What is Reach 11?
There is a park in north Phoenix the size of a small preserve, with eighteen miles of trail, five minutes from the Scottsdale Airpark, that most people who live next to it have never walked. It’s called Reach 11, which sounds like a construction invoice, and that is more or less what it was.
Reach 11 Recreation Area is roughly 1,500 acres running along the north side of the Central Arizona Project canal, east to west between Cave Creek Road and Scottsdale Road, north of the Loop 101. Its shape is the whole story: about seven miles long and less than half a mile wide — a ribbon, not a block. Threaded through it are about 18 miles of groomed multi-use trail, each roughly seven feet wide, open to walkers, runners, mountain bikers and horses.
It is technically Phoenix, and its eastern end stops at Scottsdale Road without crossing it. It is also, in practice, north Scottsdale’s flat-mileage park. If you live near the Airpark, Desert Ridge or the 101 and you want to run eight miles on dirt without climbing anything or queuing for a Preserve trailhead, this is the closest thing that exists.
The vegetation makes it strange and good. Because the corridor collects runoff along the canal, it’s xeroriparian — dense mesquite and palo verde thicket rather than the open, spiny bajada you get in the McDowells. It feels like a bosque. It holds actual wildlife. And bolted onto the same corridor are the Reach 11 Sports Complex — soccer, baseball, rugby, field hockey — and the roughly 90-acre Arizona Horse Lovers Park, with lighted arenas and bridle trails, which is the organized equestrian center for this whole side of the Valley.
How to use Reach 11 right
Understand the shape before you go. This is a linear park, not a loop park. You pick an access point, head one direction, and turn around when you’ve had enough — the mileage is entirely yours to choose, which is the single best thing about it. The southeast end near Princess Drive, just west of Scottsdale Road, is the most convenient entry from the Scottsdale side; there’s also access toward the corridor’s north end. Hours are daylight, and the ranger office is the reliable source for current seasonal times.
Navigate by the canal. Signage is thin and the mesquite blocks sight lines, which catches first-timers out. The rule is simple: the canal is always on the corridor’s south side. Heading west, water is on your right. Heading east and back toward Scottsdale Road, water is on your left. That one fact is worth more than a map here.
Use it for what it’s uniquely good at: flat volume. Seven-foot groomed tread means a jogging stroller works, a gravel bike works, a horse works, and a group can run three abreast. Marathon training blocks, long dog walks, easy recovery rides, kids learning to ride dirt — all better here than on a rocky Preserve trail. If you want elevation, you want Pinnacle Peak Park or the Gateway trailhead instead. If you want flat paved miles with lakes and underpasses, that’s the Greenbelt and our Greenbelt cycling cut-throughs.
Respect the thicket. The dense vegetation that makes this corridor pleasant also makes it a real habitat. Rattlesnakes are present in warm months and the trail edges are where you’ll meet one; coyotes, javelina and a long bird list come with the territory. Keep dogs leashed and on the tread, and give horses room and a calm voice — riders use the same trails from the Horse Lovers Park staging area.
Season and shade. Flat and low means hot. There is more shade here than in most desert parks, but not enough to matter in July — dawn only from May through September, per the summer sunrise hiking rules, and after storms the corridor drains across the trail in places, so check the monsoon field manual.
Local pairing. The southeast access sits within a couple of minutes of TPC Scottsdale, so the one week you should avoid it is WM Phoenix Open week, when every road in that quadrant is a parking lot. For equestrian company on the Scottsdale side of the line, Stonegate Equestrian Park and Thompson Peak Park are the nearest in-city options.
How a canal easement became a 1,500-acre park
The name is the history. Arizona spent the better part of the twentieth century fighting for a share of the Colorado River, and in 1968 Congress finally authorized the Central Arizona Project — an aqueduct system that would eventually run some 336 miles from Lake Havasu to Tucson, lifting water thousands of feet uphill along the way. A project of that scale is not designed as one object. It’s designed in numbered segments, and engineers call a segment a reach. This one was the eleventh.
The Granite Reef Aqueduct section that crosses north Phoenix and Scottsdale was built through the 1970s and 1980s, and building a canal requires a wide easement — room for construction, access roads, maintenance, and the simple hydraulic fact that you cannot put buildings tight against an open water channel. When the work was finished, north Phoenix had a seven-mile strip of federal-scale public land, half a mile wide, running through country that at the time was empty desert nobody had built on yet.
What Phoenix did with it was the interesting part. Rather than fence it as pure infrastructure, the city developed the corridor as recreation: groomed multi-use trails along the whole length, the Reach 11 Sports Complex with its bank of soccer, baseball, rugby and field hockey fields, and the Arizona Horse Lovers Park, a roughly 90-acre equestrian facility with four lighted arenas, bridle trails and livestock handling. The result is a park with the amenity mix of a county fairgrounds and the footprint of a wildlife corridor.
Then the Valley grew into it. Through the 1990s and 2000s, everything around the strip filled in — Desert Ridge to the west, the Airpark and north Scottsdale to the east, thousands of houses and a couple of resorts on the corridor’s flanks. Land that had been surplus easement in a construction zone became the only large open space for several miles in any direction. The corridor’s vegetation thickened too, fed by the canal’s influence on local water: mesquite and palo verde grew into a proper xeroriparian thicket, denser and greener than the surrounding desert, which is why a walk here sounds and feels nothing like a walk in the McDowells. Birders noticed long before runners did.
Reach 11’s obscurity is a branding failure, not a quality one. It has no signature summit, no visitor center, no photograph that explains it, and a name that actively discourages curiosity — compare it to “McDowell Sonoran Preserve” and you can see the problem. But measure it the way a runner or a rider measures a park, in miles of usable tread, and it beats nearly everything nearby: eighteen miles of flat, groomed, wide trail, free, with parking that never fills. Scottsdale’s own answer to flat mileage is the Greenbelt — eleven miles of paved path through the Indian Bend Wash, brilliantly engineered and permanently busy. Reach 11 is the dirt version, on the wrong side of the city line, with a fraction of the traffic.
Why it matters
Every metro area has a park like this: enormous, useful, and invisible because it started as infrastructure. Reach 11 is 1,500 acres of desert that exists only because a canal needed elbow room, and it now quietly does a job no Scottsdale park does — long, flat, groomed dirt miles, right where the city’s densest new development meets its western boundary. If you train here, you already know. If you don’t, the fix is one drive to the Princess Drive end at sunrise and an hour heading west with the canal on your right.