What is the Greenbelt?
Every city has flood control. Almost no city has this.
The Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt is an eleven-mile ribbon of parks, lakes, and golf courses running north–south through the heart of Scottsdale, stitched together by a continuous paved path with barely a stoplight on it. On any given morning it carries road cyclists in pace lines, kids wobbling to school, anglers heading for a stocked lake, and retirees on three-wheelers — all inside what is, legally and functionally, a floodway.
That’s the twist that makes the Greenbelt world-famous among planners: when the big storms come, this entire green corridor turns back into the river it always was. The parks flood on purpose, over grass engineered to take it, and the surrounding neighborhoods stay dry. A few days later the water’s gone and the frisbees are back.
The chain includes four of the city’s major parks — Vista del Camino, Eldorado, Indian School and Chaparral — plus Camelback Park’s former golf fairways and a string of lakes. If south Scottsdale feels unusually green for a desert city, this is the reason. It is the reason.
How to ride (or walk, or fish) it right
The classic ride: start at Vista del Camino near Roosevelt, head north. The path runs flat and car-free through Eldorado Park’s lakes, ducks under the major cross streets, threads between golf fairways, and lands you at Chaparral Lake around mile six with Camelback Mountain filling the sky. Turn around, or push on toward Shea. South of Vista del Camino, the path continues to McKellips and hands off toward Tempe Town Lake — locals ride Old Town to Tempe’s lake loop as a standard 20-miler.
Timing: November through March, any hour is good. April and October, mornings. Summer, sunrise only — the path is exposed, and the asphalt radiates by 9 a.m. Winter weekend mornings are peak sociable chaos; weekday mid-mornings are yours alone.
Fish the chain: Chaparral Lake and Eldorado’s lakes are on Arizona’s Community Fishing Program stocking schedule (catfish in warm months, trout in winter). A license covers you at every lake on the belt — one of the Valley’s few genuine multi-lake fishing walks.
Underpass wisdom: the grade-separated crossings are what make the Greenbelt magic — miles without traffic. But they’re the floodway’s low points: after storms they hold water, mud and the occasional displaced duck. Surface streets are the polite detour. And cyclists: call your passes; this is a shared path with strollers and dogs, not a time-trial course, whatever the guys in matching kits believe.
Facilities: restrooms, ramadas, playgrounds and water fountains cluster at each of the four anchor parks, spaced every couple of miles — you’re never far from shade, water or parking.
The best decision Scottsdale ever made
For its first seventy years, Scottsdale had a geographic curse: a wide, shallow wash running straight through town that spent 360 days a year as weedy nothing — old-timers called it the slough — and five days as a dangerous brown river. Storms stranded school kids, drowned cars and split the city in half. Growth made it worse: every new rooftop shed more water into the channel.
The federal answer, worked out in the early 1960s and authorized by Congress in 1965, was the standard one: a seven-mile concrete channel, like the Los Angeles River. It would have worked, and it would have put a permanent gray scar through the middle of a city that was busily branding itself “The West’s Most Western Town.”
What happened instead is the founding legend of Scottsdale urbanism. A landscape architect, Bill Walton, proposed it in a 1964 newspaper column, and citizen committees, a local engineer and city hall pushed an idea that sounded naive: leave the wash open, shape it, grass it, and let the flood have it — a greenbelt that would be parkland 98% of the time and a river the rest. It took years of fighting to convince the Army Corps of Engineers that grass could be infrastructure. The city bet early, opening Eldorado Park in 1967 on wash land it had bought the year before as a working prototype, then adding park after park through the 1970s as bond money, federal cooperation and land deals allowed. In April 1985, Scottsdale dedicated the finished project: $54 million, nearly two decades of work, eleven miles of connected green — and no concrete-lined channel. The greenbelt fight page tells how the argument was won.
Part of the bill was paid in density. “Generally the Council has been willing to permit increase in the density of developable land in order to give developers incentive to construct the Indian Bend Green Belt Wash Floodway,” the city told its citizens in 1973: developers dug and turfed stretches of the channel and deeded them to the city, and in return built townhouses and apartments at the water’s edge. A city report of 1985 said the same, and that the arrangement protected large sections of the wash “at no cost to the city.” The rest came from the $10 million bond voters approved in April 1973, state money for land and a federal cost-sharing contract signed in 1976. The first real test came in March 1978. “It worked beautifully!” Mayor Bill Jenkins wrote to Congressman John Rhodes.
It has paid off on every axis since. The floods still come, and the system just… absorbs them, storm after storm, decade after decade. Property along the wash — once the cheapest in town — became some of the most desirable, which is why the Greenbelt corridor reads today like a linear tour of golf communities. Planners from flood-prone cities worldwide still make pilgrimages to study it, because Scottsdale accidentally invented what the profession now calls green infrastructure — twenty years before the term existed.
The bigger idea
The Greenbelt is the skeleton key to understanding every park in south Scottsdale: Chaparral, Eldorado, Vista del Camino and Indian School aren’t four parks that happen to line up — they’re one flood-control system wearing four name tags. The city’s other master-stroke, the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, applied the same lesson at mountain scale a generation later: in the desert, the smartest thing you can do with land the water wants is give it back — beautifully.
Ride it once end to end and you’ll understand Scottsdale better than any museum can teach it. Bring a fishing rod for credit.