What is Deem Hills Recreation Area?
Deem Hills is a cluster of dark volcanic hills between I-17 and the Stetson Valley and Norterra subdivisions in far north Phoenix, and the city has kept almost 1,000 acres of it as a recreation area. The rock is basalt, black and blocky, which gives the place a different character from the granite of the McDowells or the schist of the Phoenix Mountains: the saguaros grow straight out of broken lava, and the trails are gravelly rather than sandy. The Circumference Trail runs 5.7 miles around the outside with 306 feet of elevation change; the Ridgeline Trail, 1.5 miles and 353 feet, climbs over the top to the system’s high point at 2,050 feet and is the one piece the city rates difficult. From the East Trailhead a handful of shorter trails, Basalt (0.6 miles), Palisade (1.5 miles, 395 feet) and Water Tank Road (0.4 miles), climb the east face, and the CAP Road Trail (1.6 miles) follows the Central Arizona Project canal along the southern edge.
It is a neighborhood preserve first. Dog walkers, trail runners and kids on bikes use it daily, and the west half looks out over rooftops. But the loop is long enough to be a real training lap, the ridge view takes in the whole north Valley to the McDowells and Four Peaks, and it is never crowded.
What you get is a free two-hour workout with real footing, a short summit and a view, 35 minutes from Old Town and never full. What you do not get is water, a toilet, shade, scenery that beats the Sonoran Preserve across the freeway, or an escape from the subdivision on the west side.
How to hike it right
Pay nothing, mind the gate. Free, no reservation. Both lots are open from 5 a.m. (the trailhead pages say 6) to 7 p.m. and the trails until 11; park outside if you will be late. The lots do not fill.
Get there. Take Loop 101 west to I-17 north, exit at Happy Valley Road and go west, then north on 39th Avenue to the East Trailhead at 27428 N. 39th Ave., about 35 minutes from Old Town. For the West Trailhead at 26606 N. Deem Hills Pkwy., continue west on Happy Valley to Deem Hills Parkway and turn north; it sits beside Deem Hills Park with its dog park and ball fields. Neither lot has shade.
Pick the route. Start at the East Trailhead, climb Palisade to the Ridgeline for the view across the Valley to the McDowells and Four Peaks, and come down the Circumference on the north side, where the basalt is darkest and the saguaros thickest; that is about four miles and the best of the place. The full Circumference is a good flat-ish trail run and a beginner mountain-bike lap, but the west half has the subdivision in view, so hikers can skip it without missing much. The CAP canal road along the south edge is flat, open and shadeless, and the neighborhood walks dogs there at dusk.
Pick the season. October through April. Black rock radiates: from May through September be on the trail at first light and done by nine, the summer rules apply, and the Ridgeline is the first place to feel it.
Water. The city says water at the East Trailhead is unavailable until further notice, and there is none on the trails. Treat the area as dry and carry what you need.
Footing. Basalt is sharp. Ankles roll on the Ridgeline and Palisade descents, and dogs’ paws take a beating on the hot black rock from April on. Boots, not sandals.
Shared trails and dogs. Hiking, biking and horses throughout; expect riders on weekend mornings. Dogs on leash, and Phoenix bans dogs on all city trails at 100 degrees or above.
Skip it if you came for scenery over exercise. For a prettier version of the same morning, Apache Wash is fifteen minutes east; for a real summit, Daisy Mountain is up the interstate; for the same basalt with a reservoir view, Thunderbird Conservation Park is 15 minutes south; and Lookout Mountain is the closer short climb on the way home.
A homestead, a canal and a thousand acres the subdivisions went around
The hills are older than everything around them by a margin the name hides. Lava flows about 1.6 million years old cap the Precambrian granite underneath, and the black, blocky basalt that gives the trails their names and their footing is what is left when a flow weathers in a desert. Below the hills the washes run toward Skunk Creek and the Agua Fria, and the Hohokam farmed where they spread; the hills themselves were a landmark on open desert far north of the Salt River villages and stayed that way through the Spanish and territorial periods, grazed, crossed and otherwise left alone.
The name arrived in 1922, when Dennis and Carl Deem began homesteading 160 acres of desert just southwest of the hills. It was a hard place to prove up a claim, dry range 20 miles north of a town of 30,000, and the family’s name outlasted whatever they built; for the next sixty years the Deem Hills were cattle country at the far edge of anything Phoenix called itself. The first thing to change the hills’ shape was water for somebody else. The Central Arizona Project cut its concrete canal along the hills’ southern foot in the 1970s and 1980s on the way from the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson, and the maintenance road beside it is the flat gravel CAP Road Trail you walk today; the canal is the straightest line in the recreation area and the only one with a purpose other than recreation.
Phoenix got there in the 1980s and 1990s, annexing north toward Happy Valley Road and the Carefree Highway and, for once, planning before it built. The city’s experience with the Phoenix Mountains, saved in the 1970s after the houses had already surrounded them, taught it to set land aside first; it published a Desert Preserve Preliminary Plan in 1994 and adopted the Sonoran Preserve Master Plan on February 17, 1998 for the country across I-17. Deem Hills was handled as a recreation area rather than a preserve unit, a city-park designation with the same practical result: when Stetson Valley and Norterra built out against the hills’ west and south sides in the 2000s, almost 1,000 acres of basalt stayed open, with the Deem Hills community park, dog park and ball fields at the west edge where the houses meet the rock.
The trails are the newest thing. In the 2010s the city built the East and West trailheads, the 5.7-mile Circumference around the whole area, the Ridgeline over the 2,050-foot top and the short Palisade, Basalt and Water Tank connectors, with money from the Parks and Preserve Initiative sales tax that also paid for the Sonoran Preserve’s 36 miles across the freeway. The city has not published an opening date for the trailheads, and I have not found one; what the trailhead pages do say is that the East lot’s water has been off until further notice for long enough that regulars have stopped expecting it.
What has changed lately is use rather than land. The neighborhood runs the Circumference, rides it, and walks dogs on the canal road at dusk; the city’s 100-degree dog ban applies here as everywhere in Phoenix; and the view from the Ridgeline now includes a lot more roofs to the south than it did when the Deems were proving up their claim.
Why it matters
Deem Hills is what the Valley’s preserve movement looks like at neighborhood scale: not a mountain saved by a citywide vote, but a thousand acres of hard black rock that the subdivisions went around because the city drew the line before the lots were sold. It explains the difference between a preserve and a recreation area, why the CAP canal runs along its foot, and why a homesteader’s name from 1922 is on a trailhead sign. For a Scottsdale hiker the verdict is modest and honest: it is a good two-hour loop with real footing and a view, never crowded, 35 minutes away, and the Palisade-to-Ridgeline climb is worth doing once; for scenery, cross the freeway to Apache Wash.