Why she matters
Every fast-growing western city watches development climb its signature mountains. Scottsdale is the rare one that stopped it, not with zoning a future council could undo but by buying the land outright, and the campaign began with a handful of volunteers. Jane Rau was one of the founders. In January 1991 she and Karen Bertiger signed the papers that incorporated the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust.
The Trust’s target sounded absurd: roughly a third of the city’s land area, held as natural open space forever. Within four years the city had a Preserve and a tax to pay for it. Three decades later the McDowell Sonoran Preserve covers about 30,500 acres, and the Trust, now the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy, still puts hundreds of volunteer stewards on its trails.
Where to find her mark today
The Jane Rau Interpretive Trail. At Brown’s Ranch Trailhead, a half-mile barrier-free loop dedicated in March 2014, the one place in the Preserve with her name on it.
The Gateway. The Gateway Trailhead is the Preserve’s front door, and its own history starts with the 1991 incorporation.
The whole Preserve. The McDowell Sonoran Preserve is the organization’s life’s work, and hers.
Seeing it for yourself
Brown’s Ranch is the place to start. The trailhead opened in 2013 with water, restrooms, shade ramadas and an amphitheater for Conservancy programs, and the Jane Rau loop beside it is flat enough for strollers and wheelchairs. For something longer, Brown’s Ranch Road heads out on the old ranch two-track toward Balanced Rock. The land here was once E.O. Brown’s cattle range, which the E.O. Brown profile covers.
If you want to understand how a volunteer group turned into a city policy, read October 3, 1994, when the council adopted the Preserve resolution, and May 23, 1995, when voters funded it. The Conservancy also runs free guided hikes, which are the best way to meet the people who inherited her work.
The full story
By 1990 Scottsdale stretched across 185 square miles, and graded pads appeared higher on the McDowells every season. The range was a checkerboard of private land and State Trust land, which by law had to be sold or leased for the benefit of schools, usually to the highest bidder. That year a group of citizens decided the mountains should not become backyards.
On January 21, 1991, Jane Rau and Karen Bertiger signed the incorporation papers of the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust. Its members were hikers, scientists and retirees, and its mission was to persuade a boomtown with a reputation for tax aversion to buy a mountain range at retail. The Trust’s argument was that the McDowells were infrastructure: the city’s skyline, watershed and wildlife corridor, and the scenery behind every resort rate and home price in town.
It worked faster than anyone expected. Polling showed overwhelming support. On October 3, 1994, the City Council adopted Resolution No. 4103 establishing the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, and in May 1995 voters approved a 30-year, 0.2% sales tax to buy land for it. In 2004 they added 0.15% more, and in 2018 they locked the Preserve against development without a public vote. The purchases, from ranch owners and at State Trust auctions, carried it past 30,000 acres, about a third of the city.
The Land Trust became the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy, and its volunteers build trail, patrol it, run guided hikes and do field science. In March 2014, the spring after Brown’s Ranch Trailhead opened, the city dedicated the Jane Rau Interpretive Trail beside it: half a mile, built so that anyone can walk it, named for one of the volunteers who started all of this. The campaign’s wider story is in the 1990s chapter.