Stand at the Cholla trailhead gate on Invergordon Road this week and you'll find orange fencing, a City of Phoenix water crew, and a hand-lettered sign redirecting you to the other side of the mountain. That's normal enough. What's less obvious, unless you've been tracking the schedule closely, is that the moment this closure lifts, a second one starts almost immediately on the opposite trail. For anyone who treats Camelback as a rotating pair of options depending on mood, traffic, or how the parking looks that morning, this stretch of the calendar removes the choice entirely.
The four-day window
Cholla Trail closes from August 17 through August 28 while Phoenix Water Services installs a new sewer line along Cholla Lane, part of what the city calls the Cholla Sewer Diversion and Abandonment Project. Once that work wraps and the trail reopens, Echo Canyon Trail closes September 2 through September 18 for a different reason: crews are installing new automatic gates and repairing safety cables along that route.
Line the two closures up on a calendar and the overlap tells the real story.
| Dates | Cholla Trail | Echo Canyon Trail |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 17–28 | Closed | Open |
| Aug 29–Sept 1 | Open | Open |
| Sept 2–18 | Open | Closed |
Out of the 33 days this stretch covers, Camelback offers hikers a genuine choice between its two trails for exactly four of them. The rest of the time, whichever trail happens to be open is the only way up.
That matters more than a typical single-trail closure because Camelback's two routes aren't interchangeable in the way a closure notice implies. Echo Canyon, on McDonald Drive near Tatum Boulevard, is the steeper, more technical climb and it already runs short on parking during peak months. During the Cholla closure, that lot is absorbing hikers who'd normally split off toward Invergordon Road, which means an already-tight morning window gets tighter. When the swap flips in September and Cholla becomes the only option, the pattern reverses: street parking near the Cholla trailhead is limited by posted signage, and there's no equivalent lot to fall back on.
If you've hiked this mountain long enough, none of this is a total surprise. Echo Canyon closed for more than a week last October after a storm loosened three boulders along the trail, and the city spent weeks stabilizing them with engineered grout before reopening it. Camelback has a habit of needing this kind of work. What's different this time is that the closures are planned rather than storm-triggered, which means residents can actually build a hiking calendar around them instead of checking the gate each morning and hoping.
What to do with the four-day gap
If you're the kind of hiker who alternates trails to manage knee strain, boredom, or just wants the harder climb some days and the longer one on others, August 29 through September 1 is the entire window this year to get both in. After that, plan on Cholla exclusively until September 18, and budget extra time for street parking rather than assuming you'll find a spot near the trailhead the way you might on a normal week.
Dogs aren't allowed on either trail regardless of which one is open, so that part of the routine doesn't change. What does change is the drive time and the parking hunt, and neither of the City of Phoenix's trail closure notices spells out just how narrow that overlap actually is. You have to do the math yourself, which is exactly what this is.
The other change on this side of the mountain
While the trail schedule has been shuffling, something more permanent opened on the flat ground between Camelback and Mummy Mountain. Kimpton Miralina Resort & Villas debuted in January 2026 after a $42 million reimagining of what longtime residents will remember as the Scottsdale Plaza Resort. It's not a small refresh. The property came back with 224 redesigned guest rooms and 36 casitas as phase one of an eventual 404 keys, six pools, a spa, and more than 50,000 square feet of event space, all sitting on the same 42-acre footprint locals have driven past for decades.
The part that actually affects a resident's week is the food and beverage program. Miralina's signature restaurant, Hecho Libre, is run by chef Wes Avila, a Los Angeles chef recognized by both the Michelin Guide and the James Beard Foundation for his approach to Baja-inspired Mexican cooking. The property's own materials describe Miralina as built to serve the surrounding neighborhood, not just overnight guests, and its evening ritual, described as raising a glass to the last light of the day as it moves across the property, reads more like a standing invitation than a hotel amenity buried in a rate sheet.
For anyone finishing a Cholla or Echo Canyon hike on this side of town, that's a genuinely new option that didn't exist a year ago. The old Scottsdale Plaza Resort wasn't the kind of place you'd casually stop into after a trail run. Whether the current iteration becomes that kind of habitual stop for the neighborhood is still an open question, but the intent behind the renovation, and the caliber of the chef brought in to run the kitchen, suggests the town got more than a cosmetic update out of the deal.
The month in one sentence
Camelback runs on a single working trail for most of the next month, with a narrow window where both are open, and the mountain's east side now has a legitimate new place to land afterward. Neither fact shows up if you're only checking the trail status the morning of your hike. Knowing both in advance is the difference between rerouting on the fly and actually planning around it, which is what living somewhere for more than a season is supposed to buy you.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of Paradise Valley, or you already call it home and want a clearer read on what's shifting in the neighborhood beyond the trailheads, The Mitchell Group AZ tracks these details because they shape daily life here as much as any listing does. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what's next, whether that's this year or a few years out.
