What is the Lookout Mountain Summit Trail?
Lookout Mountain is a single volcanic-looking knob rising about 500 feet out of a north Phoenix neighborhood between Greenway and Bell roads. It is not volcanic; it is the same 1.7-billion-year-old metamorphic rock as the rest of the Phoenix Mountains, left standing when the valley around it dropped away. The city preserve around it holds two trails. The Summit Trail (#150) goes straight up: 0.6 miles one way, 474 feet of elevation change, rated moderate/difficult, with a rocky, loose last pitch and a summit just over 2,000 feet that gives you Piestewa Peak, the McDowells, Four Peaks and the Bradshaws in one slow turn. The Circumference Trail (#308) circles the base in 2.6 miles with about 150 feet of up and down, and two connector trails (#25 and #25A, 2.7 and 2.2 miles) run east toward Shadow Mountain.
It is a neighborhood mountain, and that is its charm. Retirees walk the loop at dawn, kids race the summit after school, and the whole package, summit plus loop, is under four miles. For a Scottsdale visitor it is a half-morning, not a day, and a good first peak for someone who finds Piestewa intimidating or wants a child to stand on a real top.
What you get is a free, fast, 360-degree summit 22 minutes from Old Town with almost no one on it. What you do not get is water, a restroom at the main lot, shade of any kind, or a parking space after 8 a.m. on a January Saturday.
How to hike Lookout Mountain right
Pay nothing, watch the clock. Free, no permit. The trails are open 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., but the 16th Street lot closes at 7 p.m. or sunset, whichever comes first, which in December means about 5:30. That lot is the real limit unless you park on the street.
Get there. From Old Town take Scottsdale Road north to Shea Boulevard, west to SR 51, north to the Greenway Road exit, then west on Greenway to 16th Street and south a quarter mile. The Lookout Mountain Trailhead is the gravel lot on the left at 15600 N. 16th St., about 22 minutes from Old Town. It is small and fills on winter weekend mornings; the overflow is on-street in a residential area, so park legally and quietly. The alternative is Lookout Mountain Park at 1898 E. Evans Dr. on the south side, a regular city park with a bigger lot open 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., a restroom and water, and the Circumference Trail a few minutes’ walk away.
Pick the season. October through April is the season. There is zero shade, so from May through September this is a sunrise hike under the summer rules and nothing else; the rest of the year it is a sunset hike too, because the summit faces every direction and the light on the McDowells at dusk is the reason the regulars keep coming.
Carry water. None at 16th Street. The summit is short but fully exposed; a liter per person is plenty and none is a mistake in October.
Mind the footing. The top third of the Summit Trail is loose rock on a steep grade. It is not a scramble like Piestewa or Camelback, but people slide on the descent. Shoes with tread, not sandals. Take the last pitch slowly on the way down.
Do the loop too. Come down the Summit Trail the way you went up, then walk the Circumference Trail counterclockwise for the quiet, saguaro-studded north side, which almost nobody bothers with. Bikes use the loop and the connectors; yield and call out on blind corners.
Dogs. Allowed on leash. Phoenix bans dogs on all city trails when the temperature is 100 degrees or above, and the rock here burns paws well before that.
Skip it if you want distance. Pair it with Shaw Butte ten minutes south for a real morning, head north to Deem Hills for a longer loop, or stay in Scottsdale and climb Pinnacle Peak, which has a restroom.
The knob the city bought before the builders did
The oldest thing on this hike is the ground. The Phoenix Mountains are a remnant of rock about 1.7 billion years old, laid down as sea-floor volcanics and sediments and then folded and cooked in the Mazatzal orogeny, the mountain-building event that also raised the range across the Verde. Hundreds of millions of years later, Basin and Range faulting dropped the valley floors and left the hard cores standing: Camelback, Piestewa, North Mountain, Shaw Butte, and the lesser knobs along the north edge of the range, Lookout and Shadow mountains. The Hohokam, who farmed the Salt River valley with canals for roughly a thousand years before leaving around 1450, hunted and gathered across these foothills and left the valley before anyone needed to save them.
The saving came late and fast. Phoenix grew north after the Second World War, and by the early 1960s the subdivisions had reached the base of the mountains; the first individual efforts to protect the peaks began then. In 1966 the City Council passed a resolution to buy and preserve “open space,” with no money to do it. Four years later the city hired a planner, Paul Van Cleve, to recommend which lands to buy, and in August 1970 a group of residents founded the Phoenix Mountains Preservation Council to make sure it happened. The two mountain parks the county had already set aside, around Squaw Peak (now Piestewa) and North Mountain, became the core.
Most of the preserve, Lookout Mountain included, was bought in the early 1970s, and the money came from bonds: by one count about $70 million in bond issues across the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, used to assemble federal land, city parks and private parcels into one system. A 1975 bond measure, Proposition 14, was sold to voters as completing the acquisition, though about 3,000 acres were cut from the planned boundary to make the numbers work; in 1977 Mayor Margaret Hance directed another $5 million to land purchases. The city does not publish an acquisition date for Lookout Mountain alone, so the honest statement is that it came into the preserve in that early-1970s wave along with its neighbors.
The last step was legal rather than financial. On April 9, 1990, Governor Rose Mofford signed a state statute, written and lobbied for by the Preservation Council, that defined the Phoenix Mountain Preserve and limited what the city could do with the land, backing up the preserve chapter already in the city charter. A mountain that had been a neighborhood’s view became a piece of ground that a future council cannot quietly sell. The Summit Trail and the Circumference Trail got their numbers in the city system, the 16th Street lot got its gate and its sunset closing, and the mountain settled into its current life as the place north Phoenix goes before work.
Today the Phoenix Mountains Preserve runs to roughly 26,500 acres and 200 miles of trail across 13 named peaks, and Lookout Mountain is one of the smallest of them. It is also one of the few whose summit is a bare knob with nothing higher nearby, which is why the view from 2,000 feet is better than the arithmetic suggests.
Why it matters
Lookout Mountain is what Phoenix got for deciding, in 1966, that it wanted open space, and for finding the money in the 1970s to buy mountains that were already surrounded by streets. Scottsdale made the same decision 25 years later with the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, on a far larger scale and with a sales tax instead of bonds; this little knob is the earlier, smaller version of the same idea, and it still works. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is practical: a free summit 22 minutes away that takes under an hour, with a view that covers the whole Valley and a loop around the base that nobody walks. Go at sunrise in winter, do the summit first, then the loop, and be back for breakfast.