Most evenings, the paved stretch behind Anthem Hills Park fills with the same crowd: a woman with two leashed dogs, a dad pushing a jogging stroller, a couple who clearly do this loop every night because they never stop to check their phones for directions. The trail is wide, smooth, and gently graded, and for the first three-quarters of a mile it feels exactly like what it looks like from the parking lot on Reunion Drive: a neighborhood path with a nice view.
Then the pavement ends and the trail underneath your feet changes completely, dropping into loose dirt and broken rock with almost no transition. What most people don't realize, because most people never walk past that point, is that Anthem East Trail and the Black Mountain summit route it eventually connects toward are really two different experiences wearing the same name. One is a park amenity. The other is one of the harder day hikes in the Las Vegas Valley. Knowing which one you're on, and which trailhead actually gets you where you want to go, is the kind of thing that only becomes obvious after you've driven to the wrong parking lot at least once.
The Paved Half-Mile Everyone in Anthem Highlands Knows
Anthem Hills Park itself is 53 acres, run by the City of Henderson, and it does a lot more than serve as a trailhead. The park holds lighted basketball courts, a roller hockey rink, lighted ball fields, playgrounds, covered picnic areas, and a large transition-style skate park that draws bowl riders and skaters from well outside the neighborhood. The skate park runs daily from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., long enough that it's not unusual to see kids skating under the lights while the sun goes down over the McCullough Range behind them.
The trail portion, Anthem East Trail, starts at the park and stays paved for about 0.75 mile. That paved section is where almost all of the daily foot traffic happens. It's flat enough for a jogging stroller, wide enough to pass another group without stepping into the desert scrub, and it faces west, which means the last twenty minutes before sunset turn the whole path gold. This is the version of the trail that most Anthem Highlands residents actually use, and it's genuinely well suited to that job.
Where the Pavement Runs Out
Past that 0.75 mile mark, the surface turns to loose dirt and rock, and the character of the trail shifts fast. Trail reports consistently describe this section as far more demanding than the paved lead-in suggests, with posted signage warning that conditions ahead are difficult. The trail continues for miles toward the McCullough Hills and eventually toward neighborhoods off Shadow Canyon Drive, several miles to the south in Sun City Anthem, gaining and losing elevation along exposed desert terrain with wide views of the valley.
This is the segment trail runners and serious dog walkers use, but it is not, on its own, the route to the top of Black Mountain. That's the detail that trips people up. Anthem East Trail is a long connector, roughly seven miles from end to end, and the summit trail most hikers actually climb branches off closer to the other end of it, well south of where Anthem Highlands residents start their walk.
Two Doors Into the Same Mountain
If the goal is a park walk, Anthem Hills Park is the better door. If the goal is the summit, the Shadow Canyon Trailhead in Sun City Anthem is the one hikers actually use, and the two trailheads are different enough in practice that it's worth knowing which is which before you drive over.
| Anthem Hills Park (Reunion Drive) | Shadow Canyon Trailhead (Sun City Anthem) | |
|---|---|---|
| Neighborhood | Anthem Highlands | Sun City Anthem |
| Parking | Designated lot, restrooms on site | As few as five or six spaces by some counts, closer to eight by others, plus overflow on the street |
| Paved lead-in | About 0.75 mile | Similar distance before the surface changes |
| What you reach | The long dirt corridor of Anthem East Trail toward McCullough Hills | Black Mountain Trail #404, climbing to the summit |
The Shadow Canyon lot is small enough that hikers who arrive after sunrise on a weekend often end up parked along the street instead, and there are no restrooms at that trailhead at all, which is one more reason locals plan around it rather than getting caught out.
The Actual Route to the Summit
From Shadow Canyon, the paved lead-in runs a similar distance before reaching a water detention basin and a small cinder block structure. The marked Black Mountain Trail, officially trail #404, picks up just past that structure, and that's where the climbing starts. The first stretch is moderate and runnable, with switchbacks that keep gaining elevation gradually. The hardest part comes later, in the final 0.7 mile before the top, where grades run between 25 and 30 percent and the trail requires actual rock scrambling over loose, eroded volcanic terrain. Black Mountain is an extinct volcano, and the rock near the summit shows it.
The full round trip runs about 7.1 to 7.5 miles depending on the exact route taken, with roughly 2,000 feet of elevation gain, topping out at 5,030 feet, the highest point in the North McCullough Range. From up there the views stretch across the Las Vegas Valley and toward several surrounding mountain ranges. Trail data consistently points to September through May as the better window for this hike, since the exposed rock and total lack of shade make the summer months rough even for experienced hikers who start early.
None of this is accessible in any meaningful way from the Anthem Hills Park side. A resident who lives in Anthem Highlands and wants that summit is better off driving the short distance to Sun City Anthem and starting from Shadow Canyon rather than assuming the trail behind their own park will eventually get them there.
Why This Split Actually Matters
The practical version of all this is simple. If your plan for the evening is a walk with the dog, a sunset picnic, or twenty minutes on the skate park bench watching your kid land a trick, Anthem Hills Park delivers exactly that, and it's a five minute walk from a lot of driveways in the neighborhood. If your plan is to actually stand on top of Black Mountain, budget the short drive to Shadow Canyon, get there early enough to claim one of the handful of parking spots, bring more water than feels necessary, and treat the last stretch below the summit as a real scramble rather than a strenuous walk.
Confusing the two trails, or assuming one leads to the other, is an easy mistake to make from a map. It's a much less easy mistake to make once you've felt the ground change under your feet at that 0.75 mile mark, on either side of the mountain.
The Reward Lap
For the people who do the paved loop most evenings, the Anthem Highlands Shopping Center on Bicentennial Parkway, anchored by Albertsons and CVS Pharmacy, covers most of what you'd want afterward. New Day Cafe handles breakfast and lunch with the kind of menu that rewards an early morning hike, and the Starbucks in the same center opens early enough for a coffee before a sunrise attempt on Black Mountain. For anyone finishing later in the day, Rounders is open 24 hours if the timing works out that way.
None of this requires leaving the neighborhood, which is part of what makes the paved half of Anthem East Trail such a fixture of daily life here rather than a novelty. The mountain half is a different trip entirely, and worth treating that way.
If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in Anthem Highlands, from the trail system out your back door to the rest of the neighborhood, Tracy Drown has spent 23 years working this stretch of Henderson and is glad to walk you through it, no hiking boots required. Reach out to schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
