What is the Piestewa Peak Summit Trail?
Piestewa Peak is the pointed summit you see from every north Scottsdale resort pool, and the Summit Trail is the most direct way up it: about 1.2 miles of switchbacks, rock steps and gravel ramps gaining roughly 1,200 feet to a 2,608-foot summit, the second-highest point in the Phoenix Mountains after Camelback. The City of Phoenix rates it extremely difficult, which is honest. There is no flat section, no shade and no bail-out, and the final hundred yards is a hands-on scramble over blocky schist. The payoff is a full 360 of the Valley: Camelback to the south, the McDowells and Four Peaks to the east, downtown Phoenix laid out below.
The mountain was Squaw Peak on maps for most of a century. In 2003 the state renamed it for Army Spc. Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier from Tuba City killed in Iraq that spring, and the federal board of geographic names followed in 2008. The trail is a National Recreation Trail and the busiest in the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, with a restroom and a drinking fountain at the base and nothing above them.
It is for visitors who want the classic Phoenix summit workout, for locals who treat it as a gym, and for anyone who could not get an Echo Canyon parking spot. What you get is a real summit in under an hour and a half, fifteen minutes from Old Town, free. What you do not get is shade, solitude, a dog-friendly route, or an open trail at noon on an Excessive Heat Warning day.
How to hike Piestewa right
It is free, and there is water at the bottom. No parking fee, no pass. Fill up at the fountain by the restroom and carry at least a liter per person for the round trip, more from April on. There is nothing on the trail.
Get there. Take Lincoln Drive west from Scottsdale Road, past 32nd Street, and turn right on Piestewa Peak Drive (the sign still says Squaw Peak Drive in places). The Mesquite (302) Trailhead at 2701 E. Piestewa Peak Dr. is the first lot past the entrance station, about 15 minutes from Old Town. If it is full, keep driving: the road climbs past a string of picnic lots and ramadas, all of which connect back to the trailhead on foot. The gate opens at 5 a.m. and closes at 7 p.m., or 9 p.m. from June through September; trails are open until 11 p.m. On cool-season weekends the first lot fills before seven and cars idle for spaces by eight.
Pick the hour by the month. October through April, any morning works. From May to September this is a first-light hike: the mountain faces east and the lower switchbacks are an oven by nine. The summer rules apply.
Heat closures are real. On days the National Weather Service issues an Excessive Heat Warning, the city closes the Summit Trail from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., the same rule as Camelback’s Echo Canyon and Cholla trails, and rangers enforce it. The policy and its history are in our heat trail closures entry.
The climb. Count on 45 to 70 minutes up and a little less down. Wear real shoes; the gravel ramps near the top send people down on their backsides every week, and the preserve averages more than 200 rescues a year across the city’s mountain parks. Treat the last hundred yards as a scramble, because it is, and give way to people coming down.
No dogs on the Summit Trail, ever. The ban is year-round and posted. Dogs on leash can use the other preserve trails, but Phoenix bans dogs from all city trails when the temperature reaches 100 degrees.
The alternative on the same mountain. The Freedom Trail (#302) is a 3.7-mile loop around Piestewa with about 720 feet of gain, rated difficult but far less punishing, and it is where the locals go when the summit line is absurd. For a quieter climb of the same peak, start from the Dreamy Draw side on the Perl Charles Trail and join the Summit Trail from the north.
Skip it if you want quiet or a dog. Shaw Butte and the 40th Street trailhead give you the same range with a fraction of the people and leashed dogs allowed. Compared with Scottsdale’s own trails, the summit is harder than Tom’s Thumb and about even with Camelback’s Echo Canyon; our Echo Canyon versus Cholla comparison covers the other mountain.
The mountain the city kept, and renamed
The rock is older than almost anything else you can stand on in the Valley. Piestewa Peak is a fold of quartzite, conglomerate and volcanic debris metamorphosed into schist about 1.7 billion years ago and crumpled in the Mazatzal orogeny, then left standing when Basin and Range faulting dropped the valleys around it some 20 million years back. The Akimel O’odham call it Vainom Do’ag, Iron Mountain, and their Hohokam ancestors farmed the canal country at its feet; the name Squaw Peak was in use by 1910, alongside Phoenix Mountain and a cruder variant, and it stuck for most of a century.
The mountain survived the city because of a decision made as the city arrived. Through the 1950s and 1960s subdivisions climbed the bajadas around the Phoenix Mountains, and the peak itself became the first of the range to be set aside as a park. In the early 1970s, with development pressing on every side, Phoenix bought most of the rest of the range to create the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, one of the largest city parks in the world, with Dreamy Draw on the north side (named for the mercury miners made dizzy by the cinnabar they dug there) as its second recreation area. The parks director who led that campaign, Charles M. Christiansen, got the 10.7-mile trail that links North Mountain to Piestewa Peak Park named for him in 1986. By then the Summit Trail had been built into a stone staircase, designated a National Recreation Trail, and adopted by the city as its gym.
The name took longer. In 1992 State Representative Jack Jackson, a Navajo from Window Rock, began introducing a bill every session to retire the old name as a slur; it failed every year. A 1997 petition by a local American Indian Movement youth group for Iron Mountain, the English of Vainom Do’ag, was rejected by the state board in 1998 on the grounds that the O’odham name might refer to a neighboring peak. Then, on March 23, 2003, Army Spc. Lori Piestewa, a 23-year-old Hopi soldier from Tuba City and a mother of two, was killed in an ambush at Nasiriyah in the opening days of the Iraq war, the first Native American woman to die in combat in the U.S. military. Governor Janet Napolitano asked the state board on geographic names to put her name on the mountain. The board’s rules required a five-year wait after a death; the director refused to schedule the item, an aide to the governor pressured him, the governor publicly rebuked the aide, and on April 17, 2003, meeting without its director, the board voted to rename the peak. The state renamed the parkway through Dreamy Draw, SR 51, the Piestewa Freeway at the same time.
The federal board declined to follow in 2003, citing its own five-year rule. When the five years were up it took the question again, considered a rival proposal to name the peak for the pioneer Jack Swilling, and in 2008 voted 11 to 2 for Piestewa Peak, noting that Squaw Peak could remain a secondary reference in publications. The city changed the signs; the trail numbers stayed. Twenty years on, the trailhead is named Piestewa, the drive is signed both ways in places, and roughly half the people on the staircase on any Saturday still call it by the old name.
What has changed lately is the weather. The city’s heat-closure rule, closing the Summit Trail from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Excessive Heat Warning days, arrived in 2021 after a run of rescues and deaths on this trail and Camelback, and the number of warning days has climbed since. The next chapter of the mountain’s history is likely to be written in those closures.
Why it matters
Piestewa Peak explains Phoenix in a single climb: billion-year-old rock, an O’odham name, a city that bought its mountains just before it paved them, a fight over a slur that took eleven years and a soldier’s death to settle, and a heat policy written for a climate the trail’s builders never imagined. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is the one locals have reached: it is the best hour-and-a-half workout in the Valley, fifteen minutes from Old Town, as long as you are on the trail at first light, carrying water, and off it before the gate crew arrives at eleven.