What is the Crosscut Canal Path?
Scottsdale has two canal paths, and this is the one that does the work.
The Crosscut Canal Path runs 4.5 miles of paved concrete down the bank of the New Crosscut Canal, starting where it meets the Arizona Canal path near 64th Street and Indian School Road — the Scottsdale–Phoenix line — and ending at North Mill Avenue in Tempe. In between it threads residential backyards on the city border, slips under McDowell Road, and then opens into Papago Park, where the red sandstone buttes, the fishing ponds and the Phoenix Zoo’s fence line make the middle two miles genuinely scenic.
The canal underneath it is a piece of early Salt River Project plumbing. The New Crosscut was built in 1912 by the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association under contract with federal Reclamation and finished in 1913, replacing an 1880s crosscut about three and a half miles to the west. Its job is to move Arizona Canal water south to the Grand Canal — and, on the way, to drop it roughly 112 feet through penstocks into the Crosscut powerplant, a six-wheel hydro station completed by 1915 that was for years SRP’s second-largest generator after Roosevelt Dam. The same water still fills the Papago ponds, the zoo’s lakes and Tempe’s treatment plant.
For South Scottsdale, the path is simply the best car-free route out of town. It links Vista del Camino and the Greenbelt network to Papago, Tempe and the light rail without asking you to ride McDowell Road. That it also happens to follow a hundred-and-ten-year-old hydroelectric canal is the kind of detail this city hands you for free.
How to ride it right
Go north to south, and make Papago the payoff. From the Arizona Canal junction the first couple of miles are honest infrastructure — straight, paved, backed by block walls, useful and unremarkable. Then the corridor breaks into Papago Park and the ride changes completely: buttes, ponds, desert planting, the zoo, Hunt’s Tomb on its hill. Ride it in the other direction and you spend your best scenery first and your legs last.
Surface intel. This is concrete slab, not asphalt, which means clean sailing with a metronome of expansion-joint thumps. It is fine on any bike and pleasant on anything with 32mm tires or wider. Runners will find the concrete unforgiving over four miles; the dirt banks alongside are kinder in places but not continuous.
Shade and season. The northern half has essentially no shade and the southern half has the kind Papago offers, which is to say mesquite and luck. This is a November-through-April route in the middle of the day and a dawn route the rest of the year. There is water and there are restrooms in Papago Park; there is nothing at all on the Scottsdale stretch, so fill bottles before you start.
Build the loop. The classic: south on the Crosscut to Tempe, east and north up the Indian Bend Wash path through Vista del Camino and the Greenbelt, then back west on the Arizona Canal to where you started. It is roughly fifteen miles, almost entirely car-free, and it is the single best way to understand how Scottsdale’s path system actually fits together. Our Greenbelt cycling notes cover the underpasses that make the wash half work.
Etiquette that matters here. This is a commuter corridor as much as a recreation path — e-bikes, scooters, dog walkers and kids on the same eight feet of concrete. Call your passes, keep right, and remember that the water beside you is a working SRP canal: no swimming, no fishing, and stay off the catwalks and gates.
Pair it well. Papago’s own Rotary Park and the pocket parks of South Scottsdale are minutes from the north end; at the Tempe end, Mill Avenue’s cafés are the traditional turnaround reward.
The canal that generated a city’s electricity — and the Valley’s first bike path
The Salt River Valley’s canal system grew by patching. Private companies dug the Arizona Canal in the 1880s on the high line, the Grand Canal lower down, and in between they needed a way to shunt water from one to the other. The first Crosscut Canal, cut in the 1880s, did exactly that; it survives today mostly as a drainage channel.
Then the federal government arrived. Roosevelt Dam and the Salt River Project turned a patchwork of private ditches into a single reclamation system, and the system needed a better crosscut — bigger, better aligned, and capable of doing something the old one could not: making power. In 1912 the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association, under contract with the U.S. Reclamation Service, built the New Crosscut Canal about three and a half miles east of the original, finishing in 1913 and handing it over to Reclamation.
What made it valuable was the fall. Between the Arizona Canal and the Grand Canal the land drops sharply, and the engineers put that drop to work: penstocks carry the water about 112 feet down into the Crosscut powerplant, a neo-classical concrete building fitted with six custom Pelton wheels built to cope with silty, variable canal water. Completed by 1915 and rated around 3,000 kilowatts, it was for years the second-largest generating station in the SRP system, behind only Roosevelt Dam — which is to say that a substantial share of early Phoenix and Scottsdale’s electricity came from water falling a hundred feet beside what is now a bike path. The plant still runs on water order: when farmers and cities call for enough water, the wheels turn; when they do not, the flow bypasses the plant.
The corridor collected other history. Through 1943–45 the land just west of the canal held Camp Papago Park, one of the country’s larger German prisoner-of-war camps, whose inmates included U-boat officers and whose legend was written on the night of December 23–24, 1944, when twenty-five prisoners — led by the U-boat ace Jürgen Wattenberg — crawled out through a 178-foot tunnel and scattered into the desert. Their plan involved rafting the Salt River to Mexico, which would have worked in a wetter century. All were recaptured.
The path itself is a smaller but genuinely consequential first. In 1975, the Valley’s first concrete canal-side bicycle path was laid on the New Crosscut’s bank — the prototype that proved canal rights-of-way could carry people as well as water. Everything that followed, from the Arizona Canal’s paved miles to the 180-plus miles of canal path in greater Phoenix today, descends from that experiment. The last gap closed in 2011, when a southern extension in Tempe finally gave the canal a continuous path from the Arizona Canal junction down to Mill Avenue.
Why it matters
The Crosscut is not scenic in the way the Preserve is scenic, and nobody plans a trip around it. It matters because it connects: without these 4.5 miles, Scottsdale’s canal and wash paths are a network that ends at the city line, and with them you can leave your driveway in Scottsdale and arrive in Tempe, or at the zoo, or at a light rail platform, without sharing a lane with a car. That it does so on the bank of the canal that once lit the valley, and that carried the Valley’s first bike path in 1975, makes it the most quietly important stretch of concrete in South Scottsdale.