Walk the Arizona Canal Path near 24th Street around dusk this week and you will still catch the last of them: thousands of Mexican free-tailed and canyon bats streaming out of the flood-control tunnel that parallels the canal, headed out for one more night of insect hunting before the desert cools further. By October they will be gone, back to Mexico for the winter, according to the Arizona Game and Fish Department. The bats arrive every April to raise their young in that tunnel and clear out by fall, and for years that migration has quietly marked the turn of the season here more precisely than any thermometer reading.
What has changed is not the bats. It is what residents can now do with the rest of that walk once the bats have left it to them.
What Actually Leaves the Canal Each Fall
The bat colony near the 24th and 40th Street tunnel openings has been part of this stretch of the Arizona Canal for as long as anyone has been walking it seriously, and their departure each October has always been the unofficial signal that the canal belongs to people again. The path itself runs close to 39 miles from east of Scottsdale through Phoenix and into Peoria, but the mile or so that cuts through the Biltmore has spent much of the last two decades as scenery you drove past rather than a route you walked to somewhere.
That is the part of the fall story that took longer to arrive than the weather.
The Corridor Didn't Used to Connect
For most of the Biltmore's history, Camelback Road did what busy arterial roads do: it split the neighborhood into a north side and a south side that residents crossed at their own risk. The fix took until 2009, when a pedestrian underpass connecting 24th and 26th Streets finally opened, a project the Biltmore Area Partnership says cost roughly $14 million and was made possible in part by about $6.6 million in federal and city funding the partnership helped secure. An additional $500,000 in state shared revenue funded the surrounding midblock work: wider bike and pedestrian refuge islands, ADA-compliant ramps, countdown signals, and shade canopies along Camelback between 24th and 26th.
The tunnel solved the crossing. It did not, on its own, connect anyone to the canal.
Canalscape Finished What the Tunnel Started
That second piece arrived far more recently. The Western Canalscape Phase 1 project, a partnership between Salt River Project and the City of Phoenix running roughly from 4th Avenue to 24th Street, wrapped in 2024 and brought a continuous concrete path, lighting, landscaping, shade, public art, and pedestrian bridges to that stretch of canal bank. The 24th Street sidewalk improvements between Missouri Avenue and the canal were built to complement it, tying the tunnel's north-south crossing directly into the canal's east-west path. Phase 2 is still underway, extending the same treatment east toward 48th Street.
Put those two projects together and the timeline gets interesting. Phoenix residents could cross Camelback safely on foot starting in 2009. They could not walk a genuinely finished, lit, shaded canal path away from that crossing until 2024. This is the first fall since that second piece landed that the full loop, tunnel to towpath, works as one continuous route instead of two separate errands.
Salt River Project's own recreation team frames the canals as more than a utility corridor. As SRP principal analyst James Duncan has put it, "the canals were always part of the social fabric of the area," a description that fits the Biltmore better now than it has in years, given how recently the physical connections caught up to that idea.
A Calendar That Runs on Its Own Clock
None of this would matter much if the neighborhood didn't already have somewhere to walk toward. It does, and the fall calendar around the canal and Camelback corridor runs on a rhythm that has little to do with the broader Phoenix events circuit.
Arizona Biltmore's Spire Bar is running Oktoberfest through October 4, with Bavarian-style food specials, seasonal beer pours, and Saturday activations featuring Arizona breweries, a short walk from the canal's south bank. Biltmore Fashion Park hosts Midweek Miles with the Phoenix Run Club every Wednesday at 6:30 p.m., a free weekly community run open to all levels that starts and ends at the shopping center rather than out on a trailhead. Blanco Cocina + Cantina's Arizona Restaurant Week menu at Biltmore Fashion Park runs through today, September 27, offering a fixed two-person menu for $55.
Layered underneath the retail calendar is a slower, more civic one. The Biltmore Area Partnership, which has run monthly programming since 1994, held its August happy hour at the Wrigley Mansion and its September luncheon on the 22nd at Adobe Bar & Grille inside the Arizona Biltmore Golf Club ballroom, with recent speakers drawn from the Greater Phoenix Economic Council and Visit Phoenix. None of these events are new to the neighborhood. What is new is that a resident can now string several of them together, mansion to golf club to canal to run club, on a single connected route instead of four separate car trips.
The Golf Course Was Always the Point
The Arizona Biltmore Golf Club's two courses sit against the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, and cooler fall mornings are when tee times start filling back in after a summer of early starts and heat-shortened rounds. The Wrigley Mansion, built as the private estate of the chewing gum magnate before it became the Biltmore Area Partnership's own recurring event venue, sits close enough to the canal path that a fall evening can move from a golf club luncheon to a canal walk to a mansion happy hour without needing to move the car at all.
That kind of proximity has technically existed for a century. It has only been walkable, end to end, since the tunnel and the canal path both cleared their respective finish lines.
What This Fall Actually Marks
The bats leaving the canal tunnel each October have always told Biltmore residents that the hardest part of summer is over. What they could not tell you, because it had nothing to do with weather, is that the neighborhood spent fifteen years closing the physical gaps between its own landmarks: a 2009 tunnel under one of the city's busiest roads, a 2024 canal path finished in the other direction, and a second phase of that same canal work still reaching east toward 48th Street. This fall is the first one where all three pieces are in place at once, which means the walk from Wrigley Mansion to the golf club to the canal to Biltmore Fashion Park is no longer four separate outings stitched together by habit. It is one route, finally built to be walked.
If you already call the Biltmore home and you have noticed the corridor filling back in this fall, whether it's a Wednesday run at Fashion Park, a Saturday stein at Spire Bar, or a slower walk along the newly finished canal bank, that noticing is the whole point of this piece. Merritt Estates works this neighborhood closely enough to track these changes as they happen, and we're always glad to talk through what else has shifted in the corridor you live in, whether or not real estate is anywhere on your mind.
