Three things the data says
Phoenix mountain rescues start at one trailhead. Echo Canyon on Camelback accounts for 310 of the 1,197 located calls (26%). Add Piestewa Peak, Pima Canyon and Cholla and you have most of the city.
Phoenix rescues are down about a fifth. 255 mountain-rescue calls in 2019, about 203 a year from 2023 to 2025, counting every call whether or not it could be mapped. Heat closures only cover about a month of days a year, so they can't be most of it. See the heat analysis.
Each city has its own calendar. Boulder peaks in July. Scottsdale peaks in February and goes quiet in summer. Phoenix barely has a season at all: March and May are as busy as July.
Explore a city
Where the calls come from
| Dispatch location | Calls | |
|---|---|---|
| Echo Canyon Trailhead · Camelback49XX E MCDONALD DR | 310 | |
| Piestewa Peak · park road27XX E PIESTEWA PEAK DR | 115 | |
| Pima Canyon Trailhead · South Mountain47XX E PIMA CANYON RD | 63 | |
| Piestewa Peak · park road (old name)27XX E SQUAW PEAK DR | 63 | |
| Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022)51XX N INVERGORDON RD | 59 | |
| Valley View Dr · South Mountain, north side24XX E VALLEY VIEW DR | 56 | |
| Cholla Trailhead · Camelback62XX E CHOLLA LN | 48 | |
| South Mountain Park entrance109XX S CENTRAL AV | 32 |
Source: Phoenix Open Data · Fire calls for service · CC BY · Addresses are published to the hundred block and geocoded here. 1,197 of 1,619 mountain rescues located (74%).
Scottsdale publishes the date of each call but not the time.
Where the calls come from
| Dispatch location | Calls | |
|---|---|---|
| 5150 North INVERGORDON Road | 47 | |
| Gateway Trailhead · McDowell Sonoran18333 North THOMPSON PEAK Parkway | 39 | |
| Tom's Thumb Trailhead · McDowell Sonoran23015 North 128TH Street | 38 | |
| Brown's Ranch Trailhead · McDowell Sonoran30301 North ALMA SCHOOL Parkway | 29 | |
| Echo Canyon Trailhead · Camelback4925 East MCDONALD Drive | 27 | |
| 31402 North 136TH Street | 20 | |
| 26802 North 102ND Way | 17 | |
| 12601 North 124TH Street | 16 |
Source: Scottsdale Open Data · Fire Department calls for service · City of Scottsdale open data terms · Full street addresses, geocoded here. Dates only, no time of day. 463 of 522 calls located (89%).
Where the calls come from
| Dispatch location | Calls | |
|---|---|---|
| Chautauqua Park · Flatirons trailheads | 243 | |
| One shared point in the mountain parks near Bear Peak | 99 | |
| NCAR Mesa trailhead | 23 | |
| 39.965, -105.258 | 16 | |
| 39.977, -105.267 | 13 | |
| 39.998, -105.293 | 13 | |
| 39.997, -105.309 | 10 | |
| 40.018, -105.250 | 8 |
Boulder publishes a point for each call rather than an address, so places are named from the coordinates. Many calls share a single point, which likely stands in for a trail or open-space area rather than the exact spot.
Source: Boulder Open Data · Response times for Boulder Fire-Rescue · CC0 1.0 · Points published by the city; no street addresses. 756 of 756 calls located (100%).
Side by side
| City | Agency | Data | Rescues / yr | Busiest | Quietest | Weekend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phoenix, AZ | Phoenix Fire Department | 2019–2025 | ~171 | March | December | 39.6% |
| Scottsdale, AZ | Scottsdale Fire Department | 2022–2026 | ~109 | February | June | 41.3% |
| Boulder, CO | Boulder Fire-Rescue | 2015–2026 | ~48 | July | January | 41.5% |
Mountain & technical rescues only. "Rescues / yr" averages full calendar years. The cities don't count the same way (see How to read this), so compare shapes, not totals.
Heat & trail closures
Since July 2021 Phoenix has closed the Echo Canyon and Cholla trails on Camelback and the Piestewa Peak trails on National Weather Service heat days, and added South Mountain in October 2024. The hours, season and trigger changed several times (table below), so every date here is scored under the rules in force that day. Does the dispatch data show the closures working? This section lines up all 1,619 Phoenix mountain-rescue calls, located or not, with daily highs at Sky Harbor and every heat warning and watch the Weather Service issued for Central Phoenix.
| From | Closed | Trigger | Rules |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 16, 2021 | 11–17 | Watch or warning | Pilot: Echo Canyon and Piestewa Peak, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., on an Excessive Heat Watch. Cholla was closed for renovation. |
| May 1, 2022 | 11–17 | Warning | May-September, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., on an Excessive Heat Warning. |
| May 1, 2023 | 11–17 | Warning | May-September rules, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. |
| Aug 31, 2023 | 9–17 | Warning | Year-round, 9 a.m.-5 p.m., on a Warning (Parks Board, 31 Aug 2023). |
| Oct 25, 2024 | 8–17 | Warning | 8 a.m.-5 p.m.; South Mountain added (Parks Board, 25 Oct 2024). |
| Mar 27, 2025 | 8–17 | Warning | South Mountain limited to Holbert, Mormon, Hau'pal Loop and Pima Canyon access to the National Trail. |
Timeline shared by Yun-Peng (Liz) Lu, University of Maryland, and checked against 2021 and 2023 coverage and the city's 2024 release.
Warning days vs. ordinary summer days
| Rescues per 100 days, May–Sep | Before heat days | Before ordinary |
After closure days | After ordinary | Net change 95% range |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Closure trails (Camelback, Piestewa) | 32 | 34 | 11 | 24 | 0.49 0.25–0.98 |
| South Mountain (closed from Oct 2024) | 13 | 10 | 8 | 7 | 0.83 0.31–2.22 |
| All other Phoenix trails | 34 | 32 | 30 | 26 | 1.08 0.62–1.87 |
Before = January 2019 to July 15, 2021; after = from the pilot's start on July 16, 2021. Before, a heat day is one with a warning in effect between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. (the first rule); after, a closure day is one with the trigger in effect during that day's closed hours. Days: 79 heat and 303 ordinary May–Sep days before, 135 and 554 after. "Net change" compares the heat-day rate with the same trails' ordinary-day rate, after vs before; 1.00 means no change, below 1 means heat days got relatively quieter. The range is an approximate 95% interval from the call counts.
What it says
Heat days got quieter at the closed trails
Before the program the closure trails averaged 32 rescues per 100 heat days; on closure days since, 11. Other trails barely moved (34 → 30). That's the pattern you'd expect if closures work. The net change is 0.49, about a 51% relative drop, with a 95% range of 0.25 to 0.98, which only just excludes no effect. The counts are small (25 and 15 calls), so treat it as a signal, not a measurement.
Closures can't explain the long drop
The closure trails went from 119 rescues in 2019 to about 74 a year in 2023–2025, while other trails went from 136 to about 128. But the drop is year-round, and there are only about 31 warning days a year. Even if every warning-day rescue that disappeared was prevented by a closure, that's about 6 a year. Something else, most of it outside summer, did the rest.
Rescues don't rise with the thermometer
Calls per day are roughly flat from below 70°F to 110°F and up. At the closure trails, 110-degree days are as quiet as the coolest ones. The city's own review found visitors fall as the temperature climbs, so each hiker out there faces more risk even though the count of rescues doesn't grow.
Some people go anyway
Since the pilot began there have been 17 rescues at closed trails during that day's closed hours, none in 2021–22 and most since the 2023 switch to 9 a.m. Some may have started before the closure; some may be at the trailhead rather than on the trail. The list is below.
The city's numbers, reproduced
| Closure trails (Echo Canyon, Cholla, Piestewa) | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2021→2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| City of Phoenix, "rescues on closed trails" | 57 | 47 | 30 | 35 | -39% |
| Dispatch data, May–October, any day or hour | 55 | 50 | 33 | 36 | -35% |
| Dispatch data, November–April (no closures) | 53 | 42 | 42 | 35 | -34% |
| Dispatch data, during closed hours on warning days | 0 | 0 | 3 | 9 |
The city published these four figures in its October 2024 news release without a definition. Counting every mountain-rescue call at the closure trails from May through October, on any day and at any hour, reproduces them to within 3 a year, so "on closed trails" most likely means trails that close, not rescues while they were closed. The same trails fell just as much over the winter months, when nothing closes.
Rescues at closure trails during closed hours (17)
| Date | Hour | Where | Closed | High |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-07-01 | 12:00 | Echo Canyon Trailhead · Camelback | 11:00-17:00 | 110°F |
| 2023-07-17 | 15:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 11:00-17:00 | 113°F |
| 2023-07-25 | 13:00 | Echo Canyon Pkwy · Camelback | 11:00-17:00 | 115°F |
| 2024-06-07 | 10:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 9:00-17:00 | 110°F |
| 2024-07-09 | 09:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 9:00-17:00 | 113°F |
| 2024-07-19 | 11:00 | Echo Canyon Trailhead · Camelback | 9:00-17:00 | 111°F |
| 2024-08-05 | 09:00 | Piestewa Peak · park road | 9:00-17:00 | 108°F |
| 2024-09-28 | 12:00 | Piestewa Peak · park road | 9:00-17:00 | 114°F |
| 2024-10-01 | 12:00 | Echo Canyon Trailhead · Camelback | 9:00-17:00 | 110°F |
| 2024-10-02 | 12:00 | Echo Canyon Pkwy · Camelback | 9:00-17:00 | 105°F |
| 2024-10-03 | 11:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 9:00-17:00 | 106°F |
| 2024-10-06 | 11:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 9:00-17:00 | 107°F |
| 2025-06-14 | 09:00 | Valley View Dr · South Mountain, north side | 8:00-17:00 | 109°F |
| 2025-06-19 | 08:00 | Valley View Dr · South Mountain, north side | 8:00-17:00 | 115°F |
| 2025-08-05 | 11:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 8:00-17:00 | 114°F |
| 2025-08-23 | 11:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 8:00-17:00 | 109°F |
| 2025-08-24 | 10:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 8:00-17:00 | 108°F |
Heat warnings and watches for zone AZZ543, Central Phoenix, come from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet VTEC archive. Counting every date a warning touched gives 20, 18, 42, 45 days for 2021–2024, the same as the city's 2024 program review (20, 18, 42, 45). Closure days, which need the trigger in effect during closed hours and fall inside the program's season, number 8, 17, 42, 45: 2021 counts only the pilot from July 16, and 2022 loses July 17, when the warning expired at 2 a.m. An independent check: an ABC15 report at the end of the 2021 pilot (found by Yun-Peng Lu) said the trails closed on eight days with no mountain rescues during closure hours, which matches the 8 pilot closure days and zero closed-hour rescues here. A watch later upgraded to a warning is stored with its end before its start; it has no in-effect time of its own, and in this zone every 2021 pilot watch was upgraded to a warning for the same days, so watches add no closure days unless a closure began the day a watch was issued. Daily highs: Open-Meteo historical reanalysis at Sky Harbor. Trails are assigned from the dispatch address, so unlocated calls count too. The "before" years include 2020, when trail use changed with the pandemic.
National parks
The National Park Service released lists of every search-and-rescue incident its rangers logged from 2013 to August 2021: 20,058 incidents across 190 parks. Each record gives the park, the date and the kind of incident, but not where in the park it happened, so the map has one circle per park rather than one dot per rescue. Pick a park to see its calendar.
Where rescues happen most
| Park | Incidents / yr | Visits / yr | Per million visits |
|---|
Source: NPS FOIA reading room, SAR incident lists 2013–2018 and 2019–2020 (the second runs to August 2021); visits from NPS visitor use statistics; boundaries from the NPS Land Resources Division. Averages and rates use 2016–2020: fewer incidents were logged in 2013–2015 as the reporting system came into use, and 2021 is partial. Rates are ranked only for parks with at least a million visits a year. 2020 visits fell with the pandemic. 1,237 incidents have no park code and appear only in the national totals. "Search" types are recorded separately only in 2013–2018. An incident is one logged event, not one person.
How to read this
What counts as a rescue
Each department's own call type. In Phoenix, dispatches coded Mountain Rescue (plus a handful of tree and confined-space rescues). In Scottsdale, the department's MTNRES code and high-angle rescues. In Boulder, rescue and technical-rescue call types, including Boulder units sent into county open space ("auto-aid").
Dispatched, not completed
These are 911 dispatches. Some were cancelled en route or found nobody. A call is the unit of count, not a person. One call can be a whole group, and some rescues never reach the fire department (sheriff's teams and volunteer groups run many backcountry missions).
How precise a dot is
Phoenix publishes addresses to the hundred block ("49XX E McDonald Dr"), so a dot marks the middle of that block, or the intersection named in the call. Scottsdale gives full addresses. Boulder gives its own points. When a call only names a preserve, the dot sits at a representative point for that preserve. Click any dot to see which of these it is.
What's missing
Calls whose address couldn't be matched aren't on the map, but they're still in the counts where noted. In Phoenix, 241 located calls sit at a preserve's representative point rather than a street address. Scottsdale's data starts in December 2022; Boulder's in 2015.
A correction
An earlier version of this page showed 2,263 Phoenix incidents, led by 1,120 "crisis care" calls clustered at the preserve edges, plus a wildland-fire cluster. Both were artifacts of a bug. The code that placed preserve-name addresses at a preserve also matched street names, so calls on Camelback Road, McDowell Road and South Mountain Avenue were pulled in and pinned to preserves up to 20 miles away.
A second problem hid most of the real rescues: Phoenix's hundred-block addresses weren't being matched, so only 474 of 1,619 mountain rescues made the map. Both are fixed. Preserve matching now requires the place name, not the street; hundred blocks become their midpoint; and every dot records how precise it is. Mapped Phoenix mountain rescues went from 474 to 1,197. The full write-up is in the README.
Data & method
Each week a GitHub Action downloads every city's public dispatch data, keeps the rescue call types, and geocodes addresses with the Maricopa County geocoder, caching every answer so later runs only look up new addresses. It then writes one GeoJSON file per city and rebuilds this page. Nothing here is modeled or estimated; every number is a count of calls in those files.
Sources: Phoenix (CC BY) · Scottsdale (City of Scottsdale open data terms) · Boulder (CC0 1.0). Geocoding by Maricopa County GIS. Basemap © Esri.
Methods, limitations and code: github.com/bdgroves/ridgeline. The Phoenix view with trails, trailheads and preserve boundaries is on the detailed Phoenix map.