What is 40th Street Trailhead?
The Phoenix Mountains Preserve is the band of schist hills that separates Scottsdale from north-central Phoenix, and most visitors only ever see the Piestewa Peak lot on its west end. The 40th Street Trailhead is the east end: a paved lot with a restroom, a drinking fountain and a shade ramada, open 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., free, 12 minutes from Old Town, and three trails that fan out from it. The L.V. Yates Trail (#8) follows an old road south for 2.5 miles out and back, gaining about 220 feet, and within half a mile it crosses the Charles M. Christiansen Memorial Trail (#100), the 10.7-mile multi-use spine that runs the length of the preserve to the North Mountain Visitor Center. The Quartz Ridge Trail (#8A) branches off Yates and climbs 500 feet in 1.7 miles onto a ridge with the city at your feet.
None of it is dramatic. That is the point. These are rolling, well-built, honestly signed trails with views of downtown, Camelback and the back side of Piestewa Peak, used by trail runners, dog walkers, horses from the stables along 40th Street and a steady stream of mountain bikers. For a Scottsdale visitor it is the nearest real desert trail after the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, and it is almost never crowded.
What you get is a quiet, equipped lot and a four-mile loop with one real hill, ten minutes from a hotel. What you do not get is a summit, shade on the trail, or any trail you can call your own on a Saturday morning when the bikes are out.
How to hike 40th Street right
Nothing to pay. Free, no pass, no reservation. The lot gate closes at 7 p.m. and the trails stay open until 11; arrive after seven and you park on the street, legally, without blocking a horse trailer.
Get there. From Old Town take Indian School Road west to 44th Street, north to Lincoln Drive, then west to 40th Street and north about a mile and a half; the trailhead is on the left just before the road ends at the preserve. Alternatively take Scottsdale Road north to Shea Boulevard, west to 40th Street and south. Either way it is about 12 minutes with no traffic. Overflow parks on the street, which the neighbors tolerate as long as nobody blocks a driveway.
Pick the season. October through April is prime, and in the cool months this is a perfect after-work loop with the lot lit by the sunset on Camelback. From May to September hike at first light and be done by nine; the hills face every direction and there is no shade. The summer sunrise rules apply, and when the city posts a heat trail closure it applies to Piestewa’s summit trail, not to these, which are open and still a bad idea at noon.
Water. There is a fountain at the lot and nothing on the trails. Fill up before you go; the preserve’s water catchment along Trail 100 is for wildlife.
Do the loop. Go out on L.V. Yates, climb the ridge on 8A for the downtown and Camelback view, and come back along Trail 100 in the wash: about four miles, one real hill, ninety minutes. Quartz Ridge in March is the best cheap wildflower walk in the city when the brittlebush is going. For distance, keep west on Trail 100 to the Dreamy Draw tunnel under SR 51 and back, a flat ten miles with a restroom at Dreamy Draw.
Share the trail. Trail 100 is a mountain-bike highway on weekend mornings and horses use the whole system. Bikes yield to hikers and everyone yields to horses, but stepping right, making eye contact and saying good morning works better than the rulebook; see the etiquette entry.
Dogs. On leash, on every trail from this lot. The city bans dogs on all trails once the temperature hits 100 degrees, and rangers write tickets; from late May through September that means no dogs after about 9 a.m.
Skip it if you want a summit. This end of the preserve is for distance and quiet; for the climb, drive to Piestewa Peak, and for the north-end views with fewer people, Shaw Butte. The Scottsdale hikes guide covers the McDowells if you would rather stay east of the line.
The mountains the horsemen saved first
The Phoenix Mountains were never anybody’s destination. The Hohokam farmed the Salt River canals to the south and the washes to the north and used the schist ridges between them for hunting and quarrying; the quartz vein that gives Quartz Ridge its name is the kind of thing they came up here for. The ranchers and health seekers of territorial Phoenix rode around the range rather than over it. What the mountains had was openness, and by the 1950s, as the city’s grid pushed north past Camelback Road and then Northern Avenue, that was exactly what the subdivisions wanted.
The first people to object were the ones who used the desert on horseback. In 1962 the Arizona State Horsemen’s Association petitioned to keep the mountains open, an act the preserve’s own historians remember as the grass-roots beginning of the movement; the riders were watching the trails they had used for decades get fenced one section at a time. The county had set aside Squaw Peak and North Mountain as parks, and Squaw Peak, now Piestewa, was the first of the mountain parks to be preserved, but the ridges between them were private and for sale. In August 1970 Dorothy Gilbert and a group of residents founded the Phoenix Mountains Preservation Council to “save the mountains,” and the council spent the next three decades, in its own account, prying roughly 7,000 acres out of the path of the bulldozers through bond elections, land swaps and lawsuits. Most of what is now the preserve was bought in the early 1970s, as the development pressure peaked; the city’s own history says plainly that the land was acquired when houses threatened to swallow the hills.
The trail system was built onto that patchwork. The spine, Trail 100, was laid out to run the whole 10.7 miles of the preserve from the 40th Street end to North Mountain, under the freeway at Dreamy Draw, and named the Charles M. Christiansen Memorial Trail for a former Phoenix parks director who was part of the acquisition years; the L.V. Yates Trail carries another memorial name. The city’s trail pages give the names and not the lives, and I could not find a source for the biographies that I would stand behind. In 1985 Phoenix voters wrote the Desert Mountain Preserves into city law, so that preserve land cannot be sold or built on without a public vote, the same protection Scottsdale would later give its own Preserve. In 2003 Squaw Peak was renamed for Lori Piestewa, the Hopi soldier from Tuba City killed in Iraq that March, and the park and its trails followed.
What has changed since is heat and use. The city’s rule banning dogs from all trails at 100 degrees, and the later closures of the Piestewa summit trail on excessive heat days, came after a run of deaths and rescues on the preserve’s steep west end; the east end, with its rolling trails and its horses, has stayed the quiet side. Trail 100 became one of the most ridden singletracks in the city, and 40th Street, with its ramada and fountain, became the lot bikers and runners use because the Piestewa lots are full. The preserve is now hemmed in by a million people, and from the top of Quartz Ridge you can see every one of their roofs.
Why it matters
The Phoenix Mountains Preserve is the first time the Valley decided a mountain was worth more as empty ground than as lots, and it did so ten years before Scottsdale got around to the McDowells. The horsemen who petitioned in 1962 and the residents who organized in 1970 were not conservationists in the modern sense; they were people losing the places they rode, and they invented the bond-and-charter model that every Valley preserve has used since. For a Scottsdale visitor, 40th Street is the practical result: a free, equipped trailhead 12 minutes from Old Town where the trails are long, the hills are gentle and the lot has a space at nine on a Saturday. Do the loop clockwise, listen for bikes, and be off the ridge before the city turns the heat on.