What is MacDonald’s Ranch?
Drive Scottsdale Road north past the 101, past the Promenade and the gated everything, and just before Jomax the pavement is still lined by a split-rail fence with horses behind it. That is the last of it.
MacDonald’s Ranch is a Richardson family horse operation that has been on this ground since 1956 and has been taking the public riding since Easter Sunday 1970, when Bob Richardson opened the gate under the name Old MacDonald’s Farm and charged two dollars for a horse and a hayride out to a bonfire. His youngest son Robby runs it now with his wife and two daughters, and the product has not changed much: a wrangler, a saddled horse that knows the route better than you do, and an hour or more of open Sonoran desert below Pinnacle Peak, with saguaros, cholla, the McDowells to the east and no buildings in the frame if you angle the camera right. The ranch describes its riding country as 1,280 acres, which is a couple of square miles of desert that the subdivisions never reached.
The menu is short. Trail rides of one, one and a half or two hours, in groups or private. Sunset rides year-round. Moonlight rides on the four nights around each full moon, which sell out. Hayrides, cowboy cookouts, a petting zoo and a stagecoach for parties and corporate groups. And every October, a Pumpkin Patch that turns the front pasture into a month-long fall festival with a field of pumpkins among the cactus.
It is not a resort stable and it is not a dude ranch. It is a working place with a gravel lot, a check-in counter, firm rules about shoes, and horses that have done this a thousand times. That is the appeal.
How to ride it right
Reserve, then read the rules. Everything is by reservation, with a 30 percent deposit at booking, refundable until 48 hours out, and a late fee if you show up more than fifteen minutes after your check-in time. Riders must be 6 or older (8 for the two-hour and moonlight rides), under 230 pounds, not pregnant, and one to a horse. Long pants and closed-toe shoes are not a suggestion; the counter will turn away flip-flops. Bring water. The horses are calm to the point of boredom, which is what you want with a first-timer or a nervous eight-year-old.
Pick your hour by the calendar. As of this writing a one-hour group ride is about $97, the sunset version about $123, and the longer rides climb toward $170. Private rides, roughly $140 to $220, and the two-hour rides only run in the cool season, November through April. Summer rides go out early, roughly a 7 to 10 a.m. window, and again around 5 p.m., with the ranch typically closed Mondays and Tuesdays from May through September. There are no midday rides in summer and there should not be; see our summer sunrise rules for why.
The moonlight ride is the special occasion. One hour or an hour and a half, leaving as the sun goes down and coming back under a full moon, on only four nights a month. It is the ride to book for a proposal, an anniversary or a visiting parent who thinks they have seen the desert. Check the ranch calendar for the dates and book weeks ahead in the winter.
October is a different place. The Pumpkin Patch runs the whole month, daily except Tuesdays, 9 to 5, closing early on Halloween. Admission is about $15, kids under 2 free, and it covers the petting zoo, gold panning, the hay-bale maze, pedal cars and the games; pony rides, the barrel train and the mechanical bull are a few dollars more, and pumpkins are priced by size. Go at opening, wear a hat, and expect strollers by mid-morning. It is one of the fixtures of our October calendar and the north-side answer on our Scottsdale with kids list.
Make a morning of the corner. The trailheads at Pinnacle Peak Park and Brown’s Ranch are ten to twenty minutes east if you want to see the same desert on foot; the Pinnacle Peak and Troon guide has the breakfast options. From mid-January through March the Arizona Fine Art Expo tent is literally next door on the same corner, and the Celebration of Fine Art, the other big white tent, is four miles south at Hayden and the 101. For the wider world of saddles in this city, start with horseback riding near Scottsdale and Western heritage, rodeo and horses.
The last ranch on Scottsdale Road
When the Richardsons took this ground in 1956, Scottsdale’s city limits stopped miles to the south and north Scottsdale Road was a two-lane run through creosote toward Cave Creek. Pinnacle Peak Patio opened its steak-and-tie-cutting business up the road the following year, and for the next two decades the stretch between Bell Road and Carefree was the Valley’s informal Western playground: a place Phoenix families and winter visitors drove to for a steak, a gunfight or a horse. The Richardsons were a horse and cattle outfit first and joined the tourist trade late, on Easter Sunday 1970, with a name borrowed from the nursery rhyme and a price list that said $2. The hayride went out to a bonfire in the desert; you brought a dish for the potluck.
The neighborhood then filled in around them. Rawhide, the full-scale 1880s cowboy town, opened in 1971 two miles south at Pinnacle Peak Road and became Arizona’s biggest Western attraction. Troon, Pinnacle Peak and Grayhawk were master-planned and built through the eighties and nineties; Scottsdale annexed north almost to the county line; the two-lane road became six. Robby Richardson took over from his father and renamed the place MacDonald’s Ranch, which sounded less like a petting zoo and more like what it was. Then, on Halloween 2005, Rawhide closed and decamped to Gila River land near Chandler, its 160 acres turned into the Silverstone development. CrackerJax, the fun park down by the Airpark, followed in 2023. Every other piece of drive-up, pay-at-the-gate Scottsdale Road entertainment from that era is gone.
MacDonald’s Ranch is the exception, and the reason is partly the land. The ranch itself is modest at the road, but the riding country behind it runs into open desert that the ranch describes as 1,280 acres, two full sections, on the flank of the same terrain the city later protected as the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. You cannot build a resort stable around a parking garage; you need somewhere for the horses to go. The Richardsons had that, kept it, and kept the operation small enough, one family, one herd, one corner, to survive the decades in which the bigger Western attractions were sold out from under their Main Streets.
Why it matters
Scottsdale calls itself the West’s Most Western Town and has for seventy years, and most of what backs that claim now is a parade, a rodeo weekend and a few saloons. MacDonald’s Ranch is one of the very few places inside the city limits where a visitor can still do the thing the slogan describes: get on a horse and ride into the desert with a wrangler, on ground a single family has held since Eisenhower. It is not cheap anymore, the rules are strict, and the sunset slots are hard to get in March. It is also open six days a week in season, ten minutes from the resorts, and exactly as real as the day the gate opened in 1970. Book the early ride. The two dollars is gone; the desert is not.