Cholla Trail Is Closed Again, and Arcadia Isn't Surprised

Walk up Invergordon Road this week and you will find orange fencing where the trail crossing used to be, a City of Phoenix crew truck parked where hikers usually queue before sunrise, and a printed notice zip-tied to the gate. If you have lived in Arcadia longer than a season, none of this registers as news. Cholla Trail closes. It has closed before. The only real question each time is how long, and whether the answer on the sign matches the answer online.

This time the mismatch is small but real. The City of Phoenix's own trail page lists the closure as running August 10 through 21. Coverage from Patch earlier this week pushed that window to August 17 through 28. Both agree on the cause: Phoenix Water Services is running its Cholla Sewer Diversion and Abandonment Project, installing a new sewer line along Cholla Lane and decommissioning the old one, work that started July 13. Both agree on the result: for the length of the closure, Echo Canyon Trailhead at 4925 E. McDonald Dr. is the only way up Camelback Mountain. If you are reading this today, check the gate before you check either date online. Signage on site has the final word.

Why "just take Echo Canyon" undersells it

The instinct is to treat this as a detour. Cholla closes, Echo Canyon absorbs the traffic, hike resumes as normal somewhere else on the mountain. That instinct undersells what actually happens.

Echo Canyon is rated Extremely Difficult and it earns that rating without the switchbacks Cholla uses to soften its climb. The city's own trail guidance notes that the Echo Canyon parking lot fills from late morning through early afternoon on weekdays and stays full all day on weekends, and once it reaches capacity the entry gate closes outright. Idling on McDonald Drive or Tatum Boulevard while you wait for a spot to open is not a workaround. Phoenix police ticket vehicles that idle there and tow anything parked illegally. None of that is new. What is new, for the length of this closure, is that every hiker who would normally split between two trailheads is now funneling into one lot built for one trailhead's worth of demand.

If you hike with a dog, this window doesn't change anything you should already know: both trails prohibit dogs year round, closure or no closure.

The deal behind Cholla Trail

Here is the part that explains why a three-week sewer project can black out an entire trail instead of narrowing it to one lane the way a street repair would. Cholla Trail does not sit on the same kind of ground Echo Canyon does.

Camelback Mountain became a city park in 1968, after the Preservation of Camelback Mountain Foundation, led by Barry Goldwater, pushed to stop private development on the peak. Echo Canyon's side has operated as public parkland ever since, with a trailhead, restrooms, and a maintained access road the city controls outright.

Cholla's east side access is a different animal. Since 1997, the City of Phoenix has hiked Camelback's eastern slope by way of an easement on Phoenician resort land, land that used to be part of the resort's golf course. That is not a footnote. It means the trail crossing that just closed for sewer work exists in the first place because a private property owner agreed to let the public cross it, not because the city owns the ground the way it owns Echo Canyon's.

That arrangement has already broken down once. Before 2020, hikers parked on Invergordon Road and walked up Cholla Lane itself to reach the trailhead, a residential street with no sidewalk built for foot traffic. The Arcadia Camelback Mountain Neighborhood Association documented volume on that street reaching more than 10,000 hikers a month, enough that safety concerns from residents eventually forced the city's hand. The association's own position at the time was blunt:

"Close the Cholla Trail until the relocation of the easement can occur."

The city agreed, closed Cholla in 2020, spent more than two years negotiating a new alignment with the resort's owner, Host Properties, and reopened the trail on September 30, 2022 on a rerouted path off Invergordon that keeps hikers off Cholla Lane entirely. The current trailhead's restrooms and water fountain sit in a building that used to serve the golf course. Every amenity there exists because that 2022 negotiation included it, not because Cholla Trail has always had it.

So when the sewer department needs weeks of access to Cholla Lane, there is no version of this where the trail stays partly open. The easement, the alignment, and the amenities are all recent and all negotiated. Echo Canyon has none of that fragility built in, which is exactly why it is the fallback every time and never the other way around.

What to actually do this week

A few practical notes if you are planning a hike while the closure holds:

• Echo Canyon Trailhead: 4925 E. McDonald Dr., sunrise to sunset, restrooms and water on site.
• Arrive before sunrise if you want a parking spot without a wait. The lot fills from late morning on weekdays and stays full most weekends.
• No dogs on either trail, closure or not.
• If Echo Canyon's crowding isn't for you, Camelback isn't the only peak in the Phoenix Mountains Preserve system. Piestewa Peak and Papago Park both sit within a short drive and don't share Camelback's single-trailhead bottleneck this month.
• Confirm the closing date at the trailhead rather than trusting one source. The city's page and local coverage differ by a week, and signage on site reflects whatever schedule the crew is actually working.

The ritual doesn't pause, it just moves

None of this changes what Camelback hiking actually is for the people who live around it: a pre-dawn habit more than a weekend activity. The scramble for a parking spot at Echo Canyon before the sun clears the ridge is already a known quantity in Arcadia, closure or not, and the coffee stop plenty of hikers make afterward at La Grande Orange is part of the same morning rhythm, not a separate errand. The mountain doesn't get less central to how Arcadia starts its day just because one of its two doors is temporarily locked. It just means more of the neighborhood funnels through the other one for a few weeks, and the ones who already knew that Cholla's door was never as permanent as Echo's aren't the ones caught off guard.

If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually asks of daily life, from the trails to the streets around them, that kind of on-the-ground detail is the difference between a guess and a plan. The Ackerman Team works Arcadia and the rest of Greater Phoenix every day and can walk you through what a given block, trail access, or commute really looks like before you make a decision. Work with Arizona Real Estate Experts.