"It's the backdrop to our lives," Joe Trudeau said of the boulders east of Highway 89.
Most mornings, that's all the granite formations are to the people driving past them on the way into town: scenery, permanent as the sunrise catching Glassford Hill. It's easy to assume the open ground wrapped around Granite Dells has just always been there, the way the rock itself has been there for roughly 1.4 billion years. The rock has. The trails haven't, and the ground under a fair number of them was still privately owned within living memory, some of it still is.
If you live in Granite Dells and walk Easter Island Trail or paddle out from Watson Lake on a Saturday, you're moving through the result of a fight that's been going acre by acre for two decades and isn't finished yet.
Twenty-Four Miles, Then One Hundred Thirty
When Chris Hosking arrived in Prescott in 2006 to take over the city's scattered trail work, the entire system added up to 24 miles. The Peavine, a converted rail bed from the old Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix line, was more or less the whole show. Everything else was informal, unofficial, or simply not there.
Two decades later, Hosking, now the city's trails and natural parklands manager, had helped add roughly 130 more miles. Prescott's public trail system now draws over a million visits a year, with more than 100,000 of those on the Peavine alone. That's not a rounding error against the 2006 baseline. It's a different city.
Some of that new mileage runs directly behind the homes in Granite Dells. The Storm Trails system, a dense web of singletrack named for a nearby ranch, includes routes like Captains Trail, Easter Island Trail, Big Rock Canyon Trail, Boulder Creek Trail, and Quartz Canyons Trail, along with more than a dozen others. None of it was built by a city crew with a construction budget. It was laid out and maintained by the Over the Hill Gang, a volunteer trail organization that still does most of the ground-level work in the Dells, including the section of Captains Trail that Hosking is said to have designed himself.
Here's the part that surprised even people who've hiked there for years: several of the Storm Trails were already in regular use before the city legally owned the land they crossed. A trail review from December 2019 describes hikers already following the Storm Ranch Trails, cutting through granite and quartz outcrops on volunteer-built singletrack. The city didn't close on the 302-acre Storm Ranch parcel that gave the trails their name until August 2022. For close to three years, the public was walking a trail network on land the city hadn't formally acquired.
The Development That Would Have Put Houses on the Peavine
Trudeau moved to Prescott from New Hampshire in 2010, drawn in part by the same rock formations everyone else notices. By 2016 he'd noticed something else: a development proposal on the Dells' northern edge that would have layered hundreds of residential and commercial units directly across the Peavine's most heavily used stretch. Anyone wanting to hike the trail would have had to walk through a new subdivision to reach it.
That proposal is what turned casual appreciation into organizing. The group that formed, Save the Dells, spent years negotiating with the landowner, Arizona Eco Development, rather than simply opposing the project outright. The deal that closed in July 2021 protected 473.7 of the 500 acres the group had originally targeted as public Natural Open Space. The annexation agreement also cut the number of at-grade road crossings over the Peavine from five down to one grade-separated crossing, kept new construction out of the Point of Rocks area and off the stretch of trail south of No-Name Creek, and moved a proposed resort to a less disruptive location. Almost eight miles of new road that would have come with the original plan never got built.
One detail from that agreement rarely comes up in conversation but says something about how specific the negotiation got: the Boblett family homestead and grave site, tucked inside the same acreage, ended up protected as part of the same deal. Nobody was fighting over a grave site when the fight started. It got folded in because the map happened to include it.
The Hill Behind the Boulders Got the Same Treatment
Glassford Hill, the extinct volcano visible east of the Dells, went through a version of the same process on a longer timeline. In May 2022, the City of Prescott, the Town of Prescott Valley, and Yavapai County signed an intergovernmental agreement to jointly pursue state trust land on and around the hill. In November 2023, the three governments closed on roughly 2,284 acres for $6.255 million, with $3.5 million of that covered by state funding.
Combined with the Dells acreage already in public hands, that purchase created what's now called Glassford Dells Regional Park, a combined footprint of about 4,100 acres stretching from Watson Lake east across the hill. The project won a 2024 Crown Communities Award from American City and County, a recognition typically reserved for government projects notable for their scale or for how many separate agencies had to cooperate to pull them off. Three governments quietly agreeing to spend $6 million on open space, without a ballot fight, was the kind of outcome Save the Dells hadn't gotten used to expecting.
The Piece That's Still Up for Grabs
None of this means the map is finished. As of this spring, one private in-holding remains at the center of the Dells, a 220-acre parcel nicknamed "the Diving Board" for being the last privately owned tract surrounded almost entirely by state trust land. It's city-approved for up to 1,000 housing units. The asking price runs between $22 million and $24.5 million, driven largely by the water rights attached to roughly 1,150 units. Reporting from this spring described the owners as open to selling the parcel to the city instead, though no sale has closed as of this writing.
A separate 600-acre state trust parcel near Badger Mountain, valued around $5.5 million, was scheduled for an April state land auction. If the city didn't act, the reporting noted, Prescott stood to lose the "P" landmark on the mountain, about two miles south of Watson Lake, a small but recognizable piece of the local skyline. Meanwhile, on a different stretch of the Peavine, construction on roughly 250 new houses was described as ready to break ground any day. Preservation and development aren't taking turns here. They're happening on adjacent parcels at the same time.
There's also a second organized voice in the room now. A group called the Granite Dells Preservation Foundation has formed to push back on how much land the city keeps taking off the private market, evidence that not everyone in Prescott agrees on where the line between open space and buildable land should sit. That disagreement is part of why the Diving Board's fate isn't settled yet.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
None of this is cause for alarm. It's context. The trail sign you pass on a Saturday morning loop through the Storm Trails, the bench with the Watson Lake view near the end of Easter Island Trail, the fact that you can walk from your street to open granite without crossing a construction fence, all of that is the accumulated result of a series of specific, sometimes narrow decisions made over twenty years. It could have gone differently in more than one place, and in a few spots it's still being decided.
After a loop through the Dells, plenty of residents end up a short drive down Highway 89 at Farm Provisions or Superb Food Company for the same reason people have always ended a hike with a meal. That routine only exists because the trail exists first, and the trail exists because enough people, mostly volunteers and a handful of persistent locals, decided it was worth the years of negotiation to keep it public.
If you're curious how these open space decisions have shaped property values near the Dells over time, or you're weighing what a home backing onto this land is actually worth given how much of the surrounding ground is now permanently protected, Cheryl Fernandez at Prescott Lux Homes follows these changes closely as part of working this neighborhood. Request Your Personalized Home Valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
