What is Lake Pleasant Regional Park?
Lake Pleasant is the big one. Where Saguaro and Bartlett are river canyons with water in them, this is a Central Arizona Project reservoir, filled by Colorado River water pumped up from the CAP canal behind New Waddell Dam as much as by the Agua Fria, and when it is full it spreads across the desert north of Peoria in a maze of coves and islands, from about 3,000 acres at its lowest to nearly 10,000 at the top. The county park around it is 23,362 acres, and it exists mostly for boats: ten-lane and four-lane ramps, two marinas, and summer weekends when the lake hits capacity and trailers are turned away.
For a visitor without a boat it still works. Swimming is allowed in any cove not posted, with Fireman’s Cove the family beach and Humbug and Coles Bay for paddlers, and no lifeguards anywhere. Kayaks launch from the day-use areas for $3. The Discovery Center near the dam, expanded in 2016 with the Bureau of Reclamation, explains how the water system works and runs the ranger programs, including the after-dark scorpion walks that fill their registration lists every warm month. Feral burros graze the roadsides at dusk. And there are 18.8 miles of trail: the 1.9-mile Pipeline Canyon Trail, which follows the shoreline and partly floods at high water; the 1.5-mile Yavapai Point climb (399 feet) for the view; the 4.4-mile Beardsley and 2-mile Wild Burro along the west side; and a half-mile interpretive loop between the Roadrunner campground and the Discovery Center.
What you get is the most water, the most coves and the only shoreline hike in the Valley, with flush toilets, showers and a store. What you do not get is quiet in summer, a fixed shoreline, or saguaros to the water’s edge. The Pipeline Canyon trailhead is closed November 10, 2026 through March 10, 2027 for a rehabilitation project; the trail stays reachable from the Cottonwood and Wild Burro day-use areas. The campgrounds have their own guide.
How to do Lake Pleasant right
Pay like this. $10 per vehicle in 2026 and 2027, $12 from 2028, plus $5 per motorized boat or $3 per paddlecraft. The county annual pass is $120 and covers the car, not the boat. Day use needs no reservation; campsites, boat-in camping and ramadas book through the county.
Get there. Loop 101 west to I-17 north, exit Carefree Highway (SR 74) and go west 15 miles to Castle Hot Springs Road at milepost 19, then north to the main entrance. Figure 55 minutes from Old Town. Everything is paved. Inside, roads run north along the west shore to the campgrounds, the ramps, the Discovery Center and the trailheads. On summer weekends the lots at the ramps and coves fill by mid-morning and the gate turns boats away when the lake hits capacity.
Pick the season. Open year round. October through April is for hiking and quiet; April through October is for the water, and the lake is cold at depth even in July. November through March the boat traffic drops to anglers and the lake is at its most beautiful. The county warns about rapidly changing depth as CAP draws the lake down through summer; the shoreline can move 50 vertical feet in a year.
Water and rules. Drinking water and flush restrooms at the day-use areas, campgrounds and Discovery Center; showers at the campgrounds. Glass is banned in the park. No lifeguards anywhere, life jackets strongly recommended, cliff jumping prohibited.
Swim here, paddle there. Fireman’s Cove is the family beach; Humbug Cove and Coles Bay are for people with a kayak. Launch paddlecraft from the day-use areas early, before the wake boats and the afternoon wind; the coves on the north arms stay calm longest.
Walk the shore. Pipeline Canyon is the cool-season walk, 1.9 miles one way with 202 feet of gain, partly underwater when the lake is high. This winter start from the Wild Burro day-use area and walk the connecting trail. Yavapai Point is the view hike. The Discovery Center loop is the one for small children, who will mostly want the scorpion walk anyway.
Dogs and burros. Dogs on a six-foot leash, licensed; they may swim where you swim. Drive the park roads slowly at dusk, because the burros stand in them, and do not feed them.
Skip it if you want a desert lake with saguaros to the water and a real beach; Butcher Jones at Saguaro Lake is closer and prettier. For shoreline camping on sand without the crowds, Bartlett Lake. For the most water, the most coves and a kayak day in February, nothing in the Valley beats this.
The farm dam that became a tank for the Colorado River
The Agua Fria is a desert river that runs hard for a few weeks and not at all for months, and the first people to try to make it behave were farmers. The canyon above Peoria had been Hohokam country and then Yavapai; the prospectors who followed left their pack burros behind when the placers quit, and the herd that stands in the park roads at dusk is theirs. In 1888 the Agua Fria Water and Land Company formed to irrigate 100,000 acres of the west Valley, and George Beardsley’s crews started a dam in 1892. Beardsley died in 1895, the money ran out in 1896, and for thirty years the project was a canal with no reservoir, the Beardsley Canal, and a hole in the canyon.
The Beardsley-Agua Fria Water Conservation District picked it up again in 1925, signing a construction contract on December 20 for a concrete multiple-arch dam whose design engineer Carl Pleasant had helped draft a decade earlier. It was finished in October 1927 at more than $3.3 million, and for a moment the Carl Pleasant Dam was the largest multiple-arch dam in the world, holding 157,600 acre-feet for the Maricopa Water District’s farms around Beardsley and Waddell. It cracked almost at once; the dedication slipped to February 1928, the state made the district cut the spillway down 24 feet in 1929, and a rehabilitation with a new steel roadway finished in 1935. In the early 1960s it was renamed Waddell Dam, for Donald Waddell, who had helped finance it, and in 1965 Maricopa County formed a regional park around the 3,700-acre irrigation lake it held, a fishing reservoir with dirt roads to the shore.
The second dam was a consolation prize. The Central Arizona Project, under construction from 1973, had planned its storage at Orme Dam on the Salt and Verde at Fort McDowell; the Yavapai Nation refused to be flooded out, and in April 1984 Congress approved Plan 6, which moved the storage here. The Bureau of Reclamation began New Waddell Dam in 1985, an earth-and-rock embankment 4,700 feet long and 440 feet high from bedrock, a half mile below the old dam. In late 1992 engineers breached two arches of the old Pleasant Dam so the new lake could rise over it, and by 1994 the reservoir held 1,108,600 acre-feet, nearly three times the old lake’s area, with a pump-generating plant that lifts CAP water in from the canal each winter and lets it flow back out each summer. The whole thing cost more than $625 million. The old dam is still down there, under the water off the Discovery Center.
Then the drought arrived with the lake. It took until early 2005, through the driest decade in the Valley’s modern record, for the enlarged reservoir to reach full capacity for the first time, and the county spent those years and the ones since rebuilding the park around a shoreline that now rises and falls 50 feet a year by design: the ten-lane ramp, the campgrounds, the marinas, and the Discovery Center expanded with Reclamation in 2016. Peoria annexed the park and its surroundings and had resort plans for the shore until the 2008 crash paused them. The latest project is the Pipeline Canyon trailhead, closed from November 10, 2026 to March 10, 2027 for a rebuild, which tells you how the county now sees the lake: as a park people walk at, not only a place to launch a boat.
Why it matters
Lake Pleasant is the Valley’s plumbing made visible. It began as a private farm dam, failed slowly, became a county fishing lake, and was then absorbed into the biggest water project in Arizona history as the storage tank for Colorado River water that could not be stored where the engineers first wanted it. Every winter rise and summer drop you see from the Pipeline Canyon Trail is the CAP breathing. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is practical: the most water within an hour of Old Town, best between November and March, with a swim in Fireman’s Cove, a kayak in Humbug, burros at dusk and a Discovery Center that explains where the tap water comes from. Pay the boat fee, skip the summer weekends, and watch the road for donkeys.