What is the Pima & Dynamite Trailhead?
Twenty-six years after the first vote, Scottsdale built the last one — and built it for the people the Preserve had quietly become most useful to.
Pima & Dynamite Trailhead, at 28777 N. Pima Road on the northeast corner of Pima and Dynamite Boulevard, was dedicated on November 13, 2021 as the final major trailhead planned for the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. It is the westernmost of the northern gates and by a wide margin the easiest to reach: Pima Road runs straight up from the Loop 101, and the entrance is right there at the light.
The amenity list reads like a list of complaints answered. Restrooms. Drinking water. Shade ramadas. A covered amphitheater for Conservancy programs. Interpretive signs and maps. A large paved lot with extended spaces sized for a truck carrying bikes on a hitch rack — a detail that sounds trivial until you have tried to fit one in a standard stall. And a separate equestrian area with hitching rails and a trough.
The reason for all that is what lies north of the gate: more than a hundred miles of connected singletrack across the flat northern desert, smooth rolling crushed granite with almost no technical trouble and endless loop combinations. The local canon starts with Latigo and Sidewinder as a 2.7-mile warm-up and builds through the 4.5-mile Axle Grease Trail, with Basalt Ridge Overlook (about 4.8 miles round trip) and Scorpion Point (about 5.3) as the walkers’ picks. For anyone who cannot manage distance, the Camino Campana Interpretive Trail is a barrier-free loop of under a mile. From here the network runs east to Brown’s Ranch and onward to Fraesfield and Granite Mountain — a twenty-mile day is a matter of choosing turns.
How to use Pima & Dynamite right
Bikers: this is your trailhead. Not Gateway, where the loop is steep and the lot is a scrum, and not Tom’s Thumb, where the trail goes uphill for two miles. Here the parking fits the vehicle, the water is on site, and the trails north are the flowiest, most rideable network in Scottsdale. Warm up on Latigo and Sidewinder, then take Axle Grease and keep going as long as the legs hold. Beginners can do a genuinely pleasant hour without ever being frightened.
Hikers: go the quieter directions. The Camino Campana interpretive loop is short, barrier-free and better written than most, which makes it the right call with small kids, visiting parents or a wheelchair. Basalt Ridge Overlook at roughly 4.8 miles round trip is the best two-hour desert walk this close to Pima Road, and Scorpion Point adds a little more of the same.
Arrive before 8 in the cool season. This lot fills with bikes earlier than it fills with boots, especially on Saturday and Sunday mornings from November through March. It is a big lot and it turns over reasonably fast, but the first hour after sunrise is the good hour anyway.
Use the water while you have it. Along with Brown’s Ranch, this is one of only two northern trailheads with drinking water — Tom’s Thumb, Fraesfield and Granite Mountain have none. Fill everything here if you are riding a loop that ends at a different lot.
Share properly. Everything is multi-use and the riding is fast, which is a combination that only works because people behave. Bikes yield to hikers, everyone yields to horses, call out early at blind boulder corners, and ride at a speed that assumes a family with a dog is around the next bend, because sometimes it is.
Heat rules are not advisory. The northern flats have no shade and no bailout. May through September means first light or nothing: be rolling by 5:30 and done by 8. The Preserve prohibits dogs on trail above 90 degrees. Our summer sunrise hiking rules cover the rest, and the monsoon field manual is required reading before any late-summer plan out here — these trails cross washes that fill fast.
Pair it well. A ride here plus a climb at Tom’s Thumb makes an ambitious day. A walk here plus lunch at Market Street at DC Ranch makes a civilized one. And if you want the story of the land you are riding across, it is all in the Brown’s Ranch guide.
Twenty-six years, eight front doors
The McDowell Sonoran Preserve was assembled backwards from the way most parks are built. Scottsdale bought the land first — a great deal of it, over decades, by referendum — and then spent another twenty years working out how the public was supposed to get onto it.
The buying started with the vote of May 23, 1995, when Scottsdale approved a dedicated 0.2% sales tax to acquire Preserve land. The target then was the McDowell Mountains: the skyline, the ridgelines, the visible thing that development was climbing. Nobody was arguing about the northern flats. Then came 2004, when voters raised the dedicated tax to 0.35% total and redefined the project — buy north, buy east, push the protected desert out across the old ranch country toward the Tonto National Forest. That is the vote that produced the Preserve’s second half, including everything you can see from this parking lot.
The trailheads followed the money, slowly. Lost Dog Wash and Sunrise served the southern neighborhoods off Via Linda. Gateway opened in 2009 as the flagship. Tom’s Thumb opened in October 2012, the first real front door on the north side of the mountains, replacing an informal access route through Troon that had worn out its welcome. Brown’s Ranch followed in 2013, a net-zero-energy facility that finally made the flat northern desert usable at scale. Fraesfield and Granite Mountain, commissioned as a pair in 2014 and opened in 2019, covered the northeast corner.
That left one hole, and it was the obvious one. The corner of Pima Road and Dynamite Boulevard is where the Valley’s traffic already passes — the straightest shot from the Loop 101 to the northern Preserve, the intersection everyone drives through on the way to somewhere less convenient. Riders had been parking on shoulders and in dirt pull-offs around here for years. The city built the lot before the building was finished, then completed the facility and dedicated the Pima and Dynamite Trailhead on November 13, 2021, describing it as the last of the major trailheads planned for the Preserve.
It was designed with a clear-eyed read of who actually shows up. Mountain biking had become one of the Preserve’s defining uses — the northern network’s smooth crushed-granite tread and gentle grades make it the best beginner-to-intermediate riding in Arizona — and the trailhead reflects that: extended parking spaces for vehicles with bike racks, water to fill bottles, maps at the trailhead rather than three trails in. It also does the civic work: a covered amphitheater for the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy’s guided hikes and programs, interpretive signage, and the Camino Campana Interpretive Trail, a barrier-free loop that makes this end of the Preserve reachable for people the desert normally excludes.
Twenty-six years from the first ballot measure to the last front door. Eight major trailheads, roughly 30,500 acres, more than 230 miles of trail, no entrance fee at any of them. The land was the hard part; the gates were the patient part.
Why it matters
Pima and Dynamite is the least romantic entry in the Preserve’s story and one of the most revealing. There is no famous spire here, no landslide, no ranch ruin — just the intersection everybody drives through, finally given a proper gate, with parking spaces measured for the bikes people actually bring and a fountain where people actually need one. It is what a city does when it has stopped congratulating itself for buying land and started asking how ordinary people get to use it. That the Preserve’s final major trailhead was aimed at mountain bikers and wheelchair users rather than at a photo opportunity says more about Scottsdale’s last twenty years of open-space politics than any ballot summary could.