Every city › Phoenix › trails and paths
Ranked shortlist · 10 of 56 trails and paths
Best trails and paths in Phoenix
The 10 most notable trails and paths in Phoenix, in rank order. The order is curation quality — how well attested and how complete each record is — not popularity, and no place on this list paid to be on it.
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1
Desert Foothills Trailhead
14251 S Desert Foothills Pkwy
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.99 · rank score 2.512, percentile 100 of 56
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2
Pima Canyon Trailhead
4500 E Pima Canyon Rd
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.99 · rank score 2.482, percentile 98.18 of 56
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3
Thunderbird conservation
22800 N 59th Ave
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.97 · rank score 2.335, percentile 96.36 of 56
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4
North Mountain
10600 N 7th St
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.97 · rank score 2.331, percentile 94.55 of 56
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5
Shaw Butte
12444 N 17th St
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.97 · rank score 2.331, percentile 92.73 of 56
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6
Fat Man's Pass
Pima Canyon Trailhead, Hidden Valley Trail
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.97 · rank score 2.331, percentile 90.91 of 56
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7
Shaw Butte Trail
Shaw Butte Trail
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website, a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.97 · rank score 2.331, percentile 89.09 of 56
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8
Phoenix Mountain Preserve - 40th St. Trailhead
9200 N 40th St
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a phone and an address · Overture confidence 0.99 · rank score 2.247, percentile 87.27 of 56
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9
Beverly Canyon Trailhead
8000 S 46th St.
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website and an address · Overture confidence 0.99 · rank score 2.247, percentile 85.45 of 56
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10
Quartz Ridge Trailhead (#8A) Phoenix Mountain Reserve
6511 E Sierra Vista Dr
listed by Meta and Overture Maps Foundation · record has a website and an address · Overture confidence 0.97 · rank score 2.066, percentile 83.64 of 56
How this list is made
Every place in this group was scored by the same model, with each term z-normalised inside the group and capped, so a famous chain cannot win by being famous everywhere. The weights, verbatim:
- attestation by independent providers
- +0.35
- record completeness (website, phone, address)
- +0.25
- Overture existence confidence
- +0.20
- Michelin designation (Wikidata, CC0)
- +0.40
- brand fame (Wikidata sitelinks)
- −0.15
- same-name chain collision
- −0.30
Curation quality, not popularity: how well attested and how complete a record is.
No licensable popularity signal; this ranks curation quality, not taste
Independent check: 5,951 places listed in Wikivoyage (CC BY-SA 4.0; validation only, never published or scored) were matched to our records by name within 250 m. Across the 5,651 that fall in groups of at least 10, the median matched place sits at percentile 73 and 24.2% are in the top decile, against 10% by chance; five families have enough anchors to report (arts, food and drink, lodging, shopping, sport), while health care (5), lifestyle services (17), travel (26) have too few and are not validated. A match needs both the guide and the catalogue to name the same place, which favours well-attested places — a term this rank itself rewards — so these are lower bounds; Michelin's 528 in-group anchors have a median percentile of 100, but that is partly circular: across the Wikivoyage matches, the 17 that also carry the designation term this rank scores sit at 99.93, against 72.55 for the 5,934 without it.
The catalogue carries no rating, review count, price or opening hours, so this file has none.
Nobody paid for placement: no ads, no sponsored results, no ratings for sale.
Data: AllThePlaces (CC0-1.0), BrightQuery (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), DAC (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), Foursquare Open Source Places (Apache-2.0), Meta (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), Microsoft (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), PinMeTo (CDLA-Permissive-2.0), RenderSEO (CDLA-Permissive-2.0).