What are the McCormick Ranch lakes and paths?
Most Scottsdale neighborhoods have sidewalks. McCormick Ranch has a circulatory system.
Built out from the early 1970s on the McCormick family’s old cattle-and-Arabian spread, the Ranch was planned around more than 25 miles of walking and bike paths — locals still call the network the Camelback Walk — plus seven man-made lakes covering roughly 130 acres of water and two 18-hole golf courses. The paths were drawn before the houses, which is why they run behind fences and between villages rather than along arterial roads, and why the whole community is navigated more sensibly on foot than by car. Kids ride to parks on them. Retirees walk loops on them at six in the morning. Cyclists use them to get from Shea Boulevard to Old Town without meeting a single left-turn arrow.
The water is the scenery. Lake Margherite sits at Hayden Road and Via de Ventura behind Mercado del Lago; Camelback Lake anchors the golf club and the Scottsdale Resort; Lake Angela, Santa Fe Lake and Lake Nino hold the north and east ends. Several of them started as stock ponds for Anne McCormick’s Arabian horses and were reshaped into lagoons when the plan came together.
One crucial distinction: the paths are public, the lakes are not. Anyone can walk or ride here. Fishing is catch-and-release, artificial lures only, by permit from the McCormick Ranch Property Owners’ Association — and those permits go to owners and their tenants, not visitors. Bring shoes, not tackle. For public fishing, Chaparral Park is ten minutes south.
How to walk and ride it right
Follow the water, not the signs. Wayfinding here is thin, the path network branches constantly, and the villages all look plausibly like the one you just left. The reliable method is to keep a lake or a fairway on one side of you and commit to a direction; the reassuring fact is that you are never more than a few hundred yards from a street you recognize. Screenshot a map before you start anyway.
Start at Lake Margherite. Park free at Mercado del Lago at Hayden and Via de Ventura, get a coffee, and walk the lakeshore path. South of Via de Ventura the path traces the edge of the McCormick Ranch Golf Club, which is the prettiest mile in the network — parkland golf, eucalyptus, water, and Camelback Mountain doing its thing to the southwest. Out-and-back it for two easy miles or keep going and make it a loop of whatever length your morning allows.
By bike, go long. This is the connective tissue of central Scottsdale. Ride the Ranch paths west to the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt at Indian Bend Road and you are on eleven uninterrupted car-free miles: south through Chaparral Park, Indian School Park, Eldorado Park and Vista del Camino to Tempe, or west on the Arizona Canal path to the Waterfront and Old Town. Our Greenbelt cycling notes cover the underpasses that make it work.
Where to leave the car. The Ranch’s streets are permit-free but its lots mostly belong to somebody. Use city parks as trailheads: Rotary Park on Doubletree Ranch Road, Comanche Park in Paseo Village, Shoshone Park or Mountain View Park — all of them wired into the same path system, all free.
Season and hours. The paths are unlit in places and read as neighborhood space after dark; treat them as daylight routes. October through April, any hour is pleasant. June through September, this is a sunrise activity — the lakes look wonderful at dawn and the eucalyptus shade holds until about eight.
Manners, because people live here. Every path runs behind somebody’s back fence. Keep dogs leashed, keep bikes slow through the blind corners, and do not treat the lakeshore lawns as picnic grounds — a good share of them are private easements. The community’s tolerance for outside foot traffic is what makes this guide possible.
Kids’ version. Ride to McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park at Scottsdale Road and Indian Bend — the train, the carousel, three dollars — then loop back along the lakes. It is the most reliable good day in central Scottsdale.
From Arabian stables to a national template
In 1921 the Jolly family ran cattle on 160 acres of desert between the Indian Bend Wash and the McDowell foothills. In April 1944 that ranch was bought by Fowler McCormick — grandson of Cyrus McCormick, who invented the mechanical reaper, and of John D. Rockefeller, who invented most of the rest — and his wife Anne “Fifi” Potter Stillman McCormick. Over the next decade they assembled parcel after parcel around it until the holding reached roughly 4,200 acres, about seven square miles of what is now central Scottsdale.
Fowler ran International Harvester and then its board. Anne ran horses, and she ran them seriously. She bought her first Arabian in 1948, built a breeding program that imported the stallion Naborr in 1963 — a sire credited with hundreds of foals — and created Paradise Park, a 150-acre arena complex where the Valley’s Arabian shows were held from the mid-1950s through 1968. Scottsdale’s identity as the Arabian horse capital of America was not invented by a chamber of commerce; it was largely built on this ranch. And the ponds that watered those stables, dug where the ground held water best, are the ancestors of the lakes people walk around today.
The McCormicks also gave the city one of its great gifts. In 1967, as Scottsdale grew toward their fences, they donated 100 acres with a single condition — that it become a park for everyone. Thirty of those acres are now McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park, where Anne’s son Guy Stillman installed his own miniature railroad.
Anne died in May 1969. The following summer the ranch was sold to Kaiser-Aetna for about $12 million, and Fowler died in 1973. What the buyers held was extraordinary: four thousand contiguous acres inside a booming city, unentailed, ready to be planned from scratch. What they drew has been studied ever since — villages of clustered housing rather than a uniform grid, lakes as organizing features, golf woven through, commercial nodes at the edges, and a path network laid down as the community’s primary circulation. The McCormick Ranch Property Owners’ Association was incorporated on September 21, 1972, and build-out ran through the decade and beyond.
Two things made it work in practice. The first was the timing: the Ranch grew up alongside the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt, built between 1967 and 1985, so the community’s private paths could plug into eleven miles of public flood-plain parkland on its western edge and suddenly reach the entire city. The second was the water, which in 1970s Arizona was still treated as a design material — seven lakes, 130 acres, evaporating cheerfully under a desert sun. Nobody would plan it that way now, and the Xeriscape Garden six minutes south exists to explain why.
The Ranch also produced one genuine first. In September 1976 the Scottsdale Conference Center — now The Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch — opened beside Camelback Lake as the first resort in America purpose-built around corporate meetings, a format the entire hospitality industry subsequently copied. Fifty years on, the association counts something like 27,000 residents inside the old ranch fence line.
Why it matters
McCormick Ranch is where Scottsdale learned that the amenity could be the plan. Not a park at the end of the subdivision, not a golf course with houses stapled to it, but a whole community whose organizing logic is water and paths — and, crucially, paths that connect outward to the Greenbelt rather than dead-ending at the property line. The lakes are a period piece and the association knows it. The 25 miles of path are not: they are the most useful piece of 1970s infrastructure in the city, still delivering kids to ball fields and retirees to their morning loops, fifty years after somebody drew them before the first house went up.