What is Drinkwater Peak?
Scottsdale named a boulevard, a statue and a mountain for the same mayor, and almost nobody knows about the mountain.
Drinkwater Peak is a 3,910-foot summit, by the city’s own trail map, in the southern McDowell Sonoran Preserve. It sits on the ridge that runs west from McDowell Peak, between Windgate Pass to the north and Bell Pass to the south. The federal record puts it 0.4 mile west of McDowell Peak and names it for Herbert Drinkwater (1936–1997), Mayor of Scottsdale from 1980 to 1996 and longtime supporter of preservation of the McDowell Mountains. The City Council endorsed the name in 2004. Arizona’s naming board approved it in November 2007, and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names made it official on May 8, 2008.
It isn’t much of a mountain. Peak databases give it only about 90 feet of rise above the ridge connecting it to McDowell Peak, which is taller and sits just to the east. From the city the two read as a single ridgeline above the Gateway Trailhead, with Thompson Peak’s antennas to the south drawing the eye. Drinkwater is the knob at the western end.
There is no trail to the summit. The city’s Spring 2026 map shows the peak with no route to it, and Preserve rules keep everyone on designated trails. So this is a page about a place you look at, which suits it. You see it best from Bell Pass and from Inspiration Viewpoint on the Windgate Pass Trail, both on the Windgate–Bell Pass loop. For the man behind the name, see Herb Drinkwater.
How to see it (and why you shouldn’t climb it)
Pick your viewpoint. There are three good ones, all on official trail out of the Gateway Trailhead at 18333 N. Thompson Peak Pkwy:
- Inspiration Viewpoint (2,714 feet) on the Windgate Pass Trail. Adding up the segment lengths printed on the city map, it’s about 2.8 miles each way from the lot with roughly 1,000 feet of gain. Look south: McDowell Peak is the bigger mass, and Drinkwater is the lower knob at the west end of its ridge.
- Windgate Pass (3,031 feet), about another mile on. You’re now 0.6 mile north of McDowell Peak by the federal record, and the ridge fills the southern skyline.
- Bell Pass (3,204 feet), the high point of the loop’s southern side. The federal record puts the pass 0.3 mile southeast of McDowell Peak, so you’re looking up the ridge toward Drinkwater from the other end. In the morning, with the sun at your back, this is where the photograph is.
Do the loop if you want all three. The Windgate–Bell Pass loop runs about 9.5 miles and 2,000 feet from Gateway. It’s a big day with no water, which is why it’s a cool-season trip with a 6:30 start and three liters each. The summer sunrise rules apply from May on.
The no-trail part is real. Older peak-bagging write-ups treat the McDowell Peak ridge as fair game. The rules don’t. Preserve users must stay on designated, posted trails, and the city map shows nothing reaching either McDowell Peak or Drinkwater Peak. The slopes between the passes and the ridge are steep and unmaintained, and they’re habitat. The Preserve’s whole management model depends on people not cutting new lines across ground like this. A peak named for one of the people who started the Preserve is a poor place to start a social trail.
Bring the backstory. It’s a better view if you know what you’re looking at: a mayor who annexed the foothills in the early 1980s, then presided over the first votes to buy the mountains above them. The 1995 Preserve tax passed on his watch. The ridge you’re looking at was bought with it and the 2004 tax that followed.
Pair it. Read the Herb Drinkwater page, then drive down to the Civic Center and find his statue, with his dog at heel, on the mall off Drinkwater Boulevard. One morning, three memorials, one of them made of rock.
How a mayor got a mountain
For most of Scottsdale’s history the McDowells had a handful of names on federal maps: the range itself, Thompson Peak, McDowell Peak, East End, Rock Knob, Mountain Spring. Everything else hikers talked about, including the passes, the climbing walls and the washes, was local usage, passed along at trailheads and in guidebooks. That changed once the city owned the land. By the mid-2000s Scottsdale had acquired most of the southern McDowells through the 1995 and 2004 Preserve taxes, and its preservation staff set out to make the working names official.
The East Valley Tribune reported the result on November 15, 2007. The day before, at a meeting at the state Capitol, the Arizona State Board on Geographic and Historic Names had approved calling “a previously unnamed 3,914-foot prominence in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve” Drinkwater Peak, at the request of a City Council that had endorsed the idea in 2004. The same meeting approved nine more Preserve names: Bell Pass, Windgate Pass, Horseshoe Ridge, Tom’s Thumb, Gardener’s Wall, Sven Slab, Morrell’s Wall, Mesquite Canyon and Ochoa Wash. Don Meserve, then the city’s preservation planner, told the paper the names came out of meetings with hikers, rock climbers and equestrians, “folks that knew some of the historic names.” Several, like the climbing walls, were the climbers’ own. Windgate, he said, “has been in use for quite a while.”
Drinkwater Peak was different: a new name for a summit nobody had named before. The mayor’s daughter, Jamie Drinkwater, gave the paper the line that explains it: “It is a tremendous honor. My dad, he worshipped those mountains.” He had died in December 1997, less than two years after leaving office. The Tribune said he was diagnosed with a rare salivary gland cancer in 1996, the year he retired.
The state’s approval then went to Washington. The federal gazetteer shows the U.S. Board on Geographic Names adopting Drinkwater Peak and Ochoa Wash on May 8, 2008, and the rest of the batch on June 12, 2008. Its record for Bell Pass settled a small local question: it was “named in association with nearby Bell Road.” One name from the state’s list doesn’t appear in the federal file at all, and that’s Tom’s Thumb. The McDowell Sonoran Conservancy says the spire can’t be officially named for Tom Kreuser, who first climbed it in 1964, because the federal board doesn’t honor living persons. Drinkwater’s name had no such problem, and it got through.
Which bump is which
There’s one wrinkle in the record. In the 2007 article, Meserve described the new peak as “a prominence on the eastern end of a ridge including McDowell Peak, roughly a mile north of Thompson Peak.” The federal record says the opposite end: 0.4 mile west of McDowell Peak. The city’s current trail map sides with the federal record. It prints Drinkwater Peak (3,910’) to the west and McDowell Peak (3,995’) to the east, both between the Windgate Pass and Bell Pass trails. We follow the map and the gazetteer. The likeliest explanation is a slip in conversation or in the notes, but the City Council’s 2004 action and the 2008 federal decision card would settle it. The first is in the City Clerk’s records, and the second is in the U.S. Board on Geographic Names’ published decision lists.
The elevations don’t agree either, and that’s normal. The city map says 3,910 feet, the 2007 article 3,914 and peak databases about 3,911. McDowell Peak’s spread is wider: 3,995 feet on the city map against 4,036 feet in the survey-datum figure that Wikipedia and Peakbagger use, which is also the number on this site’s other trail pages. Different surveys, datums and summit points give different numbers. The differences don’t change the order: McDowell is the taller peak, and Drinkwater is the lower knob on its western shoulder.
What the peak is made of
The city’s 2015 cultural resource plan, citing a geologic study of the range, divides the McDowells into three parts: weathered granite in the north, best seen at Tom’s Thumb; metamorphic rock between Windgate and Bell passes; and volcanic and sedimentary rock in the south. Drinkwater Peak sits right in that middle band, which is why the rock around Bell Pass looks layered and broken rather than like the rounded granite boulders farther north. For the longer story, see our field guide to McDowell geology.
Why it matters
Scottsdale is good at naming things after its mayors and bad at remembering why. Drinkwater Boulevard is a road around a parking garage. The statue is a statue. The peak is the memorial that matches what the city did in those years. A mayor who spent the early 1980s annexing desert so the city could control it ended his career presiding over the first votes to buy the mountains outright, and the city later put his name on one of them. You can’t stand on top of it, and that’s the point of the place. The mountains were bought so they’d stay the way they are, and the best way to honor the man is to stay on the trail and look up.