Giant Arrow Points to Phoenix
This page is an original summary written for the Phoenix Air Marker website from an archived copy of the Arizona Oddities article by Sam Lowe, originally published March 4, 2012. It is not a reprint of the original article.
In the 1950s, Phoenix Boy Scouts cleared brush and arranged rocks on the southern slope of a peak in Mesa’s Usery Mountains to spell “PHOENIX.” They painted the rocks white and placed a large white arrow in front of the letters, pointing toward the city’s airport nearly thirty miles away.
Sam Lowe wrote that the Valley was then mostly desert with a few small towns, and that Phoenix’s only airport could be hard to spot from the air. The scouts’ hillside marker was meant to help pilots find it.
Modern navigation tools later made that role unnecessary. As Lowe put it, “due to better guidance systems and high-tech instruments, the sign no longer serves its original purpose.” It remains visible from the air and from the ground along U.S. 60 and the Loop 202.