What is the Arizona Canal Path?
Every city has one line on the map that explains it. Scottsdale’s is a ditch.
The Arizona Canal was finished in 1885 — dug by mule team and hand scraper along the high ground north of the Salt River, where no earlier canal had run — and everything that followed, including the town itself, followed the water. Today its banks carry a multi-use path: part paved city pathway, part packed-dirt service road, entirely walkable and rideable. Inside Scottsdale it runs about four miles on a hard diagonal, from Pima Road at the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community boundary southwest past Chaparral Park, under Scottsdale Road at the Waterfront and the Soleri Bridge, then out of town at 64th Street toward Arcadia.
Keep going and you can keep going a long way. The complete Arizona Canal trail is close to 70 miles, one of the longest in Maricopa County, reaching Phoenix, Glendale and Peoria — part of the 131 miles of canal that Salt River Project still operates as a working water system, not a park. That distinction matters. SRP permits walking, running, cycling and horses on the banks; it prohibits swimming and fishing in the water, and it will keep prohibiting them.
What you get is a car-free, dead-flat, essentially uninterrupted corridor through the middle of the city — the closest thing Scottsdale has to a second Greenbelt, except this one is a hundred and forty years old and still doing its original job. Restaurant patios lean over it at the Waterfront. A solar-calendar bridge crosses it. Every November, a light-art festival floats sculptures on it. And most mornings it is just a few cyclists, a few walkers, and water moving west.
How to ride and walk it right
Pick your surface before you pick your bike. The Scottsdale stretch alternates between smooth city pathway near the Waterfront and original maintenance road elsewhere — packed dirt, gravel, the occasional rough patch at a gate. A hybrid, gravel or mountain bike handles all of it; a road bike with 25s will spend the dirt sections regretting the outing. Runners get the opposite deal: the dirt is the kinder surface.
Go with the sun at your back. Westbound in the morning, eastbound in the evening. A canal is a mile-long mirror, and facing into low sun over moving water is genuinely blinding. The corollary: this is a shoulder-season and cool-hours route. There is no shade to speak of on the Scottsdale banks, no drinking water on the bank itself, and the concrete stretches radiate heat long after sunset in summer. From June through September, treat it as a pre-7 a.m. route or skip it.
The best five miles are the ones that leave town. Start at the Waterfront, head southwest, and inside two miles you are in Arcadia, where old citrus-era trees actually shade the bank and the neighborhood watches the canal like a front yard. Another couple of miles brings you to Arizona Falls at 56th Street and Indian School — a working small hydro plant rebuilt as public art, with water crashing through a shaded room and poetry cast into the decks. It is the single best turnaround point on the whole system.
Know your connections. The path meets the Greenbelt path near Hayden and Indian Bend, which opens up eleven more car-free miles south to Tempe; at the southwest end it meets the Crosscut Canal path near 64th Street and Indian School, which runs down to Papago Park. Crossings, however, are scarce — you cross at road bridges and the occasional pedestrian span, so choose your bank deliberately.
Time it for the show. Canal Convergence takes over the Waterfront stretch for ten November nights of light art, free, and walking in along the bank from the east beats fighting the plaza crowd. Pair an early ride with breakfast in Old Town, or with the Xeriscape Garden and Chaparral Park at the northeast end.
The ditch that dug the city
In 1883 the Arizona Canal Company hired a railroad contractor named William J. Murphy to do something nobody had managed: run a canal along the high line of the north Salt River Valley, above the old Hohokam alignments and the pioneer ditches that had reused them. Murphy took the contract largely on credit, paid his crews partly in company paper, and spent two years moving earth with mules, scrapers and hand tools across country with no road, no rail spur and no water until the canal itself arrived.
It was finished in May 1885: better than forty miles long, carrying water from the river near present-day Granite Reef west and northwest across land that had been creosote and cactus the year before. Five more miles were added in the 1890s. The effect on the map was immediate and total. Desert that nobody would take for free became farmland worth buying, and buyers came — among them Winfield Scott, the Army chaplain who put 50 cents an acre down on 640 acres of canal-side land in July 1888, the purchase Scottsdale is measured from. The town’s founding document is, functionally, a water order.
The canal also made electricity. At a natural twenty-foot drop between 56th and 58th streets, Arizona Falls, Phoenix Light and Fuel built a hydroelectric plant in 1902; the new Salt River Project rebuilt it, and it generated from 1913 until 1950. By then the Water Users’ Association had absorbed the valley’s private canal companies, tied the whole system to Roosevelt Dam, and turned the Arizona Canal into one artery of a federal reclamation project — 131 miles of canal that still delivers most of the water this metro drinks.
For most of the twentieth century the banks were strictly utilitarian: dirt roads for SRP trucks, fenced where neighbors complained, crossed by cars and ignored by everyone else. The change came slowly, from below. Cyclists and runners had always used the banks informally. In the 1970s cities began paving and signing sections, and the Valley discovered it owned a rights-of-way network more than a hundred miles long, perfectly flat and already public. Scottsdale wired its own path system into it.
Then the city did something less obvious: it started treating the canal as an address. The mid-2000s Waterfront turned patios toward water that developers had spent fifty years turning their backs on. In 2003, downstream in Arcadia, Arizona Falls reopened as both a working generator and a public artwork. And on December 11, 2010, Scottsdale dedicated the Soleri Bridge and Plaza — a solar calendar over an irrigation ditch, built by a ninety-one-year-old architect who had waited his whole career to see a bridge of his constructed. Two years later Canal Convergence began floating light art on the same water. The ditch that made the farm town had become the stage the resort city performs on.
Why it matters
Scottsdale has grander landscapes — the Preserve is thirty thousand acres of them — but it has nothing older or more load-bearing than this four-mile diagonal. Stand on the bank at the Waterfront and you are standing on the reason there is a Waterfront, a Scottsdale Road, a Winfield Scott. The canal is the city’s original infrastructure still performing its original function, with a bike path, a bridge and an art festival stacked on top of it. Walk it once with that in mind and the whole map rearranges itself around a line of water that was dug before the town had a name.