What is Concours in the Hills?
Imagine a thousand collector cars parked on grass in a ring around a lake, and every hour on the hour a column of water climbs three hundred feet out of the middle of it. That is Concours in the Hills, one Saturday each February at Fountain Park in Fountain Hills, the McCulloch-built town over the ridge from north Scottsdale.
It is free to spectators and it is the Valley’s biggest single-day car show. The 2026 edition, on February 14, put about 1,000 cars on the lawns, drew more than 50,000 people, and raised a record $467,000 for Phoenix Children’s, pushing lifetime giving past $3 million. The field is sorted into neighborhoods: exotics and limited-edition supercars near the fountain, then European, Asian and American classics, muscle, hot rods, race cars, off-road rigs, motorcycles, a row of military vehicles, and helicopters, civilian and military, that land on the turf Saturday morning and sit with their doors open all day. A hundred-plus dealer tents and three food areas fill the gaps.
The organizer since 2022 is the Phoenix Children’s Foundation, whose auxiliary runs the day; the founder, Peter Volny, is a childhood cancer survivor who started the show in 2014. The next show is Saturday, February 20, 2027, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. From Old Town it is about thirty minutes out Shea Boulevard, and it is the best free thing to do with a car-minded visitor in February short of the Phoenix Open.
How to do it right
Arrive early. The show opens at 10 but owners begin rolling onto the grass at 7 and 8 from two entrances, and by 9:30 the lawn is three-quarters full while the crowd is still light. The exotics section fills the lakeside lawn first and is impassable by noon.
Parking. Fountain Park has no lot to speak of. The organizers point you to the surrounding streets and neighborhoods and list the public library at 12901 N La Montana Drive as overflow; they ask you to stay out of business lots along Saguaro and the Avenue of the Fountains. Come from Scottsdale on Shea Boulevard east, over the ridge, left on Saguaro Boulevard; expect a slow last mile after 10:30. Leaving is the harder part: Shea is the only road home for most of the crowd, so go at 2:30 or stay for a late lunch on the Avenue until 4.
The fountain. It runs fifteen minutes at the top of every hour unless it is windy. Be at the lake’s edge for 11 or 1 with the cars behind you; that is the photograph. Our Fountain Park guide has the engineering.
What to bring. February in the park is 50s at 9 and 70s by 1, so a layer you can tie around your waist, sunscreen, a hat and cash for the donation buckets and the food rows. The lawns are flat and stroller-friendly; the grass is damp early.
Showing a car. Anyone can register, which is the point. Fees in 2026 ran $75 to $95 by registration date and closed January 16; cars enter at 7 or 8 and cannot leave until 3. Judging is friendly and the classes are broad.
Make it a day. The Avenue of the Fountains is a two-minute walk for lunch. Arizona Car Week ended three weeks earlier; this is the local coda.
From one man’s idea to a hospital’s biggest car show
Peter Volny had run an advertising and public-relations agency in Toronto, retired to Fountain Hills, and came back from Monterey Car Week with the idea that his own town had a better lawn than Pebble Beach and no show on it. He registered the name, persuaded the town to lend him Fountain Park, and in February 2014 staged the first Concours in the Hills with a couple hundred cars. The first three years raised about $90,000 for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Scottsdale.
The show grew faster than one retiree could manage. In 2017, the fourth edition, about 630 cars, was the first put on by Scuderia Southwest, the Scottsdale exotic-car club behind the Scottsdale Motorsports Gathering, with Volny on its board. That year added off-road, military and motorcycle classes, the mix that makes the show feel like a county fair for engines. By 2018 the beneficiary was Phoenix Children’s Hospital, a choice rooted in Volny’s own childhood cancer, and attendance passed 20,000.
The numbering tells the pandemic story: the seventh show ran in February 2020, the eighth in February 2022, and we did not find the organizer’s announcement for the missing year. The 2022 return was the breakout: more than 1,100 vehicles, an estimated 50,000 spectators, over $430,000 raised. That year Volny handed the event to the Phoenix Children’s Foundation, whose auxiliary group now runs it, and the show has been a hospital fundraiser first and a car show second ever since. Weather is the one thing it has not solved. Rain moved the 2024 show from a Saturday to a Sunday and pushed the 2025 edition from February to April 19, where it still drew about 40,000 and raised $437,657. The 2026 show, back on Valentine’s Day, set the money record at $467,000.
Why a Scottsdale guide covers a Fountain Hills show
Because the cars and most of the crowd come from Scottsdale. The exotics on the lakeside lawn are the same ones that park at Market Street on the first Saturday of the month, the dealer tents are the Scottsdale Road stores, and the owners drove over the ridge on Shea the way they drive to Bartlett Lake. Fountain Hills supplies what Scottsdale cannot: a town park with 35 acres of flat turf, a lake, a 1970 fountain built as a sales pitch, and a town council willing to hand all of it to a charity for a day.
It is also the honest end of the Valley’s car calendar. The January auctions are about money changing hands; this is a thousand owners who are not selling, a hospital that needs the gate, and a crowd that pays nothing to walk among them. Go early, stand by the lake at eleven, and put a twenty in the bucket.