What is East End?
Ask a Scottsdale hiker for the highest point in the McDowells and most will point at the antennas on Thompson Peak. The answer is a summit with a plain two-word name above the Tom’s Thumb Trailhead.
East End is the top of the McDowell Mountains and of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. The city’s trail map and its 2024 ecological plan put it at 4,059 feet. Peakbagger, which Wikipedia follows, gives 4,069 on a newer survey datum, with 1,347 feet of prominence. The federal gazetteer pins the whole range to essentially the same coordinates as this summit: look up “McDowell Mountains” and you land on East End.
It’s also the mountain that fell down. About 500,000 years ago East End’s northeast face broke loose and ran about a mile onto the desert, leaving the jumbled boulder field now crossed by the Marcus Landslide Trail. On its west ridge stands the granite spire of Tom’s Thumb. Under its north side are the climbing walls whose names the federal board made official in 2008.
Then the catch. The city map has an East End Trail, 1.3 miles long, but it doesn’t go to the summit. It leaves the Tom’s Thumb Trail at 3,607 feet and drops about 1,040 feet south along the mountain’s west flank to the junction of the Bell Pass, Windgate Pass and Windmill trails. The summit triangle on the map has no trail to it, and Preserve rules keep everyone on designated trails. East End is the high point you hike around and look up at, best from the upper Tom’s Thumb Trail and from The Lookout, a short official spur that tops out at 3,858 feet.
How to see the top of the range (legally)
Start at Tom’s Thumb. Everything here begins at the Tom’s Thumb Trailhead, 23015 N. 128th St., at 2,813 feet. It has restrooms and no water. It fills early on cool-season weekends, so plan on 7 a.m. or mid-afternoon.
The close look: the East End Trail junction. The Tom’s Thumb Trail climbs past a string of named viewpoints: Raven Roost Scenic View, Vulture View Scenic Point and Prairie Falcon Overlook. It reaches emergency marker EE1 at 3,607 feet, where the East End Trail branches south. By our sum of the segment lengths on the city map, that’s about 1.5 miles and 800 feet up from the lot. The high ground immediately east is the summit, about 450 feet higher. This is as close as official trail gets.
The high view: The Lookout. Continue west past the Tom’s Thumb spur to marker TL1 and take the Lookout Trail, 0.5 mile and 168 feet of change, to The Lookout at 3,858 feet. The city’s own “popular destinations” box lists it at 5.0 miles round trip and 1,045 feet from the trailhead. That makes it the hardest of the three listed (Tom’s Thumb is 4.4 miles, the Marcus Landslide 3.7) and the best summit-level view of East End. (This Lookout is in the Tom’s Thumb area. It’s not the Gateway Loop’s saddle.)
The through-route: the East End Trail itself. From EE1 the trail drops south for 1.3 miles, past EE3 at 3,116 feet, to EE5 at 2,573 feet beside the Bell Pass–Windgate–Windmill junction in the interior basin. That’s over 1,000 feet of descent in 1.3 miles. Climbing it back out is the hard part. With a car at each end, a point-to-point from Tom’s Thumb down the East End Trail and out over Windgate Pass to the Gateway Trailhead is about 7.5 miles by the map’s segment lengths, mostly downhill. Carry all your water. The interior basin has none, and it’s no place to be after 9 a.m. from May through September. The summer sunrise rules are the floor, not the ceiling.
What about the summit? Older peak-bagging and hiking sites describe ways to the top. The city’s current map doesn’t show one, and the Preserve’s rules are simple: stay on designated, posted trails. Off-trail travel is prohibited throughout the Preserve, and it does real damage on ground this steep and slow-growing. The climbing walls below the summit are a separate, regulated case. Climbers reach them on signed access routes under the 2011 climbing plan, and our guide to the Preserve’s climbing crags explains how that works. Neither is a license to scramble to the high point.
Read the face from below. Do the Marcus Landslide Trail on another day, east from the same lot. From the slide you look back up at the breakaway scar on East End’s northeast face, and you understand the mountain better from there than from anywhere on its shoulder.
The summit with the plainest name
Nothing in the federal record explains the name. The gazetteer entry for East End has no history field, unlike the 2008 names around it. It reads like a cartographer’s label: the summit at the east end of the range. That’s what it is. The Preserve’s newer names, many of them from climbers and hikers, crowd around it. Gardeners Wall is “just W of the East End,” and the federal record says it was originally named for Ray Garner, a longtime area rock climber. Sven Slab is at its northeast end, named for the Sven power saws used to cut a trail to the base of the wall. Morrells Wall is at its north end. Mesquite Canyon “heads just NE of East End” and runs northwest toward Rock Knob. All four were made official on June 12, 2008, in the batch that also produced Drinkwater Peak.
Some of the coverage is plain wrong. Wikipedia’s article puts East End “about 24 miles north northeast of Scottsdale.” It’s inside Scottsdale, in the city’s own Preserve, a few miles from the Tom’s Thumb parking lot. The elevation is less clear-cut. The city prints 4,059 feet on its trail map and in its ecological plan, which describes the Preserve as running from 1,690 feet at the southern boundary to 4,059 at East End. Peakbagger’s 4,069 feet uses the newer NAVD88 datum. The ten-foot gap is a surveying question, not a ranking question. Both put East End at the top, ahead of McDowell Peak and the antenna summit at Thompson Peak.
Granite, and a mountain that came apart
The city’s 2015 cultural resource plan, citing a geologic study of the range, splits the McDowells into three parts: weathered granite in the north, metamorphic rock between Windgate and Bell passes, and volcanic and sedimentary rock in the south. East End is the northern granite. That accounts for the rounded boulders, the spire of Tom’s Thumb on its ridge and the clean walls climbers have used for decades.
Granite weathers by loosening, and about half a million years ago East End loosened all at once. The northeast face failed and ran about a mile out onto the bajada, leaving a debris field roughly 4,000 feet long. It sat unrecognized until 2002, when two ASU graduate students worked out what the lumpy ground was. The feature was named for the late Melvin Marcus, and the Marcus Landslide Trail now crosses it. The second-largest known landslide in Arizona came off the state’s urban edge, from the highest peak in the range, and went unnoticed until this century. For the full story of the rocks, see our McDowell geology field guide.
A peak the Preserve kept wild on purpose
Climbers were on these walls long before the city owned them; Tom’s Thumb was first climbed in 1964, and the federal record names Gardeners Wall for “longtime area rock climber” Ray Garner. The city’s 2011 conceptual rock climbing plan kept that use but drew a line around it: climbing only at designated “existing and historical crags,” reached by signed access routes, with no new routes. The trail system that grew up around the permanent Tom’s Thumb Trailhead, which opened in 2012, shows East End from nearly every side without a trail to its summit. The Tom’s Thumb Trail runs along the ridge below, the Lookout Trail ends at a viewpoint across from it, and the East End Trail goes around its west flank. The only thing on top is the mountain.
We’d rather report that than invent a route. The city’s map is the authority on which trails exist, and it shows none to the summit. If that changes, this page will too.
Why it matters
East End is a good test of what the Preserve is for. Plenty of places would have put a summit trail, a plaque and a bench on their highest peak. Scottsdale put the trailhead at the bottom, the viewpoints on the shoulders and nothing on top. What you get instead is the mountain as it is: the high point of the range, a granite summit that once dropped its own face onto the desert, and a set of trails that let you walk all the way around it. Hike to the East End junction, look up, and leave it alone.