What are the Pemberton Ranch ruins?
The Pemberton Trail is the 15.3-mile loop most people ride at McDowell Mountain Regional Park without asking who Pemberton was. He was Henry Pemberton, who homesteaded on the east side of the McDowells around 1917. A mile or so out along the trail are what Maricopa County calls the remnants of the Pemberton Ranch: the first permanent ranch in what’s now the park, which became the P-Bar and, in the hands of Lee and Delsie Barkdoll, grew to more than 25,000 acres of mostly leased range.
The site is on an official county trail, rangers lead history walks to it, and it costs only the park entry fee. It’s also a thin ruin. The county’s own plan doesn’t describe what survives beyond “remnants,” and we haven’t walked it for this page. What makes it worth the trip is the story, and the story has gaps. The county’s park plan and the City of Scottsdale’s Preserve plan tell it differently, and the ranch house of the later P-Bar years isn’t in the park at all. It stood under what is now Fountain Hills.
How to visit
Pay at the gate and drive to the Trailhead Staging Area. McDowell Mountain Regional Park is at 16300 McDowell Mountain Park Drive, reached through Fountain Hills. The county charges $10 per vehicle under its 2026 rates. Park hours are 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. from May through October and 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. from November through April. The county warns that the staging area is another 5 to 10 minutes’ drive past the entry booth. It has restrooms but no drinking water.
Walk the Pemberton Trail. The county’s 2019 master plan says the ranch remnants are “approximately one mile south along the Pemberton Trail.” Its June 2026 ranger program, “History of Pemberton Pond,” was billed as a 3-mile out-and-back from the staging area “on mostly level yet rocky terrain” that leads “to the remnants of a bygone era.” Put those together and expect about a mile and a half each way. The Pemberton is a shared trail, so listen for mountain bikes and step aside for horses.
Join a ranger if you can. The county runs history programs here under its Archaeology and History events listings, with titles like “Pemberton Pond Hike: Echoes of the Past.” Registration is by phone through the Nature Center at (602) 506-2930 ext. 3. A ranger will tell you what you’re looking at, which beats guessing.
Respect the site. It’s a historic site on public land, and Arizona law protects historic and prehistoric remains on state and county land. Don’t move rocks, dig, or pocket the cans and glass. Stay on the trail. In 2018, members of the public asked the county to restore “Pemberton Pond and Ranch house area.” Leaving it alone is how it stays available to restore.
Make it a longer day. The Dixie Mine is on the same side of the range; the P-Bar held nearly a dozen claims in the Dixie Mining District. The route of Stoneman’s 1870 military road also crosses the park. The Delsie Trail, 2.5 miles, presumably honors Delsie Barkdoll, though the county doesn’t say so.
Rock Knob, on the same side of the line
On the park’s mountain side, the county’s Rock Knob Trail (1.1 miles one way, multiple use) climbs toward Rock Knob, a federally named summit at the north tip of the McDowells. The city’s trail map shows the Rock Knob Trail connecting with the Pemberton Trail and marks Rock Knob as “accessed via County Park.” It’s also crag No. 1 on the city’s list of legal climbing areas. The federal gazetteer gives its position but no name history, and we don’t have a verified summit elevation. It’s a short add-on for anyone already paying to be in the park, not a reason to come on its own.
Two plans, two stories
Almost everything published about the Pemberton Ranch comes from two government planning documents. Each cites an older source, and they don’t fully agree.
The county’s version. Maricopa County’s McDowell Mountain Regional Park Master Plan Update 2019–2039 draws on two sources. One is Bert Fireman’s 1963 A Historical Survey of McDowell Mountain Regional Park, written for the county with the Arizona Historical Foundation. The other is a 2003 “P-Bar” Ranch Photo Album from the Fountain Hills and Lower Verde Valley historical society’s River of Time Museum. In this account:
- Cattle grazed the area from the 1870s. Livestock raising took hold once Fort McDowell gave ranchers a market for beef.
- The earliest documented permanent residence is a 1917 quit-claim deed for Cottonwood Springs, “thought” to mark Henry Pemberton’s homestead.
- Clayton Whitehead filed the first stock-raising homestead inside today’s park boundary sometime between 1919 and 1922 and relinquished it in 1926. State Land Department records also show a filing under the name Pemberton. The plan gives Whitehead’s land as Section 22 of Township 2 North, Range 6 East. That can’t be right for this park. Township 2 North in that range is down on the Salt River, where Granite Reef Dam was built. It’s most likely a typo for a township farther north.
- In the early 1920s the ranch passed to “Pink” Cole, who handed it to his son Bill Cole in 1926. That’s when, the plan says, it became the “P-” or P-Bar, “‘P’ presumably for ‘Pemberton.’”
- In 1935 it was bought by Lee Barkdoll and Delsie Journigan. From 1935 into the 1950s the P-Bar ran more than 25,000 acres, 165 head of cattle, and “nearly a dozen mining claims in the Dixie Mining District.”
- Beef prices fell in the early 1950s. In 1954 Delsie sold the ranch, which passed through several owners and was subdivided. The northern portion, including the original homestead, became part of the park in 1964.
The city’s version. Scottsdale’s 2015 Cultural Resource Master Plan for the McDowell Sonoran Preserve cites T. Jones’s Broken Down Cowboys (2012), a summary of ranching in north Scottsdale and the Preserve from 1915 to 1970, written by a Tempe consulting firm and on file with the city’s Historic Preservation Office. Here the P-Bar was established by Henry Pemberton “on the east side of the McDowell Mountains in 1917” and, like E.O. Brown’s upper ranch at Brown’s Ranch, “was never formally patented.” Leonard Sawyer took over the informal claim in the 1920s. He sold the P-Bar, plus land he had added, to Lee Barkdoll and his wife Delsie in 1936. The Barkdolls expanded it past 25,000 acres, mostly on state and federal grazing leases. Lee died in 1938. Delsie remarried, to Charles “Dick” Robbins, and kept running the ranch into the mid-1950s.
Where they disagree. Was it Cole or Sawyer in the 1920s? Was the purchase in 1935 or 1936? Was Delsie Lee’s wife or his partner when they bought? (The county gives her surname as Journigan, which may simply be her name before she married.) And did Pemberton ever hold a patent? The county mentions a homestead filing in his name; the city says the ranch was never patented. The documents that would settle it are federal land-patent records, Fireman’s 1963 survey, Jones’s 2012 study, and the River of Time Museum’s P-Bar album in Fountain Hills.
The ranch house that’s under a high school
The ruin on the Pemberton Trail isn’t the whole P-Bar. In May 1997 the Fountain Hills Times reported that the Fountain Hills and Lower Verde River Valley Historical Society would dedicate a P-Bar Ranch Monument on May 17. It stands in the east parking lot of Fountain Hills High School, which the paper called “the approximate location of the old ranch house for the P-Bar Ranch that operated earlier this century on property that would become Fountain Hills.” The monument carries two bronze plaques with a picture of the building and a short history. The project was the idea of society co-founder Dr. Paul Kolwaite.
So the P-Bar had at least two centers. One is the original Pemberton homestead and its water, which the county says came into the park in 1964. The other is the later ranch house, which ended up inside the town that was built on the ranch’s southern range. If you want both, the monument is a short drive from the park gate.
The National Register question
The county plan says twice that the Pemberton Ranch is “listed on SHPO’s National Register of Historic Places” as “AZ U: 6323,” and calls it the only listed site in the park. We couldn’t confirm it. The ranch doesn’t appear on the published National Register list for Maricopa County. “AZ U: 6323” looks like a garbled version of an Arizona State Museum site number, the system archaeologists use to record sites, which pairs a map letter and quadrangle number with a site number. A recorded site isn’t the same as a listed one. Until the State Historic Preservation Office says otherwise, treat it as a recorded historic site.
What you’re actually seeing
The county’s master plan includes a photograph of the remnants but doesn’t describe them. The June 2026 ranger program was titled “History of Pemberton Pond,” and the 2018 public comments asked for restoration of “Pemberton Pond and Ranch house area.” That suggests a stock pond and some kind of house site, which fits a desert homestead built around a water source. Beyond that, we’d be guessing, and we won’t. If you walk out with a ranger, you’ll know more than any published source.
Why it’s worth a page
Scottsdale’s own ranch story, E.O. Brown’s DC brand and the Brown’s Ranch cattle empire, gets a trailhead, an interpretive loop and a lot of telling. The P-Bar was the same kind of operation on the other side of the mountains: an unpatented claim at a spring, built into a ranch on leased land, then sold off as beef prices fell and the land became worth more as subdivisions. Fountain Hills was built on its southern range, and the regional park kept the north end. The ruins on the Pemberton Trail are where that history is still on the ground.