What is the Lost Dog Wash Trailhead?
The McDowells have a hard side and a kind side, and Lost Dog Wash is the kind side.
The Lost Dog Wash Trailhead is the southern entrance to the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, at the top of 124th Street north of Via Linda, where the east-Shea subdivisions stop and the bajada tilts up toward the range. It’s the trailhead built for the neighborhoods: a big free lot, restrooms, water, shade ramadas, horse-trailer stalls, an accessible nature trail, and a small stone amphitheater sunk into the desert where school groups and Conservancy hikes gather.
The building is worth a look on its own. Designed by Weddle Gilmore with landscape architects Floor Associates, it’s built of rammed earth dug from its own foundations, runs on a rooftop solar array, harvests rain and gray water for the plantings, and uses composting restrooms that save roughly 200,000 gallons of water a year. It won an AIA Western Mountain Region Honor Award in 2007 and a national ASLA Honor Award in 2008, whose jury called it the most sustainable project they’d seen. It was the model for the grander Gateway Trailhead a few years later.
Behind it fans a web of gentle trails. Lost Dog Wash Trail follows the sandy wash bottom up into the foothills; Ringtail climbs the low ridge beside it; Old Jeep Trail and Anasazi cut across; and the Taliesin Overlook, about two miles out, looks southwest over Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter camp. The standard loop is 4 to 5 miles with only a few hundred feet of gain — a real desert hike that a nine-year-old can finish. For more, the Sunrise Trail continues east to Sunrise Peak, and the Quartz Trail runs north across the bajada.
Open sunrise to sunset, free, dogs on leash, bikes and horses welcome. It’s the Preserve with training wheels, in the best sense.
How to do Lost Dog Wash right
Pick the loop, not the out-and-back. The default move is straight up the wash to the Taliesin Overlook and back the same way, and it’s fine. Better: take Ringtail out — it climbs gently onto the ridge, keeps you above the wash with the views open — visit the overlook, then drop into Lost Dog Wash for the sandy, partly shaded walk home. Four and a half miles, give or take, and every junction is signed with a map. If you have a stroller or a grandparent, the accessible nature loop at the building is short, flat and surprisingly good.
Time it for the view. The Taliesin Overlook faces west. In the cooler months, start about ninety minutes before sunset on a weekday: the range behind you goes orange, Taliesin West sits in shadow below, and the Valley lights come up as you walk out. Mornings are the busy shift; the evening shift is the local one.
Summer means dawn, and it means no dogs. This is the trailhead where the Preserve’s heat warnings got personal: a dog died on the trail in July 2017. The city asks you to leave dogs home above 90°F, and the wash bottom radiates heat like a skillet by 9 a.m. from May through September. Follow the summer sunrise rules — on trail by first light, off by 8, a liter of water per person per hour.
Going bigger. The Sunrise Trail leaves the Lost Dog network and climbs east to Sunrise Peak, about 6 miles round trip and 1,300 feet of gain from this lot — the gentler of the two approaches to the peak, and a good half-day. The Quartz Trail heads north through the bajada toward the Quartz Trailhead and the Gateway side, with a short, steep spur to the gleaming quartz outcrop that gives it its name; keep off the quartz itself.
Parking and manners. The lot is free and fills on winter weekend mornings; there is no street parking in the surrounding neighborhood, and it’s enforced. Bikes yield to hikers, everyone yields to horses, and stay on the trail — the crust between them is alive.
Pair it. This is the Shea corridor’s trailhead, ten minutes from Scottsdale Ranch Park for the post-hike playground. The obvious pairing is Taliesin West itself, a few minutes’ drive down Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard: look down on it from the overlook in the morning, tour it in the afternoon.
The trailhead that taught Scottsdale how to build one
Nobody knows who the lost dog was. The McDowell Sonoran Conservancy, which has looked, says of the original animal that we know nothing — not its name, not its owner, not its fate — only that the wash draining this corner of the range had picked up the name by the time anyone was writing names down, and that the state’s board of geographic names later made it official. It is a good name for a place, mournful and small-scale, and it stuck to the trailhead when the city built one.
The land had a famous neighbor first. In December 1937 Frank Lloyd Wright bought roughly 600 acres of desert just below this wash — the site of Taliesin West — and his apprentices started building the following January. For decades the foothills above his camp stayed what they had always been: grazing land and jeep tracks — the Old Jeep Trail keeps the memory, and the Anasazi Trail’s name nods to the people who were here long before either. Then the subdivisions arrived along Via Linda and Shea, and by the early 1990s the pattern that had already fenced off Pinnacle Peak was heading for the McDowells.
Scottsdale’s answer was the Preserve — the sales tax of May 23, 1995, raised again in 2004 — and the southern foothills, with houses already at their feet, were early acquisitions. But owning desert and welcoming people onto it are different problems. The city’s Preservation Division wanted a trailhead that demonstrated, rather than merely announced, the values it was buying land for. It hired Weddle Gilmore of Scottsdale and the Phoenix landscape firm Floor Associates, and the result, opened in the mid-2000s, rewrote what a trailhead could be.
The walls are rammed earth, made from the soil excavated for the foundations, so the buildings are literally the ground they stand on. The restrooms are composting units that save about 200,000 gallons a year over conventional plumbing. A 3,000-watt roof-integrated solar array runs the site independent of the grid. Gray water and harvested rain, around 75,000 gallons a year, irrigate the native plantings. Circular seating areas and a small amphitheater are cut into the slope rather than set on top of it; from the trails above, the whole complex reads as a few low walls and shade roofs the color of the bajada. The awards followed fast: an AIA Western Mountain Region Honor Award in 2007, the national ASLA Honor Award in 2008 (the jury: the most sustainable project we have seen), a City of Scottsdale environmental design award in 2010. When the city commissioned its flagship Gateway Trailhead on Thompson Peak Parkway, it went back to the same architects and asked for the same thing, bigger; the Gateway opened in 2009 with a LEED Platinum rating and Lost Dog Wash’s DNA.
The wash earned a second meaning in July 2017, when hikers brought an unleashed pit bull up the trail in late-morning heat and the dog died. It was the kind of story that recurs across the Valley every summer, but here the name made it land, and the Conservancy still tells it when explaining why the Preserve asks you to leave dogs home above 90°F. The gentlest trailhead in the McDowells is still the Sonoran Desert.
Why it matters
Lost Dog Wash is the Preserve at its most democratic. The mountains get the postcards, but this is where the neighborhood walks the dog at dusk, where the school bus unloads at the amphitheater, where a kid finishes a first real desert loop and a grandparent does the accessible trail while the rest go to the overlook. It’s also the place where Scottsdale learned that a public restroom could be a piece of environmental architecture, a lesson the Gateway and every trailhead since has repeated. Gentle terrain, serious building, an honest name. Go on a winter evening and watch the light fall on Wright’s camp below.