The Valley’s horse culture tries to hold on as development pushes stables out of the urban core.

Sitting on a palomino horse named “Cisco,” Jodi Scott gazes out at the SRP Tempe Town Lake Marina where she and her family once took tourists on hayrides.

The parking lot filled with colorful boats still causes her heartache. Asphalt covers the field where Scott and her sisters practiced barrel patterns for rodeos. A trail that takes riders from the family’s stables to Papago Park is still there, but now it leads underneath the rumble of whizzing cars on the Red Mountain freeway.

“We used to be out in the middle of nowhere, but now we’re in the middle of the city. We’re being squeezed out,” Scott laments.

Papago Riding Stables in Tempe may be the poster child for the Valley’s beleaguered horse culture. In the past decade, dozens of stables across the Valley have given way to development as equestrians are pushed out of the urban core. Other landmark stables like Pretty Penny in Scottsdale are now occupied by high-priced homes and parking lots. No one keeps a census – but the trend is causing concern that stables may go the way of the Valley’s once lush citrus groves.

Jeannette Fish of the Maricopa County Farm Bureau attributes the decline to a “double whammy” – pre-bubble demand that ate up large parcels of land for development followed by an economic collapse that caused many people to give up their costly horse habits.

“I don’t think it’s a dying phenomenon, but in the heavily populated areas, I think it will become harder and harder to maintain the facilities,” she says.

Donald “Bill” Scott started Papago Stables in 1965 with a truck, a small trailer and seven horses. Since then, thousands if not millions of tourists and ASU students have passed through the stables for a wagon ride or to take a guided trip through Papago Park. Today, the family-run business has about 50 horses and still caters to greenhorns seeking a fading Western experience.

Yet the Scotts are resigned to more development and have put the stables up for sale.

“I know some day we’ll be driving down the 202 and we’ll see high rises here. It’s sad but inevitable,” says Wayne Scott, one of Jodi’s brothers. 

Located just west of Scottsdale Road, the rustic stables are a sharp contrast to the shiny new marina and look out of place next to the new high rises hovering over 10-year-old Tempe Town Lake. Construction of the freeway took two of the ranch’s northern 7 acres in the 1980s, and Tempe Town Lake cut away the south side in the 1990s. A jogging path now runs along the largest corral.

Bill Scott, the family’s patriarch and a legendary horseman, died last year. Grainy photos from the ’70s depict him standing next to a herd of horses grazing on the Salt River bank with Mill Avenue Bridge in the distance. Scott’s stables have provided horses for every Scottsdale Parada del Sol since the early 1970s and once gave horseback rides to NFL players during the 1996 Super Bowl XXX at Sun Devil Stadium. Before the lake was built, Scott or one of his seven children would drive horse-drawn buckboards, stagecoaches or hay wagons across the now submerged Pima Street to ASU fraternity and sorority row to take students to cookouts.

“It is very hard to even consider selling the property,” says Scott’s widow, Vonona Scott. “It’s so much more than just a piece of land. It was and still is our home and business where our kids were all raised and holds so many memories.”