On the morning of July 29, 72-year-old Glen Keane set out to hike Mummy Mountain with his daughter and grandchildren. Keane grew up in Paradise Valley, the son of cartoonist Bil Keane, who created "The Family Circus" and lived in town until his death in 2011. Glen went on to draw Ariel, the Beast, and Aladdin for Disney, and won an Oscar in 2018 for the short film "Dear Basketball." He knew this mountain. He'd climbed it as a kid.
By mid-morning he was stuck on a narrow ridge, dizzy and unsteady, in triple-digit heat. Phoenix Fire called in a helicopter. A police pilot guided the crew to Keane's position, then flew the hoist himself. Keane was lowered to the base of the mountain, checked by paramedics, and released. A little over a week later, on August 7, he came back to Phoenix Fire Station 12 with a drawing of the rescue, thanking the crew who'd pulled him off.
It's a good story on its own. But buried in the coverage was a detail most residents drive past without registering: Mummy Mountain isn't on the city's list of trails that automatically close under an extreme heat warning. Camelback Mountain is. Piestewa Peak is. Mummy Mountain, sitting in the exact center of Paradise Valley and visible from half the town, is not. That's not an oversight. It's a consequence of what the mountain actually is, which is not what most people assume.
The Rule That Never Applied
Phoenix's extreme heat closure program governs city-owned recreation land. Camelback and Piestewa sit inside that system because the city owns and manages the trails. Mummy Mountain was never part of it, because the city has never owned Mummy Mountain. There's no parks department deciding whether it's too hot to hike. There's no ranger checking IDs at a gate. The mountain simply isn't wired into the infrastructure that makes those closures possible in the first place.
This is the piece that gets lost in every casual description of Mummy Mountain as "Paradise Valley's other peak." It's not a smaller Camelback. It's a fundamentally different kind of land, and the difference shows up exactly when it matters most, on a 109-degree morning when a hiker needs the system to catch him and finds there isn't one.
Three Owners, One Mountain
Ask who owns Mummy Mountain and the honest answer is that no single entity does. The mountain breaks into layers, and each layer answers to someone different.
- The lower and mid slopes are private residential lots, subdivided starting in the 1940s and built out over the decades since into some of the most exclusive addresses in Paradise Valley.
- A core of roughly 260 acres near the summit is held by the Mummy Mountain Preserve Trust, an independently governed land trust founded in 1997 that accepts conservation donations from surrounding property owners and holds the land in perpetuity, separate from any Town of Paradise Valley parks authority.
- The only developed hiking route, Tyner's Trail, sits on land belonging to the Camelback Inn resort, which has operated on the mountain's southern slope since 1936.
No part of that structure is a municipal park. That's the throughline. Camelback Mountain and Piestewa Peak are public land with public rules. Mummy Mountain is private land, private trust land, and resort land, arranged in a shape that from a distance looks exactly like a preserve.
The Trail That Runs Through a Hotel
If you want to hike Mummy Mountain the way most people do, you don't head for a trailhead. You head for the Camelback Inn.
The route starts near the resort's registration circle, cuts past the spa, and continues up through what longtime hikers still call the "fake western town," a cluster of themed buildings the resort built decades ago. From there the trail crosses a small bridge onto Tyner's Trail, climbs to a wooden bench at the high point of the loop, and loops back down. Hikers are told to check in at the front desk first, mostly so their cars don't get towed from resort parking.
That single instruction tells you almost everything about how this mountain actually functions. Access isn't managed by a government agency with posted hours and closure protocols. It's managed, informally, by a hotel. There's no equivalent arrangement at Echo Canyon or Cholla Trail on Camelback, where the city runs the trailhead and enforces its own rules regardless of who owns the land next door.
How the Mountain Lost Its Peak, and Who's Rebuilding It
The most visible scar on Mummy Mountain isn't natural. Decades ago, a portion of the summit was excavated, leaving behind a large exposed spill slope that's been visible from much of Paradise Valley ever since. The Donahoe family eventually acquired the lot and tried to develop it, which led to a zoning dispute with the Town that ended in litigation.
The result was a Partial Judgment and Settlement Agreement in 2002, a legal document that still governs what happens on that hilltop today. It carved out specific deviations from the Town's Hillside Development Regulations under Article XXII of the town code, defining exactly where a home could sit, how tall a graded cut could be, and where a driveway could cross the ridgeline.
A new owner came forward in 2023 to build under those terms. The Hillside committee approved the plan that October, and building permits followed in November. By the following year, the Town's own construction updates confirmed work had begun on-site, with the rock and soil cut for the new house's foundation being relocated back onto the mountain to reconstruct the peak that was removed years ago. The plan was to reshape the exposed slope into something closer to its original profile. The geo-woven mesh draped across the hillside in the Town's photos wasn't landscaping. It was temporary embankment protection required while the grading was underway, with the Town noting it would come down once construction finished.
Read that again and notice what it means. The most significant physical restoration to happen on Mummy Mountain in recent years wasn't a conservation project run by a preserve trust or a parks department. It was a condition of a private building permit, negotiated between a landowner and the Town two decades earlier, executed by a construction crew building someone's house.
What Keane Actually Ran Into
Keane's rescue and the mountain's slow peak repair are two ends of the same fact. This is private land wearing the appearance of public space, and that appearance is convincing enough that even someone who grew up here can be caught off guard by it.
Talking to a reporter after his rescue, Keane put it simply.
"This is not animation. This is real life."
He meant the rescue itself, the difference between drawing heroes and needing one. But it works just as well as a description of the mountain. From the road, Mummy Mountain reads as open space, the kind of landmark every Paradise Valley resident assumes operates on the same rules as Camelback or Piestewa. It doesn't. There's no closure list that includes it, no single owner who manages it, no trailhead run by the city. What looks like a preserve is really three separate private interests, a resort, a land trust, and a hillside homeowner building under a two-decade-old settlement, each controlling a piece of the same hill.
If you live near it, that's worth knowing before your next early morning hike, and worth knowing regardless of whether you ever set foot on it. The mountain in the middle of town isn't public land that happens to look private. It's private land that happens to look public, and the distinction is the whole story.
If you're curious about other parts of Paradise Valley that don't work the way they first appear, that's the kind of local detail Shawn Keeler spends his time tracking. Let's Connect.
