What is Thunderbird Conservation Park?
The Hedgpeth Hills are the low, rough range that rises out of north Glendale’s subdivisions, and Thunderbird Conservation Park protects 1,185 acres of them. It is a hybrid: a desert preserve with about 15 miles of multi-use trail, built largely by volunteers, and a city park with numbered ramadas, grills, an amphitheater and four wildlife-viewing blinds along the sedimentation basin on the north side, one of them wheelchair-accessible from 59th Avenue. The basin draws more than 50 species of birds and animals; mule deer, javelina, coyotes and the occasional bobcat use the hills, and so do a lot of Glendale families with coolers.
The trails are a mixed bag in the best sense. Coach Whip runs 5.0 miles point to point from the 67th Avenue lot to 51st Avenue and Potter Drive and is the mountain bikers’ main line. Cholla Loop, 3.0 miles, is the park’s real hike, moderately strenuous with a couple of rocky, steep stretches. Arrowhead Point, 1.5 miles, climbs to the high point and ends at Ramadas 14 and 15 with the whole West Valley below. Flatlander, 1.25 miles, loops the flats from the 55th Avenue lot for strollers and new hikers, and Sunrise, Ridgeline, Desert Iguana and Chuckwalla stitch the lots together.
What you get is a free desert park with real hills, a picnic table at the end of the trail, and a view west to the White Tanks and south to the Estrellas. What you do not get, compared with Scottsdale’s preserve, is scale, solitude or a dramatic summit; the hills top out a few hundred feet above the houses, and until late 2027 at least one of the three parking lots is a construction site.
How to hike Thunderbird right
Pay nothing, check the lots. Free, no reservations for trails; ramadas book through Glendale Parks and Recreation at 623-930-2820. Which lot you can use depends on the calendar. Glendale is rebuilding all three with restrooms, shade structures and paving: 59th Avenue closed April 6 through December 2026, 55th Avenue from July 2026 through February 2027, and 67th Avenue from January through August 2027. In fall 2026 that leaves 67th Avenue at Patrick Lane; take the Desert Iguana connector from there toward the Coach Whip. The trails stay open the whole time, and the city says one lot closes at a time, though the published dates overlap; check the park page before you drive across the Valley, because the schedule has already shifted once.
Get there. Take Loop 101 west across the north Valley to 59th Avenue, exit and go north about four miles past Deer Valley Road to the main entrance at 22800 N. 59th Ave., roughly 35 minutes from Old Town. The 55th Avenue lot is off Pinnacle Peak Road just east of there, and the 67th Avenue lot is at Patrick Lane, reached from the 101 at 67th Avenue.
Pick the season. October through April for anything at midday. From May through September the hills are shadeless and the rock holds heat; go at sunrise and be done by nine, the same summer rules that apply to every Valley trail.
Pick the trail. Arrowhead Point at sunset is the view: the whole West Valley to the Estrellas with the hills turning orange, ending at Ramadas 14 and 15, so bring dinner. The Cholla Loop is the honest hike, rocky in places and exposed everywhere. The Flatlander is for strollers and grandparents. Coach Whip and the connectors see most of the bikes.
Hours. Sunrise to sunset, and the gates lock at sunset without ceremony; be back at the car as the sun touches the horizon. On July 3 and 4 the park closes at 3 p.m. for the holiday.
Water and restrooms. Restrooms and picnic facilities at the developed areas; the new trailheads will add more. There is no water on the trails and the hills have no shade.
Shared trails. Hiking, biking and horses throughout; yield to horses.
Dogs. On leash. Pick up after them; the city’s ranger line is 623-695-3004 for violations.
Wildlife and fire. The city asks you to give coyotes, javelina and rattlesnakes an escape route and to report bee attacks, which have happened here. Open fires are banned in all Glendale parks; use the grills. The desert wildlife guide covers what you are likely to meet.
Skip it if you are staying in Scottsdale and want the best desert hike within 35 minutes. That is the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. Thunderbird is for when you are already on the west side, or when you want a picnic table at the end of a trail. Deem Hills, 10 minutes east, is the Phoenix version of the same idea; the White Tanks are the bigger mountains on the horizon.
A park named for an airfield and handed back twice
The Hedgpeth Hills were used long before they had that name. At their east end, where Skunk Creek comes out of the hills, basalt boulders carry 1,571 petroglyphs on 579 rocks, pecked over as much as 5,000 years by Western Archaic hunters, by Hohokam farmers between about A.D. 300 and 1450, and by Patayan people from the lower Colorado; the hills were a boundary place, and the rocks kept the record. Those petroglyphs were documented only because the Army Corps of Engineers had to survey the site before building Adobe Dam in 1980 to hold back Skunk Creek, and they opened to the public as the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve, run by Arizona State University, in 1994.
The name came from a homesteader. Robert Hedgpeth farmed below the hills in Glendale’s first decades; the town itself was platted in 1895 by William J. Murphy, who had finished the Arizona Canal in 1885 and needed buyers for the land it watered. The hills stayed dry federal range at the farm town’s northern edge for half a century, which is the only reason they are a park at all.
The park’s name came from the war. In January 1941 the Del E. Webb Construction Company began pouring Thunderbird Field four miles south at 59th Avenue and Greenway Road, a contract flight school dreamed up by the Hollywood producer Leland Hayward and his partners at Southwest Airways, with James Stewart among the investors; from the air the layout was meant to look like a thunderbird. About 10,000 pilots from 30 nations learned to fly there before the field closed in June 1945. In 1946 Lieutenant General Barton K. Yount bought the surplus field for one dollar and founded the American Institute for Foreign Trade, which became the Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Glendale moved on the hills soon after. In 1951 the city leased them from the federal government, and in 1956, with the help of the Glendale Women’s Club and the Glendale Rotary Club, took full ownership and named the park for the airfield. Then it handed the park off: Maricopa County ran Thunderbird from 1963 to 1984, and most of the ramadas, roads and picnic grounds a visitor uses today were built in those county years. In 1984 the county gave the park back to Glendale, which by then had grown north around it; Arrowhead Ranch and its mall followed in the 1990s, and the hills became the green space in the middle of a suburb rather than the edge of one. Volunteer groups built most of the 15 miles of trail. The 2026 and 2027 rebuild of the three trailhead lots, with restrooms, shade and paving, is the first large investment in the park’s front doors since the county era.
Why it matters
Thunderbird is the West Valley’s version of a story Scottsdale knows well: a rough range of hills that a city claimed before the subdivisions got there, then had to decide what to do with. Glendale’s answer was a hybrid, half preserve and half picnic park, run by the county for two decades and handed back when the town caught up. It is not the McDowell Sonoran Preserve and does not try to be; it is 1,185 acres with ramadas, grills and a sunset from Arrowhead Point, named for a flight school that trained ten thousand pilots. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is practical: go when you are already west of I-17, enter at whichever lot is not a construction site, climb Arrowhead for the view and bring dinner for the ramada at the top.