What is Javelina Canyon Trail?
South Mountain’s east end has two trailheads a mile apart, and almost everyone picks the wrong one. Pima Canyon has the ramadas and the crowd. The 46th Street lot, which the city labels the Beverly Canyon Trailhead, has a kiosk, a map and a view, and two trails leave it in opposite directions. Javelina Canyon Trail goes west from the lot and climbs a wide, mellow canyon for about a mile and a half, gaining 465 feet, to a saddle and a three-way junction on the Ridgeline Trail. Beverly Canyon Trail leaves the east end, 1.7 miles with 250 feet of change, crosses the Pima Canyon drainage and meets the Ridgeline from the other side on its way over the range to the Desert Classic. Link them and you have a loop of about 3.7 miles and 600 feet with a ridge-top stretch looking east to the McDowells, Four Peaks and the Superstitions.
It is not a famous hike, and it is better for it. The canyon holds quail, cactus wrens and, true to the name, a herd of javelina that works the washes at dawn. The grades are honest, the footing is mostly good, and it finishes before the day gets hot. For a Scottsdale visitor trying South Mountain for the first time, this is the one to start with.
What you get is a 90-minute loop with a real view, 25 minutes from Old Town, from a lot that is almost never full. What you do not get is water, a restroom, shade in the lot, or any of it after 7 p.m. when the gate closes.
How to hike Javelina Canyon right
Pay nothing, mind the gate. Free. The lot is open 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. and the gate closes at 7; the trails themselves are open to 11 p.m. but you will not have a car to return to.
Get there. Take Scottsdale Road south to Loop 202 west, then I-10 south to Guadalupe Road. Go west to 46th Street and south about a mile until the pavement ends at the trailhead, 8800 S. 46th St., about 25 minutes from Old Town. If your map routes you to Pima Canyon Road, you are headed for the other lot. The lot is small, free and rarely full even on winter weekends, which is the entire reason to know about it. There is no shade in the lot and no facilities; a windshield sunshade is not a joke in March.
Pick the season. October through April is the season, any hour. The canyon is shaded in the first hour after sunrise and an oven by ten from May on. Treat it as a dawn hike in summer; the summer rules apply, and Phoenix closes its trails to dogs at 100 degrees.
Water. None at the trailhead. Pima Canyon has fountains and restrooms, a mile south by car. Carry a liter and a half per person for the loop in cool weather and more from April.
Go counterclockwise. Up Javelina Canyon, which is a gentle climb until the last rocky quarter mile, hard left at the saddle onto Ridgeline for the view of Four Peaks and the Superstitions, then down Beverly Canyon back to the east end of the lot. Allow 90 minutes to two hours. For a longer day, cross the range on Beverly Canyon to the Desert Classic and loop back by Pima Canyon’s lot, about eight miles.
Share the trail. Bikes and horses are allowed on all three trails; Ridgeline sees a fair number of riders coming off the National Trail. Step aside on the blind corners near the saddle.
Wildlife. This is the best place on the mountain to meet javelina; if you meet a herd in the canyon at dawn, stop, let them see you and give them a way out. In spring the canyon floor is rattlesnake country, so watch where you put your feet in the wash sections. The desert wildlife field guide covers both.
Dogs. On leash. Phoenix bans dogs from its trails at 100 degrees or above; keep the dog on a short lead in the washes.
Skip it if you want facilities or a summit. Pima Canyon has the restrooms, the ramadas and the National Trail; the Mormon Trailhead on the north side has the classic climb to Hidden Valley. Come here when those lots are full, or when you want the quail to yourself.
The city that bought a mountain range for $17,000
The range the trail climbs was the Salt River Mountains until Phoenix renamed it, and before that it was the southern wall of the Hohokam world. Hohokam farmers irrigated the Salt River floodplain at the mountain’s north foot for a thousand years and left petroglyphs in its canyons, and their descendants, the Akimel O’odham of the Gila River Indian Community, still hold the land along the mountain’s south side, which is why the park has a hard edge there and a freeway fight in its history.
Phoenix was a town of 30,000 in the early 1920s when a mountain park committee, J.C. Dobbins, Mrs. John Hampton and H.B. Wilkinson among its members, began arguing that the bare range south of the river should belong to the city before anyone else claimed it. The land was federal, and the federal government was willing. In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge sold the first 13,000 acres to the City of Phoenix for $17,000, about a dollar and thirty cents an acre, and Phoenix Mountain Park, soon South Mountain Park, became one of the largest city parks in the country on the day it was created. One newspaper of the day put the figure at 14,000 acres; either way it was the cheapest land Phoenix ever bought.
The Depression built it. In the early 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps cut the summit road, laid the stone ramadas and lookouts, built the trails and left the park most of the infrastructure it still uses. Bond programs in the 1970s and early 1980s pushed the boundary out to today’s 16,283 acres and about 58 miles of trail, by which time the city had grown around the mountain on three sides, Ahwatukee to the south, Laveen to the west and the old south Phoenix neighborhoods to the north. The east end, where this trail is, got two trailheads: Pima Canyon with the facilities, and the plain lot at the end of 46th Street.
The park’s modern fight was the freeway. Maricopa County voters approved the South Mountain Freeway under Proposition 300 in 1985 as part of the regional highway plan, and for thirty years the Gila River Indian Community, through whose land or along whose border the route would have to run, fought it. A 2012 tribal referendum favored no build; environmental groups and the community sued in 2015; the Ninth Circuit rejected the community’s claims in December 2017; and the Loop 202 opened on December 21, 2019, cut through the park’s western foothills on the far side of the range from here. The east end was spared the blasting and got the traffic, as the Valley’s growth keeps filling Pima Canyon’s lot earlier every winter.
What is coming is more people. The park is hemmed in on every side, and the 46th Street lot’s advantage, that nobody knows about it, erodes a little every year.
Why it matters
South Mountain is the oldest and biggest decision Phoenix ever made about open space, a mountain range bought for $17,000 in 1924 and built out by the CCC, and the fact that a 16,000-acre desert park sits inside the sixth-largest city in the country still surprises visitors who assume the Valley paved everything. The freeway through its western foothills is the other half of the lesson: a park boundary is not a guarantee. For a Scottsdale visitor the practical verdict is small and useful. When you want a real South Mountain loop with a view and the Pima Canyon lot is full, which on a winter weekend it will be, drive one mile north to the end of 46th Street, go up Javelina Canyon and down Beverly, and be done before the heat.