What is the Windgate Pass–Bell Pass Loop?
When a visitor who hikes asks for something real in Scottsdale, this is the answer.
The Windgate Pass–Bell Pass Loop is the McDowell Sonoran Preserve’s signature hard day: about 9.5 miles and roughly 2,000 feet of total climbing, starting and ending at the Gateway Trailhead and crossing the southern McDowells twice. Sources put it anywhere from 9.4 to 9.9 miles, depending on where you close the circle on the Gateway Loop; nobody who has done it argues about the difference.
The shape is simple. From the lot you follow the Gateway Loop about a mile and a half to the Bell Pass Trail, which climbs relentlessly through cholla and ocotillo to Bell Pass, about 3,200 feet, in the saddle between antenna-topped Thompson Peak and McDowell Peak. From the pass the trail drops down the east side into the upper basin — the wild interior of the range, with Four Peaks and the Mazatzals stacked on the horizon — then the Windgate Pass Trail climbs back over the ridge at Windgate Pass, about 3,030 feet, the notch you can see from the end of Thompson Peak Parkway. The descent west past Inspiration Point rejoins the Gateway Loop and delivers you back to the ramadas, five or so hours after you left.
There is no water on the route, no shade after the first mile, and no easy bail-out once you’re on the east side. There are also views no other Scottsdale hike can match without a rope: the whole Valley from Bell Pass, the empty interior basin from the crossing, and Thompson Peak standing over the entire circuit like a referee.
Free, sunrise to sunset, dogs on leash, bikes and horses welcome in theory. It’s the route the Conservancy runs as its fitness-hike standard and the one trail runners use as a benchmark. Do it once in January and you’ll understand the Preserve.
How to hike the loop right
Go counterclockwise. Bell Pass first. Its upper switchbacks are the steepest, loosest stretch on the loop, and you want to climb them on fresh legs in low morning light rather than pick your way down them at noon. Windgate’s west side is the gentler grade, and it’s the one you want under tired feet on the way out. Clockwise is legitimate if an easier ascent matters more to you than an easier descent; just know which trade you’re making.
Start early, always. In the cool months, leave the Gateway lot by 6:30 — which also solves the parking problem, since the lot fills by 7:30 on winter weekends. You’ll top Bell Pass around 8:30, cross the interior while it’s still pleasant, and be down before the afternoon glare. May through September the loop is a first-light expedition for experienced desert hikers and an honest mistake for everyone else; our summer sunrise rules are the minimum.
Water math, doubled. One liter per hour of hiking means three liters per person as the floor, four in warm weather, and the rule that keeps rescue crews idle: turn around when half your water is gone. The east-side junction below Bell Pass is the last sensible place to decide that — beyond it, going forward over Windgate and going back over Bell cost about the same.
Know the junctions. The interior basin is a web: Bell Pass, Windgate Pass, Prospector, Windmill and the Tom’s Thumb connectors all meet out there, and every one is signed with a map. Read them. The most common error is drifting north on the Windmill or Tom’s Thumb side and adding miles to a day that didn’t need them.
Poles and shoes. Real trail shoes with grip; Bell Pass’s upper tread is decomposed granite over rock, which is ball bearings on a slope. Poles earn their weight on both descents.
Dogs. Allowed on a six-foot leash, but this is a long, shadeless day with hot tread, and the city asks that dogs stay home above 90°F. Most locals leave them for the Gateway Loop.
The upgrade. From the east side of Bell Pass, the Prospector Trail leads to Thompson Peak’s service road and a savage climb to the summit. It turns the loop into roughly 12 miles and 3,500-plus feet. Not a whim; a plan.
Afterward. Market Street at DC Ranch is the closest civilized breakfast; the pool at McDowell Mountain Ranch Park is the closest cold water. If the loop sounds like too much and you still want a pass, Gateway to Windgate Pass and back is about six miles with the best single view for the effort.
Two notches in a very old mountain
The McDowells are one of the oldest things in view from anywhere in Scottsdale. The range’s core, as the Arizona Geological Survey’s 2018 geologic map lays it out, is Proterozoic rock: metamorphosed volcanic rock and layered schist around 1.7 billion years old, intruded by granite about 1.42 billion years ago, shot through with the quartz veins that name a trail on the southern bajada. Bell Pass and Windgate Pass are what a billion-plus years of erosion do to a ridge: the low points where drainages on either side have eaten toward each other, leaving saddles a person can walk over.
People did walk over them, long before there were signs. The passes were the natural crossings between the Salt River side of the range and the Verde side, and jeep tracks and cattle trails threaded the interior basin through the ranching decades of the twentieth century. On the east side, prospectors worked the range’s minor copper showings; the Dixie Mine, in what is now Maricopa County’s McDowell Mountain Regional Park, began as the small Red Mountain copper prospect and ended with the Interior Department declaring its claims null and void (its story). The Prospector Trail that links Bell Pass to Thompson Peak’s road remembers them.
The names are less well documented than the rock. Bell Pass sits at the mountain end of Bell Road, which was named for Harvey Bell, a farmer who helped organize the Paradise Verde Irrigation District in 1916 with James Shea (of Shea Boulevard); the pass shares the honor at one remove: the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which made the name official in 2008, records Bell Pass as “named in association with nearby Bell Road.” Windgate Pass is the notch at the head of Thompson Peak Parkway, and its name is now more familiar as a DC Ranch neighborhood than as a landmark; the breeze that funnels through it after sunset is real, whatever the etymology. Thompson Peak, the antenna-crowned summit that stands over both, got a Maricopa County communications site in the 1970s and a service road from the Fountain Hills side, which is why the hardest side trip in the Preserve is a walk up pavement.
What turned old crossings into a hiking route was the Preserve. By the early 1990s Scottsdale’s growth had reached the foot of the range — Pinnacle Peak was fenced off in 1995, the same year voters approved the first Preserve sales tax on May 23 — and the passes were squarely inside the study boundary the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust had drawn. The 1995 and 2004 taxes bought the passes and the basin between them, and the city and the Conservancy’s volunteer stewards built sustainable trails over the old scratched-in routes, with drainage and switchbacks designed to survive monsoon runoff and a hundred thousand boots.
The last piece was the trailhead. Until the Gateway opened in May 2009, with its big lot, restrooms and drinking fountains, the loop was a hard hike with a logistics problem. Afterward it became a standard: the route the Conservancy runs as its Windgate Pass–Bell Pass fitness hike, the one trail runners time themselves on, the one that appears in every “best hard hikes near Phoenix” list. It also became the Preserve’s argument, in one circuit, for why the study boundary went so far past the summits — because the interior basin you cross between the passes, with no rooftop in sight, is what the money bought.
Why it matters
Most of the Preserve’s 230 miles are approachable. The Windgate–Bell Pass Loop is where the McDowells stop being scenery and start being a mountain range — two thousand feet of climbing, an interior nobody can see from the city, and a set of consequences if you get the water wrong. It’s the hike that separates people who have been to the Preserve from people who understand it. Go in January, go counterclockwise, go early, and when you stand on Bell Pass with the Valley on one side and empty desert on the other, remember that in 1995 a city voted to keep it that way.