What is Granite Mountain Trailhead?
Six miles east on Dynamite, two miles north on 136th Street, past the last mailbox and then some. By the time the pavement runs out of excuses you are at the quietest big trailhead in Scottsdale.
Granite Mountain Trailhead, at 31402 N. 136th Street, anchors the far northeast corner of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve — the last ground the city bought as it pushed the Preserve north and east toward the Tonto National Forest. Granite Mountain itself is one of the five named mountains of the northern Preserve: not tall, just extravagantly piled, a heap of weathered granite blocks and slabs sitting in open saguaro country with nothing much around it.
The headline route is the Granite Mountain Loop — about 5.6 miles with only something like 400 feet of climbing, which is to say a long, level, generous circuit that shows you every face of the mountain in turn. Shorter options run from the same lot: the 0.7-mile Bootlegger Trail threading a corridor of big stone slabs, plus Saddlehorn and Balanced Rock connections that link west into the Brown’s Ranch network.
The trailhead is worth a minute of attention on its own terms. Roughly 14,000 square feet of facility by SmithGroup, built simultaneously with its sibling at Fraesfield, it bridges an existing wash and deliberately withholds the view — the arrival path works its way past granite outcrops, turns you toward a saguaro stand, and only then hands you the mountain. It won AIA and ASLA awards for exactly that restraint. Practically: restrooms, shade ramadas, interpretive signs, horse-trailer parking — and no drinking water. Sunrise to sunset, free, leashed dogs welcome.
How to do Granite Mountain right
Respect the drive. This is a 20-to-25-minute haul past the other trailheads from anywhere in central Scottsdale, and the last stretch is genuinely out there. That distance is the crowd filter and the reason to come, but it also means you do not want to arrive and discover you forgot something.
The something you will forget is water. There is none here, and none on the loop. Carry a liter per person minimum in cool weather and twice that in warm, and understand that 5.6 flat miles with no shade and no fountain is a different proposition in April than in January.
Run the loop clockwise in the morning. You get the sun behind you on the eastern faces of the mountain early, the long views north toward the Tonto and east to the Mazatzals in the middle, and the trailhead’s staged arrival path in reverse at the end. Add Bootlegger on the way back in for the slabs.
Shorten intelligently. Bootlegger plus a segment of the Granite Mountain Trail makes a tidy sub-three-mile loop with the best rock per mile in the northern Preserve. It is the right call with kids, with a dog, or on any day above 90 degrees — which is also the temperature at which dogs are not allowed on Preserve trails at all.
Ride it for distance, not features. Crushed-granite tread, gentle grades, few technical surprises: intermediate riders looking to put in miles do very well here, and the connections west to Brown’s Ranch and south toward Fraesfield make 20-plus-mile days easy to assemble. Riders after built flow start at Pima and Dynamite instead.
Time of year matters more than time of day. October through April this is one of the best walks in Arizona. May through September it is a sunrise-only trail, and in July it is not a trail at all — read our summer sunrise hiking rules and take them literally, because you will be a long way from help.
Pair it well. With Fraesfield, ten minutes south, for a two-trailhead northern day. With Tom’s Thumb if you want a climb to go with the flat miles. Or with nothing at all, which is arguably the point of driving this far.
The trailheads built for land nobody thought Scottsdale would own
The Preserve did not grow outward evenly. It grew in two lurches, and this corner is the second one.
When Scottsdale voters approved the first dedicated Preserve sales tax on May 23, 1995, the mission was the mountains: the McDowell skyline that development was visibly climbing, the ridgelines that made the city look like the Sonoran Desert instead of a subdivision with a view. Nobody in 1995 was drawing a boundary this far northeast. This was still the far end of ranch country — the outer range of the E.O. Brown family’s cattle operation, which ran from 1916 into the 1970s across roughly 44,000 acres, and where Granite Mountain functioned as a landmark you rode past rather than a place you went.
The second lurch was 2004. Voters raised the Preserve tax to 0.35% with an explicit, much larger ambition: buy north, buy east, extend protected desert toward the Tonto National Forest and make the Preserve a landscape rather than a mountain range. That vote is why Scottsdale owns the ground under this parking lot. It is also why the city found itself, a decade later, holding tens of thousands of acres of northern desert that the public could reach only by parking on a dirt shoulder.
In 2014, the year the Preserve marked its twentieth anniversary, the city commissioned a master plan for two new trailheads in that northeast corner: Granite Mountain and Fraesfield, designed and constructed as a pair by SmithGroup, with structural work by PK Associates. The two sites got deliberately opposite treatments. Fraesfield sits up on a plateau and does as little as possible, letting a 360-degree panorama of the Preserve and the Tonto do the work. Granite Mountain does the reverse: it choreographs. The approach path curls among granite boulder outcrops, aims you at a saguaro forest, releases the long views in pieces, and saves the mountain for last. Both buildings — Fraesfield about 7,500 square feet, Granite Mountain about 14,000 — are steel-framed and span an existing desert wash on pedestrian bridges rather than filling it in, which is the sort of decision that costs money and shows up nowhere in a visitor’s experience except as intact desert.
The profession noticed. The pair collected an AIA Arizona honor award for distinguished architecture and ASLA Arizona recognition in 2019, and Fraesfield took an AIA Small Project Award in 2021 — the same year the city dedicated the Pima and Dynamite Trailhead in November and effectively finished the trailhead system the Preserve had been building since Lost Dog Wash and Gateway.
What that buys a visitor is a strange, valuable thing: a heavily invested piece of public architecture in a place almost nobody drives to. On a Tuesday morning in February the lot will hold four cars. The restrooms are clean, the ramadas are shaded, the signs are legible, and the 5.6-mile loop around the mountain will be yours. It is the most expensive solitude in Scottsdale, and the city paid for it up front, in cash, by referendum.
Why it matters
Every big preserve eventually faces the question of whether to make its quiet parts easy to reach. Make them too easy and they stop being quiet; leave them unreachable and you have bought land for an abstraction. Granite Mountain is Scottsdale’s answer, and it is a good one: build the facility properly, put it at the end of a long drive, and let distance do the crowd control that gates and permits do elsewhere. The result is the corner of the Preserve that feels most like wilderness and the one most carefully designed to feel that way. Drive the extra twenty minutes once and you will understand why the regulars are a little cagey about recommending it.