What is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Trail?
North of Jomax Road, where Peoria’s Vistancia subdivisions stop and the creosote starts, a group of residents from Trilogy at Vistancia built a trail to remember a war. From two rock piles on the shoulder, a well-graded path climbs about a quarter mile past a sequence of signs: the history of the Vietnam War, casualties by service branch, and plaques naming fallen service members, with a bench every couple hundred feet. It ends at a knoll with a flagpole, a bench, a guestbook and a sign honoring Senator John McCain, looking out over the rooftops to the White Tanks.
The trail does not stop there. It continues up the ridge at the same kind grade, benches and all, to the top of an unnamed hill that lidar puts at 1,730 feet, about 0.8 miles and 315 feet of climbing from the road. The summit has a cairn and one last bench. Past it a rougher path drops toward an old rock quarry; turn around at the top. Trail sites file this under Sun City West or Sunrise Mountain Preserve. It is neither. The hill is Arizona State Trust Land, the city has nothing to do with it, and the trail exists because volunteers keep it swept and the flag flying.
What you get is a quiet, well-built 45 minutes with a memorial at the halfway point and a view from the top. What you do not get is a parking lot, a restroom, a sign on the road, or any agency to call if something is wrong.
How to walk it right
Buy the permit if you want to be legal. Nothing is collected, but State Trust Land requires a State Land Department recreation permit, about $15 per person or $20 per family per year, sold online. Most locals do not have one and nobody checks; the rule is the rule.
Get there. Take Loop 101 west to Loop 303 north, exit at Happy Valley Road and go west past Vistancia Boulevard to Dysart Road, then north about a mile to the T-junction with Jomax Road and west a short distance. The trailhead is on the north shoulder just west of Dysart, marked by the rock piles and a white post, about 55 minutes from Old Town. Jomax Road dead-ends at barriers a little farther west, so do not let a map route you in from Surprise. Park on the gravel shoulder, well off the pavement; on a cool weekend morning there will be a dozen cars doing the same. Stay out of the Trilogy and Vistancia streets.
Go at sunrise. The flag is lit from the east, the memorial benches face the right way for the light, and the hill, low and south-facing, is pleasant any time from November through March but a first-hour walk the rest of the year. Read the plaques on the way up rather than down, because the sequence is written that way.
Water and restrooms. None. The nearest are in the shopping centers on Lake Pleasant Parkway. Carry a bottle even for 45 minutes; the decomposed granite gets hot early.
The summit. Past the memorial the grade steepens and there are a few rocky steps, but the benches keep coming and the top has a cairn and a last bench with a view north to the Hieroglyphic Mountains and the Lake Pleasant country. Beyond the summit a rougher path drops toward an old rock quarry; that is the turnaround.
Dogs. Leashed dogs are common; carry water for them and skip the hill when the ground is hot.
Behave like a guest. It is a neighborhood trail with a memorial on it, and the neighborhood would like to keep it that way. Keep voices down at the flag and sign the guestbook.
Skip it if you want a real preserve with a trailhead and restrooms. The Sunrise Mountain and WestWing trails at 27100 Westwing Parkway are the ones the pin was probably thinking of, Thunderbird Conservation Park is a bigger version of the same idea, and Deem Hills off Happy Valley Road has a lot and loops. For a long day in this corner of the Valley, Lake Pleasant is 20 minutes north and the White Tanks are 25 minutes south.
A memorial on land nobody manages
The hill is the southern tail of the Hieroglyphic Mountains, a low range named by settlers who mistook its petroglyphs for Egyptian writing. The people who made those marks are the oldest story here, and the Yavapai who held the country north toward the Agua Fria are the next; they treated the hot spring in the range as neutral ground where anyone could come to heal. The Army ended that. Columns chasing Yavapai bands came through the Hieroglyphics in 1867, and the fighting kept settlers out until the 1880s, when prospectors and ranchers moved in and Frank Murphy bought the spring and opened Castle Hot Springs as a resort in 1896.
The land under the trail got its status at statehood. The Enabling Act of June 20, 1910 gave the coming state of Arizona sections of every township to hold in trust and earn money for its schools, and when Arizona entered the Union in 1912 the new State Land Commission took charge of about 10.9 million acres. That is State Trust Land: not public land in the park sense but an endowment the State Land Department leases, sells and, where it can, develops. This hill is one such parcel, which is why no city or county sign stands at the road and why, in principle, it could be sold tomorrow. The land south of Jomax Road under Vistancia was.
Peoria arrived from the south. Settlers from Peoria, Illinois, recruited by William John Murphy, the builder of the Arizona Canal, took up land along the canal in 1886, and the post office opened on August 4, 1888. The town incorporated on June 7, 1954 with about 1,900 people, passed 50,000 by 1990 and 190,000 by 2020, and in 1996 annexed Lake Pleasant, the reservoir created by a dam on the Agua Fria in 1928 and enlarged in 1993 under the Central Arizona Project; it is the water you see from the summit. The master-planned communities of Vistancia and Trilogy at Vistancia filled the desert south of Jomax in the 2000s and 2010s, and the city’s limits now wrap around this ridge.
The trail is the newest layer and the one with no record but itself. Residents of Trilogy, a community whose veterans’ club is listed as the trail’s local steward, built a graded path up the State Trust hill behind their homes, set a bench every couple hundred feet, posted the history of the Vietnam War and the names of the fallen, raised a flag and left a guestbook. Trail websites began listing it in 2018; the Hiking Project entry credits no agency and names the Trilogy Veterans Club as the local club, and a 2022 trip report found the plaques, the flag and the sign for Senator McCain in place and the trail in excellent shape. When exactly the first plaque went up, and who paid for the flagpole, nobody has written down where we could find it, and this guide does not invent a date. What is certain is that it is swept, the flag is replaced when it frays, and the city has nothing to do with it.
Why it matters
The memorial trail is a small thing that shows a large one: how much of the Valley’s open desert is State Trust Land, held for the schools and open to anyone with a $15 permit, until the day it is sold. A neighborhood built a memorial on it anyway, which is both an act of trust and a bet against the Land Department’s auction calendar. It also happens to be a well-made trail with a flag at the top and benches for people who cannot climb fast, which is rarer than it should be. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: it is not worth an hour’s drive on its own, but if you are in Vistancia or on the way to Lake Pleasant, walk it at sunrise, read the plaques in order, sign the book and park on the shoulder.