Vail began as a railroad siding and water stop, on the last stretch of flat ground before the tracks followed the old wagon road into the bed of Cienega Creek. This map of Vail prints the Shrine of Santa Rita in the Desert, Cienega High School, Old Vail Middle School, Ocotillo Ridge Elementary School, the Vail School District and the Cienega Creek Natural Preserve, from New Tucson out to Mountain View, with Pantano Wash giving shape to the land.
Vail is a community in Pima County, 24 miles southeast of Tucson.
KNOWOL made this map in 2026 and gave modern data the look of a vintage atlas. The shaded relief of the landscape comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the streets were drawn from Census Bureau files. The Shrine of Santa Rita in the Desert was confirmed against the National Park Service and the National Register of Historic Places. The 2020 census counted 13,604 people in Vail’s 18.2 square miles, up from 2,484 in 2000.
The Vail brothers and the railroad
Vail takes its name from the pioneer ranchers Edward and Walter Vail, who set up ranches in the area in the late 1800s. Edward owned the Vail Ranch and deeded the Southern Pacific Railroad a right of way across it. His brother Walter owned the nearby Empire Ranch, which Walter and his English partner Herbert Hislop bought in 1876 along with 612 head of cattle. In its heyday the Empire was one of the largest ranches in Arizona, covering more than 180 square miles of range between the Santa Rita, Rincon, Whetstone and Huachuca mountains, and Walter Vail became an important figure in building southern Arizona’s cattle industry. The Empire is still a working cattle ranch, now owned by the Bureau of Land Management, and it was placed on the National Register in 1976. Vail itself has stayed unincorporated; votes to make it a town failed in 2013 and 2023.
The area is known for Colossal Cave and for the Rincon Mountain District of Saguaro National Park nearby. Colossal Cave, about 22 miles southeast of Tucson, holds about 3.9 miles of mapped passages that stay near 70 degrees all year, and the Hohokam, Sobaipuri and Apache people used it from 900 to 1450 AD. Its old names were Mountain Springs Cave and Five-Mile Cave. After a survey in 1917, the explorer Lynn Hodgson reported that “the cave was colossal” and later claimed that’s where the name came from, though another account credits Byron Cummings of the University of Arizona. In 2025 cave guides found about 0.4 miles of passages and rooms that hadn’t been documented before. Today the cave is part of Pima County’s Colossal Cave Mountain Park, with a ranch museum and a museum of the Civilian Conservation Corps’s work in the park.
Click to explore a larger preview. The digital watermark does not appear on printed maps.
Names on this map
These names are printed on this map.
Streets and roads: E Garigans Gulch, E Rincon Ranch Rd, E Fire Dancer Rd, E Rocket Rd, E Old Vail Rd, S Lemon, E Crysman Ln, S Pistol Hill Rd, S Cmo Loma Alta, Rough Rd, E Dawn Rd, Windy Way.
More street names, A to Z
Charolais Rd, Darlene Dr, E Alternative Way, E Andrada Rd, E Blair Pl, E Broadview Dr, E Col Cave Rd, E Farino Pl, E Inspiration Dr, E Mescalero Dr, E Rincon View Dr, E Rough Rd, E Sahuarita Rd, E Shasta Ln, E Wetstones Rd, Frontage Rd, Hndrada Rd, Larkin Dr, Mescalero Dr, N Hilton Dr, N Kirkview Dr, Old Sonoita Hwy, Ranch Rd, S Camin Loma Alta, S Lava Peak Ave, S Old Sonoita Hwy, Tomasita Dr.
Schools and stargazers
The Vail Unified School District dates to 1903 and now serves more than 14,000 students from preschool through twelfth grade, in Vail and parts of Tucson. For most of its history it had no high school of its own; Cienega High School opened in the fall of 2001 with about 400 freshmen and sophomores as the district’s first comprehensive high school, and it’s now the largest high school in Vail. Old Vail Middle School and Ocotillo Ridge Elementary School are among the district’s schools as well. Nick Gonzales played baseball at Cienega, hitting .399, before leading the nation with a .432 batting average at New Mexico State; the Pittsburgh Pirates took him with the seventh pick of the 2020 draft. Vail is also home to the astronomer David H. Levy, who has found or helped find 23 comets, including Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1993, whose crash into Jupiter in 1994 was the first planetary-scale impact ever observed in the Solar System.
Around the map
Cienega Creek, whose Spanish name has been put into English as “Hundred Springs Creek” or “Marsh Creek,” runs about 50 miles northwest from the Canelo Hills and is one of the most intact streamside corridors left in Arizona. After it crosses Interstate 10 near Vail it flows over a bedrock high where the water rises to the surface, and just north of Vail it becomes Pantano Wash, which runs on through Tucson to the Rillito River. Its cottonwood and willow forests and mesquite bosque shelter rare birds such as the Southwestern willow flycatcher, the yellow-billed cuckoo and Bell’s vireo. The Cienega Creek Natural Preserve, New Tucson and Mountain View have their places on the sheet as well.
This Vail map makes a good addition to an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of the area. It’s made for anyone who calls Vail home, along Cienega Creek and Pantano Wash, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the community as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Vail map.
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