What is the Gateway Trailhead?
If the McDowell Sonoran Preserve is the largest urban preserve in the country, the Gateway is where it shakes your hand.
The Gateway Trailhead sits at 18333 N. Thompson Peak Pkwy, on the bajada between DC Ranch and McDowell Mountain Ranch, with the whole southern McDowell range stacked up behind it. It opened in May 2009 and it was, deliberately, built to impress: rammed-earth walls made from the soil dug out for its own foundations, a roof covered in desert cobble so the building vanishes when you look back at it from the mountain, an outdoor amphitheater, a 3-D terrain model of the range, and a LEED Platinum certificate to prove the sustainability talk was more than talk. Restrooms, drinking water, shade ramadas, horse-trailer parking and hitching rails complete the list. In a system whose amenities usually stop at a vault toilet, this is the palace.
The trail everyone comes for is the Gateway Loop: about 4.4 miles around, roughly 700 feet of gain, climbing from the lot through a saguaro-and-cholla bajada to a saddle with long views of Thompson Peak and the Valley, then rolling back down the other side. It is the most-hiked desert trail in Scottsdale and, we’d argue, the best short sampler of the Sonoran Desert anywhere in the Phoenix area. For people who want less, the accessible, roughly half-mile Bajada Nature Trail and the gentle Saguaro Loop start at the same building. For people who want more, the Bell Pass and Windgate Pass trails peel off the loop and climb into the range, and a very long day continues past Bell Pass to Thompson Peak.
Free, sunrise to sunset, dogs on leash, bikes and horses sharing the tread. It is the front door, and it’s a good one.
How to hike Gateway right
Parking is the first problem. The lot is big and it still fills. October through April, weekend arrivals after about 7:30 a.m. meet a full lot and a slow shuffle of cars waiting for someone to finish. There is no legal street parking in the neighborhoods around it and the HOAs are attentive. Either arrive by 7, or come after 3 p.m. when the morning crowd is at brunch and the afternoon light on Thompson Peak is better anyway. Summer inverts everything: the lot is empty because the correct start time is 5:30 and the correct finish is 8. Our full set of house rules is at Gateway Loop protocols.
Go clockwise. From the building, take the Saguaro Trail out to the loop and turn right. You take the exposed climbing on the front half while it’s coolest, hit the saddle with the big McDowell view as your midpoint, and descend the gentler grade with the sun at your back. Counterclockwise works, but you’ll spend the last mile climbing into the afternoon.
Water math. One liter per person per hour of hiking, and turn around when half of it is gone. For the loop that’s two liters per person in the warm months. The fountains at the trailhead are for topping off, not for being your plan. There is no water on the trail.
Choose the right trail for the party. The Bajada Nature Trail is genuinely accessible — wheelchairs, strollers, grandparents — and its interpretive signs are the best free desert lesson in the city. The Saguaro Loop is a little under two miles and nearly flat, perfect for kids who are done after an hour. The Gateway Loop wants proper shoes and about two hours. Bell Pass and Windgate Pass are real climbs, and the Windgate–Bell Pass loop is a half-day; don’t add them on a whim in June.
Dogs and bikes. Leashed dogs are welcome, and the city’s own guidance is to leave them home above 90°F. Mountain bikers ride the loop and the pass trails; bikes yield to everyone, everyone yields to horses, and it mostly works. Summer sunrise rules for all of the above are in our summer sunrise guide.
Pair it well. McDowell Mountain Ranch Park with its pool is five minutes south for the post-hike kids’ reward; Market Street at DC Ranch is the breakfast answer. If Gateway is full and you want quiet, the Quartz Trailhead reaches the same bajada from a neighborhood lot with a fraction of the traffic, and Lost Dog Wash is the gentler southern entry.
A trailhead built to disappear
The Gateway exists because a group of citizens in 1990 decided the McDowell Mountains should not become backyards. They incorporated as the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust on January 21, 1991 — Jane Rau and Karen Bertiger signed the papers — and set a target that sounded absurd for a city of Scottsdale’s size: roughly a third of its land area, held as natural open space forever. On May 23, 1995, voters approved a 0.2% sales tax to start buying it. In 2004 they raised it to 0.35%. The land came in parcel by parcel through the 2000s, and by the middle of that decade the city faced a nice problem: it owned a mountain range and had almost nowhere civilized to park.
The southern Preserve had one early answer, the award-winning Lost Dog Wash Trailhead off Via Linda, and its success set the bar. For the main entrance the city went to the same architects, Weddle Gilmore of Scottsdale, with Philip Weddle as design principal and the landscape by JJR-Floor. The brief was contradictory in the best way: make the entrance to the Preserve feel like an entrance, and make it vanish.
They did both. The walls are rammed earth, 95 percent soil salvaged from the site’s own excavations and 5 percent cement, the ancient desert building method dressed for modern loads. The roof is covered in native cobble so that from the trails to the east the 8,800-square-foot building reads as another patch of bajada. Rainwater off that roof — about 50,000 gallons a year — drops into a 20,000-gallon underground cistern and covers all of the landscape irrigation; a photovoltaic array was designed to generate the building’s full annual energy demand; dual-flush toilets and waterless urinals were projected to save a quarter-million gallons a year. Around 90 percent of construction waste was recycled. The budget was about $5.6 million on a 383-acre site. The building opened in May 2009 and earned LEED Platinum under the New Construction 2.2 standard, at the time a rare rating for a public trailhead anywhere, let alone a restroom-and-ramada complex.
The programmatic idea was equally deliberate. Scottsdale wanted a place where, in the city’s own phrasing, individuals regardless of physical condition could experience the desert — hence the accessible Bajada Nature Trail with its interpretive panels, the amphitheater for school groups and Conservancy talks, the terrain model you can run a finger over to find Tom’s Thumb. At opening the Gateway gave access to about 45 miles of trail; today the system it anchors runs past 230.
What nobody fully predicted was the Gateway Loop’s popularity. A modest 4.4-mile circuit designed as a first taste turned into the Valley’s standard-issue hike: the one visitors are sent on, the one locals do after work, the one that fills the biggest lot in the Preserve by 7:30 on a January Saturday. The parking crunch is real, and it’s also the point. A city voted twice to tax itself for desert. The line of cars at Thompson Peak Parkway on a winter morning is what winning looks like.
Why it matters
Every big preserve needs one place where it explains itself, and the Gateway is Scottsdale’s. Lost Dog Wash proved a trailhead could be beautiful; the Gateway proved it could be a civic statement — a building that disappears into the land it introduces, with a trail behind it that makes the case for the whole 30,500 acres in two hours. Everything the Preserve is arguing (that the desert is worth walking, worth paying for, worth leaving alone) is condensed into one rammed-earth doorway with clean restrooms. Park early. Go clockwise. Look back at the roof from the saddle and notice you can’t find it.