What is Thompson Peak?
Look east from almost anywhere in north Scottsdale and find the summit with the antennas. That’s Thompson Peak, and it is not the tallest thing in the McDowells. It’s just the one you can’t stop looking at.
Thompson Peak rises to 3,984 feet in the southern McDowell Sonoran Preserve, standing directly over McDowell Mountain Ranch and lending its name to the parkway that curves below it and to a neighborhood park several miles west that has nothing else to do with it. The East End, farther north, is higher; McDowell Peak, half a mile north, is 4,036 feet and trailless. But Thompson’s pyramid shape and the cluster of Maricopa County radio towers on its crown make it the range’s signature, the summit every kid in the ranch neighborhoods learns first.
Getting to the top is a different matter. There is no trail to the summit. There is a service road, built by the county for the communications site, that climbs from the east at grades hikers describe as near 40 percent, with the steepest pitches poured in concrete that has spent decades cracking. From the Gateway Trailhead the route runs about a mile and a half of Gateway Loop, up the Bell Pass Trail to Bell Pass, down the east side to the Prospector Trail, along to the road, and then up — about 12 miles round trip with 3,500-plus feet of total gain, seven to eight hours for most people. From the Fountain Hills side, the Dixie Mine Trail in Maricopa County’s McDowell Mountain Regional Park reaches the same road in roughly 9.5 to 10 miles round trip, for a county park fee.
The summit is a fenced 4.5-acre county facility: towers under 200 feet, equipment buildings, a hum. The view around it takes in Four Peaks, the Superstitions, the Verde valley and the whole Phoenix basin. Free, sunrise to sunset, dogs on leash in theory. One of the hardest walks in the city, and it looks it from your driveway.
How to climb Thompson Peak right
Decide whether you actually want this. The view of Thompson Peak from Bell Pass is one of the best in the Preserve and costs about seven miles round trip. The view from Thompson Peak costs twelve, plus the road. If you want a big day with a summit, do it; if you want the peak in your photos, the Windgate–Bell Pass loop delivers that with a fraction of the punishment.
Season and clock. This is a November-to-March hike for most people, and it runs on a schedule: out of the Gateway lot by 6:30 (which also beats the parking crunch), Bell Pass by 8:30, summit by 10:30, back at the car by early afternoon. In summer it is not a hike; it’s a rescue in progress. The summer sunrise rules say to be off the trail by 8, and you cannot be off this one by 8.
Water. Four liters per person minimum, and the half-gone-turn-around rule applies with force: the last easy retreat is Bell Pass. Once you’re on the road there is nothing but road. There is no water anywhere past the Gateway fountains.
The road. Its unpaved lower stretch is merely steep. The concrete pitches near the top are the problem — smooth, cracked, and angled enough that a slip becomes a slide. Climb them in short, deliberate steps. About three-quarters of the way up there’s a comparatively flat stretch; that’s your only rest and your lunch spot. Descend the concrete sideways with poles planted downhill of you. Trail shoes with real lugs; road shoes are a mistake you’ll discover at about 3,600 feet.
The summit. The compound is fenced and the towers, buildings and equipment are off-limits — this is a working law-enforcement and emergency radio site, and the county has never been relaxed about it. Stay outside the fence, take the view, and don’t lean on anything with a warning label. The high point is a place to be quiet for five minutes and then leave.
Route-finding. The interior junctions east of Bell Pass are signed but busy: Bell Pass, Windgate, Prospector, Windmill. Follow signs for Prospector and then for Thompson Peak Road. Do not try to shortcut the ridge from Bell Pass; there’s no trail, the Preserve prohibits it, and the terrain will stop you anyway.
Dogs and bikes. Both technically allowed under Preserve rules; both bad ideas here. Hot pavement, no water and 40-percent grades are nobody’s idea of a walk. Bikers occasionally ride to the road and hike-a-bike the rest, which is a lifestyle choice.
Pair it. With nothing. Eat afterward at Market Street at DC Ranch and then sit down for the day.
The summit the Preserve couldn’t buy
The mountain got a general’s name secondhand. The McDowells are named for Irvin McDowell, the Union commander routed at Bull Run, via the Army’s Camp McDowell on the Verde River in the 1860s — a man who, as far as anyone can tell, never set foot in Arizona. Who Thompson was, and when the peak took his name, is not something we’ve found documented, and we’d rather leave the blank than fill it with a guess. What is documented is that by the twentieth century the summit was the range’s landmark, the pointed peak above the cattle country where McDowell Mountain Ranch would eventually go.
Its modern identity arrived on a truck. Sometime in the 1970s — county officials told the East Valley Tribune in 2003 it had been more than three decades earlier — Maricopa County built its first radio transmission tower on the summit, choosing the peak for the same reason everyone else looks at it: line of sight to the whole Valley. A road was cut up the east face on an easement across state trust land, and over the following decades the county expanded the site on the 4.5 acres it owns at the top, adding antennas for federal and state law enforcement, public utilities and emergency services. The towers stay under 200 feet, which keeps them free of aviation lights; the peak is more than five miles from Scottsdale Airport.
Then Scottsdale bought the mountain around it. The Preserve sales taxes of May 23, 1995 and 2004 put the slopes of Thompson Peak, Bell Pass and the interior basin into public hands as natural open space — but not the summit, which remained county communications property with a county road running through Preserve and state land to reach it. In 2003 the city asked whether a public trail could use that road. The county said no, citing security at a facility carrying police and emergency radio, and Scottsdale found itself owning most of a mountain whose top it couldn’t legally show anyone. The compromise that emerged over the following years is the one hikers use today: the road is walked, by way of the Prospector Trail from Bell Pass and the Dixie Mine Trail from Fountain Hills, while the fenced compound at the top stays off-limits.
The east side of the story is older than the towers. Below the peak in Maricopa County’s McDowell Mountain Regional Park sits the Dixie Mine, a small copper prospect first recorded as the Red Mountain Mine, whose 21 claims the Interior Department eventually declared null and void (the mine’s story); the Prospector Trail that carries Gateway hikers toward the road remembers the men who scratched at the range for ore that mostly wasn’t there. The regional park, the Preserve and Fountain Hills’ own mountain preserve meet on these slopes, which is why a Thompson Peak day can begin in three jurisdictions and end at the same fence.
What makes the climb infamous is the road itself. Built for four-wheel-drive maintenance vehicles, not for people, it goes straight at the mountain, and where the grade got too steep even for trucks on dirt the county poured concrete. Hikers put the pitches near 40 percent. Decades of monsoon and freeze have cracked the surface into a slab of loose plates that is worse to descend than to climb. On the Preserve’s honest scale of difficulty, Tom’s Thumb is steep and Bell Pass is long; Thompson Peak’s road is simply mean.
And still it’s climbed, because it is the summit you can see from the kitchen window. Thompson Peak Parkway curves below it, Thompson Peak Park borrows its name miles away, and a whole quadrant of the city uses the antennas as a compass. Standing next to them, with the hum of the equipment and the Valley spread out to South Mountain, is the closest thing north Scottsdale has to a pilgrimage.
Why it matters
Thompson Peak is the Preserve’s reminder that not everything can be bought back. Scottsdale acquired 30,500 acres by popular vote, and the most-looked-at summit in the range still belongs to a county radio site with a road up the back. The result is a strange, hard, wonderful climb — Preserve trail to a county easement to a fenced antenna farm — that tells the whole story of the McDowells in twelve miles: ranchers, prospectors, a communications tower, a citizens’ land trust and a tax. Do it once, in winter, with too much water. Then go home and look at it from the driveway, which is how it was always meant to be seen.