Rau, who later said it “made me almost cry to see beautiful saguaros and plants bulldozed out of the ground,” was one of about a dozen people at the Mustang Library on November 17, 1990: Rau, Karen Bertiger, mountaineer Pete Chasar, Nature Conservancy staffer Marilynn Pauwels, Trust for Public Land’s Tracy Conner, botanist Stephen M. Jones, attorney Frederick Davidson and others. The Greater Pinnacle Peak Homeowners Association put up $1,000.
On January 21, 1991, Rau and Bertiger signed the incorporation papers. Rau’s own 1993 account notes that Arizona law would not allow “trust” in a corporate name, so the filing read McDowell Sonoran Land Conservancy while everyone called it the Land Trust. The IRS granted tax exemption on May 20, 1991. In March, Chasar became chair, Bertiger treasurer and Rau secretary, and the Trust joined the Land Trust Alliance. In 1992 the board grew to include Chet Andrews, who later chaired it, and the Woodall siblings, archaeologist Greg and his sister Carla, who would run the politics.
The first years looked like any small land trust: a quarterly newsletter, Mountain Lines, from 1993; free hikes; a fourth-grade program; a T-shirt fundraiser; a bid for Saddleback Mountain through the Resolution Trust Corporation. Developers began setting land aside, SunCor’s 600-plus acres at Scottsdale Mountain among them. But buying a mountain range at retail was beyond any volunteer group, and the Trust knew it.
The decisions that locked it in
Let the city buy it. Chet Andrews studied the patchwork of ownership and proposed that Scottsdale acquire the land, using exchanges with private owners where it could. Carla put it bluntly in 2000: “We realized we weren’t going to raise that money selling T-shirts, so we went to the city.” The Trust lobbied, polled and campaigned, and the council of Mayor Herb Drinkwater, who had spent the decade annexing the foothills, adopted Resolution 4103 on October 3, 1994, establishing a Preserve on three city-owned parcels totaling 2,860 acres. On May 23, 1995, 64% of voters approved a 30-year 0.2% sales tax to buy more. In 1998 voters backed a boundary roughly doubling the goal, and on May 18, 2004 they added 0.15% and $500 million in bond authority. The Preserve would be public, forever, and the Trust would own none of it.
Train the stewards. With land coming into city hands faster than city staff could manage, the Trust in 1998 partnered with Scottsdale Community College to train Preserve Stewards, fewer than 100 in the first class. Stewards began wearing blue shirts in 2001. The program turned a lobbying group into an operating one: more than 650 volunteers today across nine programs, from patrol and trailhead ambassadors to construction and youth education, each committing 60 hours a year.
Change the name. In August 2005, with buying well underway, the Land Trust became the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy, a name chosen to reflect its role as the city’s caretaker partner. Sandy Bahr had become the first full-time executive director in 1997; Carla held the job by 2000.
Add science, and sign the contract. In 2010 the Conservancy founded a Field Institute, seeded by an anonymous donor in 2009 and a Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust grant in 2010, to put volunteers to work on a baseline inventory of the Preserve. It published a 730-species inventory in 2014 and co-wrote the city’s Ecological Resource Plan in 2016. The same years formalized the partnership: a 2010 strategic plan and memorandum of understanding, then in December 2011 a council-approved agreement under which, in the city’s words, “the City owns, operates, and maintains the Preserve and the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy provides staff, citizen scientists, and stewards.” In June 2018 the Bob and Renee Parsons Foundation’s $600,000 grant put the Parsons name on the institute, and a $1.5 million multi-year grant followed.
The years it nearly ended
The first danger was a target too large for its means; the Trust escaped it by giving the job to the city. The second was subtler. In 2015 the city contracted with a separate nonprofit, Desert Discovery Center Inc., led by former mayor Sam Campana, to plan a $68 million, 47,586-square-foot education and tourism center on Preserve land south of the Gateway Trailhead; Swaback Partners was hired for design in 2016. Supporters, who called it Desert Edge, saw desert education; opponents saw buildings on land voters had taxed themselves to keep natural. The Conservancy, consulted by the planners and bound to the city as its partner, kept its head down. The fight was led by Protect Our Preserve, whose president Howard Myers said more than 200 volunteers gathered over 30,000 signatures, and by Jason Alexander’s No DDC group, against a Protect Your Preserve committee that defended the council’s right to decide. On November 6, 2018, Prop 420 amended the charter with about 71% of the vote, carrying every precinct, and the center was finished after the city had spent about $1.4 million on it. The Conservancy’s partnership survived; its claim to be the Preserve’s voice did not go unchallenged.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The founding purpose was acquisition by persuasion: keep the McDowells out of backyards. By the mid-2000s the city had done most of the buying, and the mission statements track the change, from “preserves and advances natural open space through science, education and stewardship” in 2020 to the current, more local version: “We lead conservation in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve and enhance community well-being through stewardship, science, and education.”
The division of labor is settled. The city’s Preserve staff, a director (Jenna Kohl as of 2026), a manager, a coordinator, four supervisors, a maintenance worker and two part-timers, spends about $3.1 million a year from the 18% share of the 2024 Prop 490 tax set aside for the Preserve, and hires professional trail crews to supplement the stewards. The seven-member McDowell Sonoran Preserve Commission advises the council. The Conservancy, with a staff of about ten under chief executive Angy Shearer, supplies the volunteers and the science. The hikers and retirees who founded it still fill the steward classes. The risk is the one 2018 exposed: an organization whose work happens entirely on a partner’s land, under a partner’s agreement, has limited room to oppose that partner.
Who the record leaves out
The other founders. Pete Chasar wrote to High Country News in 2001 to object that a profile of Carla and Greg Woodall made it seem they had created the campaign alone; the incorporators and a core of ten to fifteen people on the city’s 1993 task force were, he said, “the tip of the iceberg.”
The ranchers and the schools. Every acre was bought, from ranch families like the Browns and from the State Land Department, whose auctions are run for Arizona’s schoolchildren; what the schools’ trust gave up is in no record we found.
The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. The McDowells rise from land the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash have lived beside for centuries, and the Community’s reservation lies along Scottsdale’s eastern edge. The Conservancy’s Past Finders program documents archaeological sites, but the Community does not appear in the organization’s founding story or its governance.
The paid staff. An organization that valued its donated labor at $1.5 million a year in 2020 has a staff of about ten doing the unglamorous work, under three chief executives since 2018. Their perspective is absent from the record.
What it didn’t have to become
It did not have to become a steward program on someone else’s land. The Land Trust Alliance model it joined in 1991 was built for trusts that hold land and easements, and the Trust tried that path with its Saddleback bid. Had it bought parcels with private money, Scottsdale might today have a patchwork of small private preserves, as many western cities do, instead of one public Preserve guarded by the city charter. Chet Andrews’s 1992 insight traded ownership for scale; the 1995 vote proved him right, and the 1998 steward program gave the Trust a reason to exist once the buying was done. It came close to being a footnote, a group that saved a mountain and then had nothing left to do. Instead it put on blue shirts.