What is the Paradise Gold Mine?
Most people who walk the Gateway Loop pass a gold mine without noticing.
The Paradise Gold Mine is the scatter of old diggings and tailings on the slopes south of the Gateway Loop in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, above the Gateway Trailhead. It belonged to the Paradise Gold Mining Company, organized in Arizona in 1916. The company dug shafts and adits, put up a boardinghouse that shows on a 1921 federal survey plat, and sold stock to the public at 25 cents a share. Its listing described “2 parallel veins 300 feet apart, traceable at the surface for 3,000 feet, 45 feet wide at depth of 100 feet, and averaging about $5 in gold.”
No record shows it ever produced any gold. The company filed one annual report with the Arizona Corporation Commission, incomplete, in 1919: $22,561.76 paid up and invested. In 1923 the Commission moved to revoke its public-company status for failing to file reports and pay fees. A Maricopa County deputy sheriff sent to serve the papers reported that he couldn’t find the officers. City directories show some of them, including the company’s agent, a former deputy U.S. Attorney, living in Phoenix the whole time.
The McDowell Sonoran Conservancy, whose volunteer researcher Larry Levy pieced the story together, calls it “both a myth (no gold) and a mystery (owners who disappeared, apparently in plain sight).” You see it from the trail, and that’s the only way to see it: there’s no path to the workings, and old mines are among the most dangerous things in the desert.
How to see it from the Gateway Loop
Do the loop. The Gateway Loop is the city’s signature hike: 4.4 miles with 655 feet of elevation change by the city’s figures, starting at the Gateway Trailhead, 18333 N. Thompson Peak Pkwy. Go clockwise, as the Gateway Loop protocols recommend: the climb comes while it’s cool, and the views open up on the way down.
Know your landmarks. The loop’s high point is Gateway Saddle, at 2,375 feet on the city map, the gap where everyone stops for the Thompson Peak photo. From the saddle the loop drops south to the junction with the Bell Pass Trail, and its southern side runs back toward the trailhead. As you walk, scan the slopes to the south for disturbed ground: spoil piles and rock that’s the wrong color and texture for an untouched hillside. Those are the Paradise workings. The Conservancy describes the diggings and tailings as visible to the south from the loop, and that’s as close as anyone needs to get. Bring binoculars.
Stay on the trail. This isn’t a formality. Preserve rules require you to stay on designated trails and forbid disturbing or removing anything. The mine is a historic site, and the city’s cultural resource plan lists it among the Preserve’s mining resources. It’s also a hazard. Abandoned shafts can be vertical, partly hidden and unfenced. Adits can collapse. Old workings can hold bad air, and tailings can hold whatever the miners left in them. The city’s plan says historic mining sites with “toxic materials or trip or fall hazards” aren’t recommended even for guided tours unless they’ve been remediated. Dogs, kids and curious adults all fall into mine shafts. Keep everyone on the tread.
Extend it with the Paradise Trail. Near the loop’s junction with the Bell Pass Trail, the Paradise Trail branches south: 1.5 miles and 325 feet of elevation change on the city’s chart, running down to the Preserve’s southern boundary. In March 2008 the Conservancy advertised a guided “Paradise Trail to Gateway Saddle” hike as “a new hike in the Gateway area”: about 6 miles round trip and 700 feet of gain. That’s still a good way to get more of this country without committing to Bell Pass.
Other named points nearby. The city map labels several viewpoints within reach of Gateway, all on official trail. Inspiration Viewpoint (2,714 feet) is on the Windgate Pass Trail. Prospector Scenic View (2,679 feet) is on the Prospector Trail, east of Bell Pass. Horseshoe Ridge, which the federal record places 1.5 miles west of McDowell Peak, got its official name in 2008. The Conservancy’s 2008 newsletter called it “Horseshoe Mountain” and described a Desert Park Loop hike that “skirts” it. The 0.7-mile Horseshoe Trail near Gateway shares the name. (The Preserve’s other “Lookout,” at 3,858 feet, is up by Tom’s Thumb. See our East End page.)
Season and water. It’s a 4.4-mile loop with no shade and no water past the trailhead’s fountains. From May through September, follow the summer sunrise rules and be done early.
The gold mine that never paid
The McDowells have always attracted prospectors and rarely rewarded them. Maricopa County’s master plan for the regional park on the range’s east side puts it flatly: the mountains “did not produce anything of significance,” and “geologists give no credence to mineral wealth in this area.” Copper showings on the east side, like the Dixie Mine, got as far as tunnels and claims. On the Scottsdale side, the best-documented venture mostly produced paperwork.
The story comes from Larry Levy, a Conservancy PastFinder and steward the organization calls a McDowell Mountains mining authority, retold in the Conservancy’s “Myths and Mysteries of the McDowells.” The Paradise Gold Mining Company was organized in Arizona in 1916. Its promoters then “went about building mining improvements, digging adits and shafts, and otherwise conducting business in an apparent effort to look like successful miners.” Two of the founders were listed in the Phoenix directory as consultants, or “mining experts.” As a public company, it could sell shares.
The pitch it gave the publisher of the Mines Handbook is worth quoting whole: “2 parallel veins 300 feet apart, traceable at the surface for 3,000 feet, 45 feet wide at depth of 100 feet, and averaging about $5 in gold. Sinking shaft to 200 feet level in 1917. Stock offered to the public at 25 cents.” Its single annual report to the Arizona Corporation Commission, filed in 1919 and incomplete, showed $22,561.76 in “Amounts Capital Stock Paid Up and Invested,” which Levy notes was a lot of money for the time. Beyond that, he writes, “no records exist of any gold ever having been produced from this mine.”
The paper trail ends in 1923. The Commission began proceedings to revoke the company’s public status for failure to file annual reports and pay fees. A Maricopa County deputy sheriff went to serve a summons on the corporate agent and officers and reported that he couldn’t find them. The city directories of the period, Levy found, show several of them living in Phoenix for years before and after. The company’s designated agent had been a deputy U.S. Attorney. The Conservancy’s verdict is “evidence of either fraud or incompetence,” and it doesn’t pick one. Neither do we. A company that dug real shafts, built a boardinghouse and attracted $22,000 of investment either believed its own veins or wanted very badly for others to. The record we’ve seen doesn’t say which.
What the federal surveyors saw
The mine shows up independently in the federal record. Sidney E. Blout, the General Land Office surveyor, surveyed the land here in 1919, while the company was still nominally active. The plat filed on February 26, 1921 marks the “Paradise Valley Gold Mine including boardinghouse.” The city’s 2015 Cultural Resource Master Plan adds that the boardinghouse “was probably used by employees of the mine” and lists a “Paradise Valley claim” among the Preserve’s previously identified mining sites. Note the drift in the name, from the company’s Paradise Gold to the plat’s Paradise Valley Gold. It’s probably just a surveyor’s label, but it’s why searching only one name misses half the record.
The same year the company organized, 1916, farmers on the plain below were organizing the Paradise Verde Irrigation District (see our Windgate–Bell Pass page on Bell Road’s namesake). Paradise was the name on everything in this corner of the county, from water schemes to mines. The Preserve’s Paradise Trail carries it today. Nobody has documented whether the trail was named for the mine or simply for the valley.
Where the rest of the story lives
The page we’d like to write needs four more sources, all reachable:
- The Arizona Corporation Commission’s corporate file for the Paradise Gold Mining Company, including the 1919 report and the 1923 revocation, at the Arizona State Archives in Phoenix.
- The 1921 GLO plat for the township, on the BLM’s GLO Records site, to see where the boardinghouse symbol sits.
- Phoenix newspapers, 1916–1923. Stock sold to the public may well have been advertised.
- The Arizona Geological Survey’s mine files, which hold the state’s old mining-department records and were offline when we checked.
None of it needs anyone to leave the trail.
Why it matters
Every hiker on the Gateway Loop walks past one of the oldest money stories in north Scottsdale, as old as the first cattle ranches up here and decades older than the subdivisions. It’s a reminder that selling the McDowells as an investment is an old idea. The 1916 version promised gold veins 45 feet wide. The 1995 version, a sales tax to buy the mountains and leave them alone, is the one that paid. Look south from the loop, find the tailings, and stay on the trail.