What it is
Carefree does not have a town square so much as a clock. In 1959, when the town was a sales brochure and a few model homes, its founders put up a sundial where the center of downtown was going to be: a 90-foot dial of anodized copper over a steel frame, with a four-foot-wide gnomon climbing 35 feet into the air above a reflecting pool, concrete hour markers four feet across, and a town motto, “Here the Sun Marks Time,” on a plaque. The architect was Joe Wong; the solar engineer was John I. Yellott, who built copper tubing into the gnomon so that it heated water for the office building next door, which was the town’s first. The sundial was billed as the largest in the world. It was not, quite, and Sun City has spent sixty years saying so, but it remains one of the largest anywhere and the only one that is also a town’s reason for existing.
Since November 2011 the dial has stood inside the Carefree Desert Gardens, four acres of Sonoran Desert plants with their names on plates: barrel cactus and agave, a boojum tree, a crested saguaro, palo verdes for shade, and a pavilion stage at one end. The whole thing is free and takes half an hour.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because it is the fastest way to see what the north end of Scottsdale Road was trying to be. Carefree is a 1950s planned town that chose quiet as its product, and the sundial is its monument: optimistic, a little absurd, well made. The garden is a smaller, free cousin of the Desert Botanical Garden, useful if you want the plant names without the ticket, and it sits in the middle of the only walkable restaurant block north of Pinnacle Peak. It is not a destination on its own. It is the right first stop on a day that continues to lunch on Easy Street, the Boulders, Cave Creek or Bartlett Lake.
The practical version
About 38 minutes from Old Town up Scottsdale Road, which becomes Tom Darlington Drive at Carefree Highway. Park free on Easy Street or Ho Hum Road. Go in the morning on a weekday, or on a Friday for the farmers market. Lunch is across the street.
When to go
Carefree’s season is October to April, and the plaza is its stage. The Friday farmers market runs year-round in the gardens, mid-morning in the cool months and early in summer. The fine art and wine festivals take over Easy Street and Ho Hum Road for several weekends in winter and spring; the plaza is at its busiest and best then, and parking retreats to the side streets. December brings holiday lights through the garden. From 2015 to 2019 October meant Ray Villafane’s Enchanted Pumpkin Garden, carved pumpkins among the cactus, and people still ask about it; it has not returned.
Summer is fine at eight in the morning. Carefree sits about a thousand feet higher than Old Town and the plaza has real shade from the palo verdes, but by eleven the copper dial is a frying pan.
What to do
- Read the dial. The shadow gives local solar time, which here runs about 28 minutes behind Mountain Standard. A small pilot dial at the south end, gold-anodized aluminum with ten-minute lines, and an equation-of-time plaque let you do the arithmetic. Most people skip this and wonder why the clock is wrong.
- Walk the garden. The outer loop passes the labeled collection and the boojum, the strange Baja tree that looks like an upside-down carrot. The crested saguaro, a rare growth mutation that fans the top of the cactus into a crown, is the thing to photograph.
- Look up. Black Mountain, the dark cone over the town, fills the view north; the short steep trail up it starts a few minutes away.
- Cross the street. Venues Café is next to the dial, the English Rose Tea Room is on Easy Street, and the Spanish Village block with Keeler’s steakhouse and the Black Mountain Coffee Shop is a two-minute walk down Ho Hum Road.
With kids
The garden paths are stroller-flat, the reflecting pool is a magnet, and the cactus are labeled at a child’s eye level. It is a twenty-minute stop, which is about right. Our desert plants field guide gives you the names before they ask.
The story
Carefree was invented in the mid-1950s by two developers, K.T. Palmer and Tom Darlington, who bought a stretch of boulder-strewn high desert at the top of Scottsdale Road and sold serenity: large lots, dark skies, no industry, and a street plan whose names (Easy Street, Ho Hum Road, Nonchalant Avenue, Tranquil Trail) were written into the plat as a kind of promise. A town like that needed a landmark, and in 1959 it got a sundial. The choice tells you about the moment: John Yellott, the engineer Palmer and Darlington hired, was a solar-energy specialist, and he designed the gnomon as a working solar collector that heated water for the adjacent office building, so the town’s monument was also its first piece of infrastructure. The sunburst ornament that hung from the gnomon rusted and came down after a few decades; a replica went up in March 2021, paid for by a donor who did not want to be named.
For fifty years the dial stood in a mostly empty plaza. The gardens came in 2011, when the town rebuilt the center as a park with a pavilion and a labeled plant collection, and the plaza became the place things happen: the market, the art festivals, the five Octobers of pumpkins, the holiday lights.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale Road runs straight to this plaza; it just changes its name at the town line. The Boulders, the resort that made Carefree a destination in 1985, is five minutes south, and its guests have been walking this plaza for forty years. Carefree incorporated in 1984 partly to stop Scottsdale’s annexations creeping up Scottsdale Road, and the sundial is where that independence is on display. The town has one square, and it is a clock that keeps its own time.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north from anywhere in the city; it crosses Carefree Highway and becomes Tom Darlington Drive. Turn right on Cave Creek Road, then left on Easy Street; the dial is on your left inside the gardens. From the 101, the Pima Road exit and Pima north to Cave Creek Road is the faster route from the Airpark. Allow 38 minutes from Old Town, less from North Scottsdale. Cave Creek is five minutes west on the same road when you want noise.