If you hike Camelback Mountain from the Paradise Valley side, you probably don't think of it as "Camelback Mountain." You think of it as Cholla. The trailhead off Invergordon Road, the gentle first mile through open desert, the parallel parking spot you know how to find because you've done this a hundred times. As of today, that trail is closed. It won't reopen until Aug. 28.

The city's reason is unglamorous: a sewer line. Phoenix Water Services is running the Cholla Sewer Diversion and Abandonment Project along Cholla Lane, installing a new line and decommissioning an old one that runs through the easement hikers use to reach the trail. Until the trail reopens Aug. 28, the only way up Camelback is Echo Canyon, the steeper, more trafficked route on the McDonald Drive side. That's a genuine inconvenience. It's also a small window into why Cholla exists in its current form at all, and why the two trails feel like they belong to different mountains.

Two Trails, One Mountain, Very Different Personalities

Both routes are rated Extremely Difficult by Phoenix Parks and Recreation, and both top out at the same 2,704-foot summit. Past that, they diverge.

Cholla's longer distance buys a gentler grade for most of the hike. Echo Canyon compresses the same elevation gain into a much shorter stretch, which is exactly why it produces more of the calls to first responders that the mountain is known for. A visitor who defaults to Echo Canyon because it's the trail that shows up first in search results is choosing the harder, hotter, more exposed version of Camelback without necessarily knowing there was a mellower option a few minutes away.

Why Cholla Ended Up on Invergordon Road

The current Cholla trailhead is only three years old. Before that, from 1997 until 2020, hikers parked on Invergordon Road and walked up Cholla Lane itself, a residential street, to reach the trail. At peak popularity that meant more than 10,000 hikers a month cutting through a neighborhood, often walking in the street because there was no separate path. Homeowners on Cholla Lane dealt with foot traffic, noise, and headlamp-lit hikers well before sunrise for years before anything changed.

The fix took shape as a joint project between Phoenix Parks and Recreation, the Street Transportation Department, Phoenix Fire, and the Town of Paradise Valley itself, using a new easement across land that had been part of The Phoenician resort's golf course. The rerouted trail moved hikers off Cholla Lane entirely, added the first restrooms and drinking fountain the access point had ever had, and reopened on Sept. 30, 2022. It also included deliberate landscaping between the new path and adjacent backyards, an acknowledgment that the trail's biggest complaint had never been the mountain. It had been the street.

That history is why this closure lands differently than a generic maintenance notice. Cholla isn't just a hiking trail with a temporarily inconvenient closure. It's the product of a multi-year negotiation between a public agency, a resort, and a town government, built specifically to keep a trail that once saw more than 10,000 hikers a month off a residential street. For the length of this closure, that engineered calm is offline, and everyone defaults to the trail that was never designed to absorb the overflow.

What Closes, What Doesn't, and Until When

The closure is specific to the Cholla Trailhead and the trail itself, running today, Aug. 17, through Aug. 28. Echo Canyon Trailhead remains fully open and is the only summit access for the duration. If you're used to parking on Invergordon and walking up, plan on the McDonald Drive side instead until the trail reopens, and budget extra time. Echo Canyon's lot has a well-earned reputation for filling by mid-morning on weekdays and staying full most of the day on weekends, at which point the entry gate closes and stays closed until spots open up. Idling on McDonald Drive or Tatum Boulevard while waiting isn't an option either. Phoenix police ticket vehicles that do it and tow anything parked illegally nearby.

The Other Restriction Nobody's Watching

There's a second layer to this that has nothing to do with construction. On any day the National Weather Service issues an Excessive Heat Warning, the city independently restricts both Camelback trails, Echo Canyon and Cholla alike, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. That policy isn't new this month. It's been consistently enforced through the summer of 2026, and it exists because of numbers the city has been tracking closely. In 2024, Phoenix logged 45 separate days of heat-related trail closures between May and October, out of 121 days that hit 105 degrees or higher and 69 that topped 110. More than 200 hikers get rescued from the city's desert preserves in a typical year, the overwhelming majority of them from Camelback specifically, which works out to roughly one rescue every other day during the season.

The practical effect for the length of this closure is that you're stacking two restrictions at once. The sewer project closes Cholla outright regardless of weather. An Excessive Heat Warning closes Echo Canyon too, but only between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. On a warning day, your entire window for reaching the summit narrows to early morning or the couple of hours right before sunset.

If You're Still Hiking This Week

A few things worth knowing before you head to McDonald Drive instead of Invergordon:

• Check the current Excessive Heat Warning status before you go. If one's in effect, the 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. window is off the table entirely at Echo Canyon, not just uncomfortable.
• Arrive early. Echo Canyon's lot fills faster now that it's absorbing Cholla's usual traffic, and once the gate closes it stays closed until a spot opens.
• Dogs aren't permitted on either trail year round, closure or no closure.
• Bring more water than you think you need. Echo Canyon's grade is steeper from the first quarter mile, and there's no shade to speak of on either route.
• If the plan doesn't come together this week, the trail reopens Aug. 28. Nothing about Cholla's route or amenities changes once construction wraps.

None of this is really about a sewer line. It's about what happens when a mountain that Paradise Valley spent years learning to share fairly with the public suddenly loses half its capacity until Aug. 28. The calm you're used to on Invergordon Road exists because a lot of people worked to build it. It's worth remembering that when it comes back.

For more on what makes life in the shadow of Camelback distinct, the Paradise Valley neighborhood guide from The Kallay Group covers the town beyond the trailhead. And if you're weighing a move to this part of the Valley and want a local's read on it, The Kallay Group is happy to talk it through.