What is the Prickly Pear Inn?
The hardest thing about a night out in Cave Creek has always been getting home. The saloons are forty minutes north of Old Town, ride-shares thin out after dark, and the town’s few beds were mostly out of walking range. The Prickly Pear Inn solves that in eleven rooms. It opened in 2017 on the second floor of Prickly Pear Plaza, a hacienda-style courtyard just off Cave Creek Road, directly across from Frontier Town.
Get the geography straight first: Cave Creek is its own town, not part of Scottsdale, and it likes it that way. If you want to stay in the real Western main street, though, this is about as central as it gets.
Owners Paul and Cherie Morina met while working at America West Airlines and later ran a small hotel in Sitka, Alaska. Back in the Valley, they saw a gap in Cave Creek between budget motels and luxury resorts, and spent about two years turning a former restaurant and shop building into an inn. The rooms are all kings, roughly 400 to 540 square feet, each named after a prickly pear variety — Beaver Tail, Bunny Ears, Santa Rita, Indian Fig. Every room has a full kitchenette and a big TV, and most have a private deck with views of Black Mountain or the hills to the west.
Downstairs, the plaza does the rest: Stumblina’s Cantina for burgers, tacos and a western bar, The City Creamery for ice cream, a salon, and the Grumpy Ole Mule Mercantile, which sells gifts, beer and wine and doubles as the front desk.
Who it’s for: couples, saloon-crawlers, hikers and bikers who want to walk everywhere. Who should look elsewhere: families with small kids, anyone with a dog, and light sleepers on weekends.
How to do the Prickly Pear right
Pick your side of the building. The rooms facing Cave Creek Road have the Black Mountain views and the street noise — great on a Tuesday, lively on a Saturday when the bikes roll by. The deluxe rooms with private decks toward the west get the mountain sunsets and more quiet. One room, Porcupine, is set up for guests with mobility needs, with a roll-in shower.
Arrive before 6 p.m. or plan ahead. The lobby is staffed 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The inn texts you a room number and keypad PIN on arrival day, so a late arrival is easy as long as you’ve read your messages.
Walk the strip, then walk home. Start with a drink at Stumblina’s, cross to Frontier Town’s shops, and work up Cave Creek Road to Harold’s Cave Creek Corral and the Buffalo Chip Saloon for bull-riding night. For a quieter dinner, the Spotted Donkey Cantina at the Boulders is ten minutes east by car.
Use the kitchenette. There’s no breakfast, so stock the fridge on day one. A coffee on your deck before a sunrise hike at Spur Cross or Black Mountain is the best hour of a Cave Creek stay.
Book the big weekends early. Cave Creek Rodeo Days in late March, Arizona Bike Week in spring and the Hidden in the Hills studio tour around Thanksgiving fill eleven rooms quickly. Note the cancellation policy: 72 hours, and longer for groups.
A town that never had a hotel row
Cave Creek grew up as a place you passed through. Soldiers from Fort McDowell cut a road through in the 1870s and 1880s, prospectors chased gold and silver in the hills to the north, and cattle ranching outlasted the mines. In the early twentieth century the dry air drew health seekers to desert cabins, and by the 1930s ranchers, miners and Phoenix day-trippers were stopping for a cold beer at what became Harold’s. The visitors kept coming, but they mostly came for the afternoon.
When residents voted to incorporate in 1986, it was largely to keep things that way: big lots, horse properties, dirt roads and a Cave Creek Road that looked like a Western main street rather than a commercial strip. That instinct protected Spur Cross and the open desert, and it kept out the hotel boom that remade the Scottsdale corridor. For decades the town’s lodging amounted to a handful of small, independent places. The best-known, the Tumbleweed Hotel on Cave Creek Road, built around 1970, is now gone, replaced by a faith-based retreat center.
The Morinas’ project fits that pattern. Instead of building new on open land, they spent about two years converting an existing restaurant-and-shops building in the middle of town into an inn and a plaza, opening in 2017. It’s small enough to live comfortably next to the post office and Frontier Town, and the plaza gave locals a cantina, an ice-cream counter and a mercantile at the same time it gave visitors a bed.
That’s the Cave Creek bargain in miniature. The town has never wanted a hotel row, and it still doesn’t have one. What it has are places like this — owner-run, a little quirky, built into what was already there — where you can spend the night inside the Western town Scottsdale’s Old Town only imitates, and walk home from the saloon.