Walk behind the JW Marriott Camelback Inn on Lincoln Drive, past the Western-style town on the resort grounds, and you'll hit a wooden bridge. Cross it and a small sign appears: Tyner's Hiking Trail. Ask the front desk first, or your car gets towed. That bridge and that sign are, as far as anyone can document, the only marked public entrance to Mummy Mountain.
Everyone in Paradise Valley knows Camelback Mountain works differently. Echo Canyon and the Cholla Trail both have city-maintained trailheads, ranger oversight, and thousands of hikers moving through them every week. It's easy to assume the mountain a half mile north, the one that gives Mummy Mountain Road its name and shows up in half the sunset photos taken from Lincoln Drive, follows the same pattern. It doesn't. Mummy Mountain is the one significant peak in the Phoenix Mountains that never became part of the city's park system. It stayed local, and it stayed mostly private.
A Trust That Protects the Ridge Without Opening It
The reason isn't neglect. It's a different kind of ownership. The upper ridge and summit, roughly 320 acres, are held by the Paradise Valley Mountain Preserve Trust, a nonprofit created and overseen by the town itself, with seven trustees appointed by the mayor and council to staggered three-year terms. Some of that acreage came from Maricopa County. Much of it came from wealthy Paradise Valley property owners donating parcels outright, specifically so the land could never be developed.
That's a conservation trust, not a recreation department. Its job is to keep the mountainside from being cut into more lots, not to build switchbacks or install trailhead signage. The trust's own history page is explicit that donated land can carry restrictions prohibiting public access altogether. So the ridge is protected. It's just not open. Houses climb most of the mountain's lower slopes on private roads that dead-end into other people's driveways, which is why anyone who's tried finding a back way up on their own has mostly found "no trespassing" signs and turned around.
Tyner's Trail exists because the Camelback Inn happens to own the land at the mountain's southern base and chooses to let hikers cross it. A few basics, for anyone who hasn't done it:
- Access is through the resort's Lincoln Drive entrance, not a public trailhead
- The route is about 1.5 miles round trip with roughly 900 feet of elevation gain
- The upper section requires hand-over-hand scrambling, similar in character to Camelback's harder stretches
- Parking is at the hotel, and the front desk expects you to check in so your car isn't flagged
There's no ranger, no posted map at a kiosk, and no other side of the mountain to try. If the Inn ever changed its policy, the public route would disappear with it.
How a Windy Gulch Became a Landmark
The name itself came from someone in the real estate business. In the early 1940s, a Swiss-born prospector and former banker named Charlie Mieg bought the Van Benscoten Ranch, which included most of the land on and around the mountain, borrowing $8,000 of the $12,000 purchase price from his mother-in-law. The property was known at the time as Windy Gulch. Mieg, who planned to subdivide and sell it, decided the name wasn't going to move parcels. Riding the property one morning and noticing how the silhouette resembled a reclining Egyptian mummy, he renamed it on the spot and started marketing land under the new label. The rebrand outlasted the ranch. Every map, deed, and street sign in the area still uses the name he chose for a sales pitch.
The Peak That's Being Put Back Together
Here's the part that shows up if you drive Lincoln Drive or Doubletree Ranch Road right now and look up: construction equipment, geo-woven mesh across a cut slope, and a visible gap where the summit should be smoother. That gap has a specific history, and the town has been tracking it in its own public updates.
Decades ago, a portion of the mountain's top was cut away, leaving a large, visible spill slope. The lot later passed to the Donahoe family, who tried to develop it, ran into conflicts with the town's Hillside Zoning Ordinance, and ended up in litigation. The dispute was resolved through a Partial Judgment and Settlement Agreement in 2002, which allowed specific deviations from the ordinance so the parcels could be built on, under conditions spelled out in Article XXII of the town code. A new owner came forward in 2023, got Hillside Committee approval that October, and pulled building permits that November. Construction has since moved into an active phase, and according to the town's own posted update, the crew isn't just building a house. They're relocating rock and soil removed for the foundation back into the old spill slope, reconstructing the missing piece of the peak and restoring the mountainside toward something closer to its original profile. The town has said it will keep residents informed as the project continues, since every phase has to stay within both the 2002 settlement and the current hillside code.
That's a different project from the one at the mountain's base. There, Silver Sky Development got unanimous town council approval in 2023 for a 12-lot luxury estate community on 17 acres, with homes designed to take in views of the McDowells and Four Peaks. The developer named the project for the sunsets visible from the site, according to its own announcement covered by KTAR, and estimated three to five years to build out, which puts the community's completion somewhere in the 2026 to 2028 window. Two different builders, two different parts of the same mountain, both reshaping how Mummy Mountain looks from the road at the same time.
None of this changes who can hike it. The summit reconstruction and the base development are both private construction projects on private lots, not new public access. If anything, they're the opposite: more of the mountain's visible surface is being actively managed, terraced, and rebuilt by property owners and their engineers, while the ridge above stays locked behind trust ownership and the one narrow trail through a hotel's back lot.
Camelback's story this year has been about which trailhead is open on which week. Mummy Mountain's story is slower and less visible unless you already live close enough to watch it. Its shape is being decided lot by lot, under a settlement written in 2002, by people rebuilding a summit that was never supposed to look incomplete in the first place.
If you've noticed that construction site from Lincoln Drive and wondered what was actually happening on the mountain, or you're weighing a property nearby and want a straight read on what's approved, what's still moving through the town's review process, and what any of it might mean for views or value on a specific street, Michael Bullis tracks these kinds of changes as part of working the Paradise Valley market day to day. Reach out anytime you want someone who already knows the mountain's paperwork, not just its silhouette.
