Three things the data says
Phoenix mountain rescues start at one trailhead. Echo Canyon on Camelback accounts for 310 of the 1,489 located calls (21%). 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. Trail counters show about as many hikers as in 2019, and heat closures cover only about a month of days a year, so mostly each hike got safer. 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 | |
| 106XX N 7TH ST | 64 | |
| 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 |
Source: Phoenix Open Data · Fire calls for service · CC BY · Addresses are published to the hundred block and geocoded here. 1,489 of 1,619 mountain rescues located (92%).
Scottsdale publishes the date of each call but not the time.
Where the calls come from
| Dispatch location | Calls | |
|---|---|---|
| 5150 North INVERGORDON Road | 50 | |
| Gateway Trailhead · McDowell Sonoran18333 North THOMPSON PEAK Parkway | 42 | |
| Tom's Thumb Trailhead · McDowell Sonoran23015 North 128TH Street | 39 | |
| Brown's Ranch Trailhead · McDowell Sonoran30301 North ALMA SCHOOL Parkway | 29 | |
| Echo Canyon Trailhead · Camelback4925 East MCDONALD Drive | 27 | |
| 31402 North 136TH Street | 19 | |
| 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. 483 of 546 calls located (88%).
Where the calls come from
| Dispatch location | Calls | |
|---|---|---|
| Chautauqua Park · Flatirons trailheads | 248 | |
| One shared point in the mountain parks near Bear Peak | 102 | |
| 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 | 9 |
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. 766 of 766 calls located (100%).
Side by side
| City | Agency | Data | Rescues / yr | Busiest | Quietest | Weekend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phoenix, AZ | Phoenix Fire Department | 2019–2025 | ~213 | March | December | 41.2% |
| Scottsdale, AZ | Scottsdale Fire Department | 2022–2026 | ~109 | February | June | 41.9% |
| Boulder, CO | Boulder Fire-Rescue | 2015–2026 | ~48 | July | January | 41.6% |
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.
Per hiker, not per day
Counting rescues per day hides how many people were out there. Phoenix publishes daily trail-counter data (infrared counters, 2019 on). Two counters sit on the closure trails for the whole period: Echo Canyon and the Piestewa Summit Trail. Below, rescues at those two trailheads are divided by the counters' passes on the same days. A pass is one person crossing the counter, so a round trip may count twice; the rates are for comparing, not for "1 in N hikers."
| Year | Nov–Apr passes/day | Nov–Apr per 100k |
May–Oct passes/day | May–Oct per 100k |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 1,952 | 10.2 | 1,220 | 21.0 |
| 2020 | 2,296 | 8.1 | 1,801 | 14.8 |
| 2021 | 2,553 | 11.2 | 1,438 | 20.8 |
| 2022 | 2,313 | 9.2 | 1,157 | 21.2 |
| 2023 | 2,097 | 9.2 | 1,085 | 14.9 |
| 2024 | 2,042 | 7.8 | 976 | 13.4 |
| 2025 | 1,865 | 6.4 | 894 | 19.6 |
| May–Sep days | Days | Passes/day | Rescues | Per 100k |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before · ordinary May–Sep days | 216 | 1,355 | 63 | 21.5 |
| Before · heat days | 41 | 918 | 19 | 50.5 |
| After · ordinary May–Sep days | 540 | 1,060 | 118 | 20.6 |
| After · closure days | 127 | 602 | 8 | 10.5 |
Days with both counters reporting (2,296 of them, 2019-01-01 to 2025-11-30); zero-count days are treated as outages. Cholla is left out: its counter is patchy and the trail was shut for renovation in 2020–22. Counters count all day, including the open hours before and after a closure.
Did rescues just get logged as something else?
| All published calls at the closure trailheads | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mountain rescue | 119 | 83 | 108 | 92 | 75 | 71 | 77 |
| Every other call type, incl. type withheld | 51 | 37 | 39 | 49 | 48 | 35 | 42 |
Every call the city published at the Echo Canyon, Cholla and Piestewa trailhead addresses, from the full (unfiltered) dispatch data. Nothing else rose as mountain rescues fell. Calls whose type the city withholds (probably medical) are in the second row and show no trend either. Medical calls that are left out of the public data entirely can't be checked.
Checks: the pandemic and trail closures
| Closure-trail net change | Ratio | 95% range | Heat-day calls before / after |
|---|---|---|---|
| all years | 0.49 | 0.25–0.98 | 25 / 15 |
| without 2020 | 0.42 | 0.19–0.90 | 15 / 15 |
| without 2020–21 | 0.49 | 0.20–1.20 | 9 / 14 |
The same heat-day comparison with the pandemic years left out. Dropping 2020 makes the effect a little stronger; dropping 2020 and 2021 keeps the estimate and widens the range (fewer days). The pandemic adds noise; it doesn't create the result.
The pandemic boom was real but short. Relative to 2019, city-wide counts ran 2020 +19%, 2021 +12%, 2022 -4%, 2023 -8%, 2024 -13%, 2025 -19%. The busy years were 2020–21; by 2022 traffic was back below 2019 (2025 runs only through 2025-11, so it's partial). The long decline in rescues is measured from 2019, before the pandemic, to 2023–25, after it, so the pandemic can't be what brought it down. It can explain the 2021 bump.
Trails closed for other reasons too. Months when a closure-trail counter read near zero while the other was busy: Echo Canyon Trail 2020-06 (0/day); Echo Canyon Trail 2020-07 (0/day); Echo Canyon Trail 2020-08 (16/day); Echo Canyon Trail 2025-11 (6/day). Echo Canyon appears to have been shut in summer 2020 (no city notice found), which is most of why 2020 had so few rescues at the closure trails. It has been closed again since October 2025 after storm damage and loose boulders (KJZZ), which will lower late-2025 counts. Cholla was closed for about a year and a half for rebuilding after a 2020 boulder accident. The per-hiker rates skip days a counter reads zero, so these closures don't distort them.
What the data can't see. Counters count people, not who they are. If the crowd after the pandemic has more experienced locals and fewer visitors than 2019, that alone could make each hike safer.
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. There are only about 31 warning days a year; even if every heat-day rescue that disappeared was prevented by a closure, that's about 6 a year. The trail counters say it isn't fewer hikers either: Echo Canyon and Piestewa averaged 1,518 counter passes a day in 2024 against 1,588 in 2019, yet rescues per 100,000 passes fell from 14.3 to 9.6. Winter fell just as much (10.2 to 7.8) with the same number of winter hikers. Each hike got safer, and no other call type rose to hide it (table above). Why is the open question.
Heat roughly triples the risk per hiker
Rescues per day look flat with temperature because the crowd shrinks: from about 2,180 counter passes a day below 80°F to about 807 above 105°F. Per 100,000 passes, rescues go from about 8.7 to 25.9. Before the program, heat days ran 50.5 per 100,000 passes against 21.5 on ordinary summer days. On closure days since, it's 10.5, below ordinary days (20.6), even with about 602 passes a day still counted outside the closed hours. That's only 8 rescues, but it's the strongest sign yet that the closures do what they're meant to.
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 | 114°F |
| 2023-07-17 | 15:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 11:00-17:00 | 116°F |
| 2023-07-25 | 13:00 | Echo Canyon Pkwy · Camelback | 11:00-17:00 | 119°F |
| 2024-06-07 | 10:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 9:00-17:00 | 113°F |
| 2024-07-09 | 09:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 9:00-17:00 | 116°F |
| 2024-07-19 | 11:00 | Echo Canyon Trailhead · Camelback | 9:00-17:00 | 112°F |
| 2024-08-05 | 09:00 | Piestewa Peak · park road | 9:00-17:00 | 112°F |
| 2024-09-28 | 12:00 | Piestewa Peak · park road | 9:00-17:00 | 117°F |
| 2024-10-01 | 12:00 | Echo Canyon Trailhead · Camelback | 9:00-17:00 | 113°F |
| 2024-10-02 | 12:00 | Echo Canyon Pkwy · Camelback | 9:00-17:00 | 108°F |
| 2024-10-03 | 11:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 9:00-17:00 | 109°F |
| 2024-10-06 | 11:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 9:00-17:00 | 113°F |
| 2025-06-14 | 09:00 | Valley View Dr · South Mountain, north side | 8:00-17:00 | 110°F |
| 2025-06-19 | 08:00 | Valley View Dr · South Mountain, north side | 8:00-17:00 | 117°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 | 110°F |
| 2025-08-24 | 10:00 | Cholla Trailhead · Camelback (address since 2022) | 8:00-17:00 | 111°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: the Sky Harbor station record (NOAA GHCN-Daily USW00023183, with the latest days from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet). 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, 336 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 1,489. 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.