What is the Cholla Trail?
Camelback has two ways up, and this is the one locals used to keep quiet about. Cholla Trail climbs the mountain’s east end — the camel’s back, more or less — for 1.5 miles and roughly 1,420 feet to the same 2,704-foot summit that Echo Canyon reaches by brute force on the other side.
Geography first, because it matters here: the trailhead is at 5150 N. Invergordon Road, in Phoenix, tucked against the Paradise Valley town line. Nothing about Camelback is Scottsdale. It is also about ten minutes from Old Town, which makes it the most convenient real summit hike for anyone staying in the Camelback corridor or along Shea — closer than Pinnacle Peak, closer than most of the Preserve.
The trail has two personalities. The first mile is a graded ridge walk with Paradise Valley’s rooftops and the Phoenician’s fairways dropping away below you — the rare Valley hike where you gain altitude while holding a conversation. Then the ridge steepens into the summit block, and the last third becomes hands-on boulder work with genuine exposure. Phoenix rates the whole thing extremely difficult, two black diamonds, same as Echo Canyon.
It also spent two and a half years closed. A rockfall injury in 2020 shut it down; the city used the shutdown to pull unstable boulders, rebuild the tread and move the trailhead off Cholla Lane onto Invergordon, where there is now a restroom, water, bike racks and a rideshare zone. It reopened September 29, 2022. The parking is still the hardest part of the hike.
How to hike Cholla right
Solve parking before anything else. Cholla has no lot. It has a short row of legal street spaces in the posted sections on the west side of Invergordon Road, and the tow policy is printed on the signs and enforced in practice. In season those spaces are gone by sunrise. The rebuilt trailhead includes a marked rideshare drop-off for exactly this reason — from a Scottsdale hotel it’s a cheap ride, and it removes the worst variable of the day. If you drive, weekday dawn is the only reliable window.
Hike it east to west and mind the pacing trap. The ridge is deceptively friendly. People cover the first mile fast, feel strong, then hit the summit block and discover the last half mile eats an hour. Turn around at the ridge top if the boulders look worse than you signed up for — you’ll have most of the view and none of the bad decisions. Coming down is where ankles go, particularly on the loose ground just below the scramble.
Heat rules apply, harder than you’d guess. This is a south- and east-facing ridge with essentially no shade. On Extreme Heat Warning days the city closes it from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and from May through September the only sane start is first light. Our summer sunrise hiking rules apply verbatim; during storm season, so does the monsoon field manual, because this mountain sheds rock after heavy rain.
Water and gear. A liter minimum, two when it’s warm. Real shoes with grip — trail runners or hikers, not fashion sneakers. Nothing in your hands on the scramble, so a small pack rather than a water bottle you have to carry. No dogs on either Camelback trail.
Which trail should you actually pick? Cholla if you want a longer, more scenic, less crowded walk and are comfortable finishing on rock. Echo Canyon if you want the shortest possible line to the top and don’t mind railings. Both if you’re the sort of person who then also wants to do the Gateway Loop the next morning.
Pair it. Down by 8:30 and breakfast at Lon’s at the Hermosa is a ten-minute drive; a flat recovery loop at Papago Park is fifteen. The Camelback Inn and Sanctuary both sit within a couple of miles of this trailhead.
The trail that had to be rebuilt to survive its own popularity
For decades Cholla was the insider’s Camelback. While tour buses and rental cars aimed at Echo Canyon, people who actually lived here parked in the neighborhood off Cholla Lane, walked the shoulder of a residential street past some of the most expensive houses in Arizona, and picked up a dirt path onto the ridge. It worked because not many people did it. Then everybody did it.
The underlying land protection dates to 1968, when Camelback’s upper elevations became a City of Phoenix park after the long acquisition campaign that Barry Goldwater helped push over the line in the mid-1960s. That deal saved the summit but said nothing about how tens of thousands of annual hikers would reach it. By the 2010s, Cholla’s bottom mile was an unmanaged interface between a world-famous trail and a quiet street: no restroom, no water, no lot, hikers walking in traffic, residents furious, and a trail surface worn down by far more feet than it was ever built for.
The forcing event came in 2020, when a hiker was struck and injured by a loose boulder — reported at roughly 300 pounds — and Phoenix closed the trail. What was expected to be a short safety closure became a full reconstruction. Park rangers, the city’s trail stewards and contractors worked the mountain for two-plus years: removing unstable boulders, rebuilding tread, setting trail posts and wayfinding signage, and — the consequential part — realigning the trailhead from Cholla Lane to Invergordon Road, with restrooms, a drinking fountain, sinks, bike racks and a dedicated rideshare drop-off. It was less a repair than a retrofit: a 1960s-era public access agreement finally given twenty-first-century plumbing.
Cholla reopened on September 29, 2022, to genuine local relief — for two and a half years, Camelback’s entire hiking load had funneled through one small lot on McDonald Drive, which made an already impossible parking situation worse on both sides of the mountain. In 2023 a group of regulars floated renaming the rebuilt route for Goldwater, arguing the man who saved the mountain deserved more than a plaque. The proposal went nowhere; the trail is still Cholla, after the cholla.
What the rebuild could not fix is the arithmetic. There is no room on Invergordon for more cars, and the mountain is more popular every year. Phoenix Fire runs on the order of two hundred mountain rescues annually across the city’s preserves, with Camelback taking a heavy share; 2025 saw a sharp jump in Camelback calls specifically. Layer on the Trail Heat Safety Program — closures 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. whenever an Extreme Heat Warning is in effect, a rule the Parks Board tightened in October 2024 and triggered as early as March 2026 — and Cholla now runs on a schedule set by the National Weather Service. The trail is in better shape than it has been in fifty years. Getting to it is harder than ever.
Why it matters
Cholla is the best argument that Camelback deserves better management, and the proof that it can get it. A rockfall forced the city to spend two years doing what should have happened decades earlier: build a real trailhead, take out the loose rock, and stop asking hikers to walk down a private street to reach a public mountain. For Scottsdale visitors, it’s the Camelback route worth choosing — longer, prettier, quieter, with a ridge you can actually enjoy before the mountain asks for your hands. Get dropped off, start at dawn, and turn around whenever the rock stops being fun.