The Corner of Hunt Highway and Gary Road Is About to Open All at Once

If you drive Hunt Highway near Gary Road, you already know the rhythm. Chain-link fencing. Dirt lots graded and re-graded. A Home Depot sign standing alone against a backdrop of steel framing that never seems to finish. That has been the view since WinCo Foods bought the 41-acre parcel back in 2023.

It is about to change, and not gradually. Over a five-week stretch this August and September, four national retailers are opening on the same corner. That is not how commercial buildout usually works in San Tan Valley. Most corners fill in one store at a time, spaced months apart, so the change barely registers. This one is landing all at once, which means the difference between "under construction" and "open for business" is going to feel sudden if you have not been tracking it closely.

What's actually opening, and when

Skyline Ranch Marketplace sits at the northeast corner of Hunt Highway and Gary Road, on a site now owned by Scottsdale-based Pennant Development and the investment firm REALM. The site already carries an anchor lineup of Home Depot, Panda Express, Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers, and WinCo Foods, which opened as the grocery anchor in 2025. What is new is the second wave, and the timeline is tighter than anything the corridor has seen before.

Marshalls and HomeGoods share an opening date, August 27, which is also why HomeGoods has been running a multi-week hiring event out of the Four Points by Sheraton near Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport. Ulta follows within the same month. EOS Fitness closes out the run in September. Four storefronts, five weeks, one intersection.

The reason for the compression is not coincidence. Pennant Development and REALM acquired the site with leases already signed for Ulta Beauty, Marshalls, HomeGoods, PetSmart, and Five Below, and junior anchor tenants were slated to open across multiple construction phases through 2026, with the full project targeted for completion in 2027. When a developer builds several buildings in the same phase, the tenants tend to open in the same window because the parking lots, utilities, and fire access all get signed off together. That is the mechanical reason this corner is about to flip from a construction site to a finished shopping center almost overnight instead of over another two years.

The one still running late

Not everything is hitting its mark. Cold Beers & Cheeseburgers, the Arizona burger chain redeveloping the shuttered Denny's on the northeast corner, was originally expected to open in late 2025 or early 2026. As of this month, the town's own development tracker still lists it simply as "opening 2026," which means the timeline has slipped by at least half a year. If you have been checking that building hoping for a specific date, there isn't one yet. Chick-fil-A, also part of the Skyline Ranch Marketplace lineup, is not expected until summer 2027, so the drive-thru line everyone anticipates is still a year out.

Saturday nights already have a name

While the retail corner has been under wraps, San Tan Valley's food truck scene never waited around. San Tan FEASTival has been running out of the Walmart lot at 1725 W. Hunt Highway on Saturday evenings, typically from 5:30 to 9:00 p.m., with 15 to 25 food trucks, live music, and activities for kids. Admission is free. It is not tied to any single retail opening or developer's construction schedule, which is part of why it has become the more reliable weekend fixture while the shopping center next door has been in flux. A late-June date confirmed through the Queen Creek Chamber put the same address and same hours on the calendar, so the format has held steady even as everything around it has been under construction.

If your Saturday plans have defaulted to driving toward Queen Creek or Gilbert for something to do, FEASTival is worth checking against your own calendar before you commit to the drive.

When the heat actually breaks, the park comes back to life

The other half of the calendar shift has nothing to do with retail. San Tan Mountain Regional Park runs its own rhythm, tied to temperature rather than construction phases, and August is when its programming starts waking back up.

A few specifics worth knowing if you have not been out there recently:

• The Goldmine Fitness Hike runs on the Goldmine Trail, rated difficult, with 541 feet of elevation gain over the route. It starts at 7:00 a.m. to beat the heat.
• A separate loop strings together the San Tan Trail, the Stargazer Trail, and the Moonlight Trail in a roughly 2.5-mile combination, described as mostly flat but rocky and uneven in spots, with hillier, sandier sections on Moonlight.
• Full Moon Hikes and Full Moon Walks run on a registration basis, capped at 25 to 30 participants, through the park's Nature Center.
• Night programs, including scorpion walks with UV blacklights looking for bark, striped-tail, and giant hairy scorpions, run through the same Nature Center booking line.

Registration for most of these goes through the Nature Center at (602) 506-2930, extension 7. Worth noting: outdoor programs can be canceled on short notice during extreme heat, and the Maricopa County Parks website is the most reliable place to confirm a program is still on before you drive out.

Why the timing matters more than the openings themselves

Here is the part that is easy to miss if you only look at each piece in isolation. The retail corner spent the hottest months of the year, June through early August, sitting mostly finished but still closed, which is exactly when nobody wants to be outside anyway. Now the openings are landing in the same late-August-into-September window when the park's morning hike schedule typically ramps back up and evening temperatures start making a Saturday FEASTival trip more comfortable than it was in July.

That is not a marketing coincidence. It is just how Arizona commercial buildout and outdoor recreation both track the same seasonal clock, and this year they happen to be hitting their reset points within a few weeks of each other. If you have spent the summer sticking to the same handful of errands and staying inside after 10 a.m., late August and September are when San Tan Valley's actual options, not just the ones that were open despite the heat, come back into view all at once.

Keep an eye on Hunt Highway over the next several weeks. The fencing that has been part of the drive for three years is finally coming down for good.

Curious what else is changing around San Tan Valley, or wondering how a fast-developing corridor like this one affects a specific street or subdivision? The Gillette Group tracks these shifts across Queen Creek and the East Valley every week. Reach out any time you want a local read on what's actually happening, not just what's on the sign out front.