Scottsdale was not built as a resort.
It started as a farm town on the edge of the Salt River Valley. In the late 1880s, Army chaplain Winfield Scott and his wife Helen settled here. By 1894 the townsite had a name — first Orangedale, then Scottsdale — and a grid of streets that is still Old Town. Citrus and cattle came first. The “West’s Most Western Town” slogan came later. The Little Red Schoolhouse went up in 1909 for about $4,500 and is now the Scottsdale Historical Museum. The Rusty Spur still has the vault from when that building was a bank.
That square mile is what a visitor actually walks. More than a hundred galleries, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Western Spirit (the city’s Smithsonian affiliate), the Old Adobe Mission built by hand in the 1930s. A few blocks over, the Civic Center Mall is not only shops and restaurants. It has fountains, sculptures, and a lagoon, and it holds the Civic Center, the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, and SMoCA. Old Town is compact enough to cross in an afternoon and layered enough that the blocks do not all tell the same story.
The rest of the city is a different scale. Scottsdale holds the record for the most destination spas per capita — the version of town people book months ahead. North of that, the McDowell Sonoran Preserve is the country’s largest urban wilderness: desert, not a lawn, with trails that start inside the city limits. Chili has been the official food since 1994. Prickly pear shows up in ice cream as often as it does on a postcard. None of that cancels the farm-town grid. It sits on top of it.
October is the month that makes the walking easy. Scottsdale gets on the order of 300 sunny days a year. In October the days often run from the low 60s in the morning to around 90 by afternoon — warm, not the summer wall. Nights cool off. That is the window Ghost Riders was written for: after the galleries close, before the desert goes fully dark, when Old Town is still the part of the city you can actually cover.
Ghost Riders in Scottsdale is the lighter of the two. Same name as Prescott, different night. You ride a golf cart through Old Town after dark with a Puzzle Master driving. Clues sit at real corners. The stories are local. It is closer to a haunted romp than to the PG-13 Prescott Ghost Riders, which leans on rougher Old West history. About 75 minutes. A private group. No one has to navigate, and no one has to skip the spas or the preserve to fit it in. It uses the square mile the city actually started on.
A lot of October visitors are already here for something else. The Arizona State Fair runs Thursdays through Sundays, October 1 through November 1, at the fairgrounds in Phoenix — a short drive when the midway closes. Baseball fans have a closer reason: Arizona Fall League games at Scottsdale Stadium, with the AZ Baseball Legacy & Experience Exhibit on display for those games. Old Town is the neighborhood after the last out. Ghost Riders is the best way to use the evening — not a second headline on the ticket, the night the day was heading toward.
October fills quickly. To the north, Prescott Ghost Riders is the spookier sell. In Scottsdale, Ghost Riders is the one for visitors who came for the weather, a ballgame, the galleries, and one night that uses the town instead of driving past it.
Book Scottsdale Ghost Riders, or call (602) 601-2261 and ask what nights are still open.
