What is Shaw Butte Trail?
Shaw Butte is the western half of the North Mountain Preserve, the pair of dark humps you see north of the Loop 101 and 7th Street. The Shaw Butte Trail (#306) circles and climbs it: a 4.0-mile loop with 654 feet of elevation change to a 2,149-foot summit, which makes it the higher of the two by 45 feet and, by the city’s rating, a difficult trail. From the Central Avenue side the route is a steep service road, paved at the bottom and gravel above, that gains most of the elevation in under a mile. From the 7th Street side it is a long, rolling singletrack along the east flank. Put together they are the best moderate loop in the Phoenix Mountains.
The reason people remember it is the ruin. On a shoulder below the tower-topped summit sits the concrete foundation of Cloud 9, a hilltop restaurant and club that drew Phoenix out to the desert edge for three years in the early 1960s. The city’s own trail description puts it simply: an early-1960s restaurant that burned down and was never rebuilt. What remains is slabs, a flight of steps, some mortared stone and the best sunset bench in north Phoenix.
What you get is a real climb, a story, water and restrooms at one trailhead, and a crowd that is a fraction of Piestewa’s. What you do not get is shade, a summit you can stand on, or a lot that stays open past seven.
How to hike Shaw Butte right
It is free; pick your start. No fee, no pass. Both lots are free and open 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. The visitor center lot at 12950 N. 7th St. is bigger and has water and restrooms; the Central Avenue lot at 12898 N. Central is a gravel pad with neither. The gates lock at 7, and the trail itself stays open until 11, so an evening hike means parking on the street.
Get there. From Old Town take Scottsdale Road or Hayden north to Shea Boulevard, west to SR 51, north to the Thunderbird Road exit, then west to 7th Street and north a block to the North Mountain Visitor Center. That is about 25 minutes. For the Central Avenue start, continue west on Thunderbird to Central Avenue and turn north; the Shaw Butte Trailhead lot is on the right.
Go counterclockwise from Central. Climb the steep paved-then-gravel service road while your legs are fresh, pass the towers, and descend the gentler eastern singletrack toward 7th Street, where the Cloud 9 ruins sit on a shoulder with the whole north Valley below. Most people take an hour and a half to two hours.
Pick the season. October through April. The service road is a south-facing reflector; from May through September this is a dawn hike, and by 9 a.m. the gravel is radiating. The summer rules apply, and Phoenix closes its trails to dogs, and in extreme heat to people, under the heat closure policy. In the cool months it is one of the best sunset walks in the city; bring a headlamp for the last mile.
Water. Fountains and restrooms at the visitor center on 7th Street, which is run by a nonprofit and opens mid-morning. Nothing on Central, nothing on the trail.
The summit is fenced. Shaw Butte carries radio and microwave towers, and the actual high point is behind a chain-link fence. The viewpoint everybody means is the Cloud 9 shoulder, which is open.
Dogs and bikes. Dogs on leash are allowed on this trail, and mountain bikers use the service road and the east-side singletrack. Phoenix bans dogs from its trails when the temperature is 100 degrees or above.
Add the second summit, or skip to a closer one. For a bigger day, cross 7th Street and add the North Mountain National Trail (1.6 miles, 614 feet) for just over six miles and two summits; do it before North Mountain Park closes in December 2026 for a renovation that runs to early 2028, which will push more people onto this loop. If you want the same kind of hill with less climbing, Lookout Mountain is ten minutes north; for the Phoenix Mountains proper, the 40th Street trailhead is the quiet way in.
The restaurant on the hill that burned
The buttes north of the Salt River were never anybody’s home, but they were everybody’s landmark. The Hohokam, whose canals ran along the line of today’s Arizona Canal a few miles south, hunted and gathered on these hills and used the high points for looking out; the Akimel O’odham who came after them knew the buttes as waypoints on the way north to the Agua Fria. When Phoenix was founded in the 1870s the hills were open range on the far edge of the valley, and around the turn of the century, by the city’s account, they served as a camping ground for pupils of the Phoenix Indian School and their families. Prospectors sank small copper pits on the slopes; volunteers at the visitor center still talk about shafts nobody has found. The origin of the name Shaw is not something we could pin down from any source, and we will not guess.
The hill’s one famous building was a private whim. In 1957 Richard Barker and his wife Barbara bought 40 acres on the south side of Shaw Butte to build a house. The project grew. Barker cut a road up the slope so steep that the cement company’s driver refused it, so Barker paid for the truck and the load with a cashier’s check and drove it up himself. He charged curious Phoenicians a dollar for a station-wagon ride to the top, with his sons collecting the fares. In 1961 the house opened as Cloud 9, a hilltop restaurant and club with a circular platform, a 50-foot pole topped by a lighted figure 9, and a view over a city that then ended at Northern Avenue. For three years it was the place to take someone to dinner in north Phoenix. In 1964 it burned, under circumstances the papers called mysterious, and was never rebuilt. The pole was later cut down, presumably for aircraft, and the foundation, steps and a few mortared walls were left to the hikers.
The hikers came because the city bought the mountain. In the early 1970s, with subdivisions climbing the slopes of the Phoenix Mountains, Phoenix made its first large open-space purchase and created the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, folding in North Mountain and Shaw Butte along with Piestewa Peak, which had been a county park, and the ridgeline between. It was a generation before Scottsdale’s own preserve and the model for it: buy the hills before the houses do, and leave them alone. The service road Barker built became the trail’s steep leg; the summit went to radio and microwave towers behind a fence; and the city numbered the loop Trail 306.
The last additions are the North Mountain Visitor Center on 7th Street, run largely by volunteers and the only reliable water on this side of the preserve, and the renovation to come: North Mountain Park, the picnic area and trailheads east of 7th Street, closes from December 2026 to early 2028. Shaw Butte stays open, which means the quietest moderate loop in the Phoenix Mountains is about to get less quiet.
Why it matters
Shaw Butte is a small history of how the Valley treats its hills: ignored, then sold to someone with a dream and a cement truck, then bought back by a city that had watched its mountains start to disappear under rooftops. The Cloud 9 foundation is the only ruin in the Phoenix Mountains with a liquor license in its past, and the preserve around it is the reason Scottsdale had a model when its turn came in the 1990s. For a visitor it is the practical answer to a common problem: a real climb with a real view, 25 minutes from Old Town, without the Piestewa parking fight. Go in winter, go counterclockwise, and sit on the slab at sunset.