What is Camelback Park?
Some parks are built. Camelback Park retired.
For four decades, this stretch of the Indian Bend Wash along Hayden Road was the Villa Monterey Golf Course — a short, friendly layout dedicated around 1962 as the centerpiece of Villa Monterey, one of Scottsdale’s pioneering retirement-townhome communities. When the course finally closed in 2004, the city did something quietly radical with the land: nothing much. It acquired the fairways, kept the little lake, threaded paths through, and let the place become what golf courses secretly always were — big, beautiful lawns.
The result is the Greenbelt’s emptiest and most restful mile: no playgrounds, no courts, no ramada reservations, no league schedules. Just rolling green contours (squint and you can still read the old holes), mature trees planted for golfers who teed off during the Kennedy administration, water, and Camelback Mountain filling the northwestern sky.
It sits directly across Hayden from Indian School Park and a stone’s throw south of Chaparral, which handle all the amenities so Camelback Park doesn’t have to. Think of it as the quiet car of the Greenbelt.
How to do Camelback Park right
Come for what isn’t here. On spring weekends, Chaparral’s ramadas are booked, its lots full, its dog park at capacity. Camelback Park, one flat mile down the path, will have open lawn as far as you can throw a frisbee. Blanket picnics, reading in the grass, low-stakes dog walks, toddlers chasing ducks — this is the venue.
Golden hour is the show. The old fairway rises give you elevated sightlines to Camelback Mountain across the wash, and the low sun turns the whole corridor amber. Photographers who’ve tired of the Chaparral Lake reflection shot work this stretch instead.
Arrive by path, ideally. The Greenbelt runs the park’s length, so it’s a natural pause point on any ride between Old Town and Chaparral. If you drive, park along the Hayden Road frontage — and note there are no restrooms here; the nearest are at Indian School Park across Hayden or Chaparral Park to the north. Pack water accordingly, because there’s less drinking-fountain infrastructure than at the developed parks too.
Know the flood rule. Like every Greenbelt park, this is a working floodway. After major storms the low ground and path underpasses hold water and mud for a few days — the grass is doing its actual job. Detour at street level and come back when it drains.
Summer: exposed former fairways mean thin shade outside the mature tree clusters. Dawn and dusk only, June through September, same as the rest of the wash.
From tee times to nap times
Villa Monterey was a big idea in its day. In the early 1960s, developer-built “active adult” living was brand new — Sun City had just opened across the Valley — and Villa Monterey brought the formula to Scottsdale: compact townhomes, shuffleboard sociability, and a golf course dedicated around 1962 as the community’s green spine, complete with clubhouse. The course ran through the Indian Bend Wash bottomland between Camelback and Chaparral roads, which in hindsight was the tell: this was flood-prone land, cheap to turf, always destined to be green one way or another.
The first blow came from the road grid. When Hayden Road was punched through the corridor, it cut the course in half; Villa Monterey regrouped as a nine-hole layout east of Hayden and kept playing. Then the Greenbelt rose around it through the 1970s and ’80s — the course became a private green link in a public green chain, dedicated all around it in 1985. For a while, the arrangement held: retirees walked nine at dawn, cyclists streamed past on the path.
Economics ended it. Short executive courses are the marginal species of the golf industry, and by 2004 Villa Monterey’s course was done. What happened next is the part worth applauding: instead of the standard fate of dead Valley golf courses — years of litigation, infill proposals, HOA warfare — this one passed into city hands and became Camelback Park, passive parkland that keeps the flood corridor open and gives the Greenbelt a breathing space between its busy anchors. The neighborhood kept its view; the city kept its floodway; the ducks kept the lake.
It’s the gentlest version of a very Scottsdale story — the same land-use tide that erased CrackerJax and Rawhide turned this course into something more public, not less. Not every obsolete landscape gets flipped to condos. Sometimes it just gets to lie down in the grass.
Why it matters
Camelback Park is the Greenbelt’s proof that a park doesn’t need a single amenity to earn its ground — and a small monument to the 1962 Scottsdale that invented leisure retirement, still legible in the curve of a fairway where somebody’s grandfather once shanked one into the wash.