What is the McDowell Mountain Regional Park Campground?
The county’s regional park on the back side of the McDowells is the campground Scottsdale forgets it has. The E.I. Rowland Campground is the developed loop: 76 sites with water and 20, 30 and 50-amp electric, a picnic table and a fire ring at each, restrooms with hot showers scattered through the loops and a dump station for registered campers. Next to it the Ironwood Campground holds 16 semi-developed sites for tents and small rigs under 16 feet, with a shared restroom and spigot. The owner’s maps list calls this “Rowland Campground,” and it is the developed campground itself, not a group area; the actual group sites are a separate Group Campground for up to 15 units, a Youth Group Area for 20 and the smaller Minks Camp.
The reason to come is what surrounds the loops. The park is 21,099 acres of bajada sloping up to about 3,000 feet at the base of the mountains, with more than 50 miles of trail, three competitive mountain-bike tracks and the 15.3-mile Pemberton Trail, which starts at a trailhead a few minutes from camp. It is the McDowells from the other side, with no Scottsdale subdivisions and a sky dark enough for the park’s stargazing programs. The park itself has its own guide; this is about sleeping there. It is for a first camping night in Arizona, a snowbird month with a hookup, a mountain-biking weekend, and a Friday night after work when the Rim is too far.
What you get is a hot shower, 50 amps, a paved pad and a world-class trail system out the back of the loop, 45 minutes from Old Town. What you do not get is wilderness, silence on a race weekend, or a horizon without an orange glow to the southwest.
How to camp McDowell Mountain right
Reserve six months out. A developed site is $40 a night, a semi-developed site $25, each plus a $10 non-refundable reservation fee; both rise in January 2027. Book at exploremaricopacountyparks.org up to six months ahead, and do it the day the window opens for any weekend between Thanksgiving and Easter, because the snowbird season fills the Rowland loops weeks ahead. Check in at 1 p.m., out by noon, eight people and one towing vehicle per site, 14 nights maximum in any 28 days. Group areas book by phone up to a year ahead with a five-unit minimum. Day-use visitors pay $10 per vehicle at the gate.
Get there. From Old Town take Shea Boulevard east into Fountain Hills, turn north on Saguaro Boulevard, then right on Fountain Hills Boulevard and follow it about four miles to the park entrance, where it becomes McDowell Mountain Park Drive. Figure 45 minutes with no traffic. Everything is paved. The campground is a short drive inside the gate, past the nature center; signs are good and the loops are wide enough for a 40-foot fifth wheel. Campers get a gate code for after hours. Day-use lots at the competitive tracks fill with bike racks by nine on cool-season weekends; campers have their own parking.
Pick the season. The campground is open all year, and the busy season is October through April. Summer camping is legal and nearly empty for a reason: lows in July hover in the high 80s, and the park sits lower and warmer than it looks.
Pick the site. The outside-edge Rowland sites face the mountains; the inside-loop sites face other rigs. Tent campers are happier in Ironwood, which is quieter and $15 cheaper, as long as they do not need power.
Water. Potable water is at every Rowland site and at a spigot in Ironwood. Still carry your own on the trails; there is none out there, and the Pemberton loop is 15 miles of exposed bajada.
Ride or hike early. The Pemberton trailhead is a short pedal from camp, and the Long Loop competitive track is the best intermediate singletrack in the Valley. Walk to the Pemberton homestead ruins or the Dixie Mine if you want the park’s history on foot. Watch for the resident javelina that work the campground at dusk; the wildlife guide explains how to behave around them.
Dogs. Allowed on a six-foot leash in camp and on every trail, with a current license, and not left tied up at the site while you ride.
Skip it if you want silence and a dark sky with no city on it: keep driving to Seven Springs or the Rim. Usery and Cave Creek are the county’s other hookup campgrounds, each a little farther and a little smaller. If you want a hot shower, hookups and a trail out the back of the loop on a Friday night after work, this is the one.
The ranch the county leased and the fire that remade it
The bajada under the campground has been used for a very long time. Hohokam people farmed and foraged across it for roughly a thousand years, and county archaeologists still record their ground-stone and pottery scatters; the Yavapai held the Verde side of the range when the Army arrived. The name came with the soldiers. Camp McDowell was founded on the Verde in 1865, the only fort inside what is now Maricopa County, and the mountains took its name. The Army left in 1890; in 1903 Theodore Roosevelt’s executive order gave the Yavapai, who had been marched to San Carlos in 1875, a reservation on the old post, which is the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation directly east of the park today.
Ranching followed. A quit-claim deed for Cottonwood Springs recorded in 1917 is the earliest documented permanent residence inside the park, and the county treats it as the start of Henry Pemberton’s homestead; the stone walls on the Pemberton Trail are what is left. The place passed through several hands in the 1920s and became the P-Bar, which Lee Barkdoll and Delsie Journigan bought in the mid-1930s and ran, mostly on state and federal grazing leases, to more than 25,000 acres, with a dozen mining claims in the Dixie district thrown in. Delsie sold out in 1954 when beef prices fell, and the ranch was subdivided.
The county had been thinking about parks since the 1940s: a ring of regional parks on federal land around a Valley everyone could see was about to fill. In 1958 Maricopa County leased 18,273 acres on the back side of the McDowells from the Bureau of Land Management, including the northern part of the old P-Bar with Pemberton’s homestead, and received the patent in 1964; the park has grown since to 21,099 acres. A historical survey of the new park and its first master plan were done in the 1960s, and the campground loops, the nature center and the trail system followed over the decades. The county does not publish who E.I. Rowland was, and we did not find a source that does.
The park’s defining event was a fire. On July 7, 1995, lightning started the Rio Fire, and winds of 30 miles an hour drove it through the non-native grasses that had spread across the bajada; it burned nearly two-thirds of the park, roughly 14,000 acres by the county’s count. Saguaros do not survive fire well, and the uneven stands you ride past on the Pemberton Trail today, mature cactus on one hillside and knee-high ones on the next, are the fire’s footprint three decades on. The McDowell fire history covers it in detail.
What grew back fastest was the trail system. Through the 2000s and 2010s the park built the Competitive Track, nested one-way loops where riders can train and race without meeting hikers, and the Pemberton circuit became the east Valley’s standard long ride; the Rowland loops were rebuilt with 50-amp service for the snowbird trade. The county’s 2026 fee schedule put a developed site at $40 and a semi-developed site at $25, with steps up in 2027 and 2028. Day visitors still pay $10 at the gate, which keeps this side of the McDowells quieter than Scottsdale’s free trailheads on the other.
Why it matters
This campground is the McDowells as Maricopa County imagined them in the 1950s: a fort’s name, a cattle ranch bought up with federal land, and a park big enough to hold a city’s weekends. Scottsdale’s Preserve, bought with a sales tax forty years later, is the other half of the same range and the other half of the same idea, and the two meet at the ridgeline you can see from your site. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is easy. It is 45 minutes away, it has a hot shower and 50 amps, the best mountain-bike trails in the Valley start a short pedal from camp, and the only thing wrong with it is the glow on the horizon. Book six months out for winter, take an outside-edge site, and ride at first light.