What is Hidden in the Hills?
The Desert Foothills north of Scottsdale have more working artists per square mile than anywhere else in Arizona, most of them invisible behind gates on dirt roads in Cave Creek, Carefree and the far end of North Scottsdale. For six days every November they open the gates. Hidden in the Hills is a free, self-guided tour of private studios, presented by the Sonoran Arts League since 1997, and the largest and longest-running studio tour in the state.
The 2026 edition, the 30th, runs November 20–22 and 27–29, Friday through Sunday, 10 to 5, with 151 artists at 38 studios. That ratio tells you how it works: a host artist with a real studio invites three or four guests to set up in the garage, the courtyard and the living room, so one stop is a small group show. You drive, park on the shoulder, walk in, and the person who made the thing is standing beside it.
The League dates to 1975, when a handful of Cave Creek painters started hanging shows under the tamarisk trees. The tour began 22 years later as a way to sell members’ work without a gallery taking half, and that remains the deal: every dollar goes to the artist.
How to do it
Get the map first. The official page has a free PDF map and a Google Map, and the League’s gallery in Stagecoach Village on Cave Creek Road stocks the printed directory. Studios are numbered geographically, so plan by number, not by name.
Route a day. Start in Cave Creek at 10, when the studios are fresh and parking is easy. Work east through Carefree and break for lunch at El Pedregal, where the Spotted Donkey does the reliable Southwestern plate. Finish in North Scottsdale, where the studios sit closer to the freeway for the drive home. Eight to ten stops is a full day. If you only have one, take the Friday after Thanksgiving; the second Saturday is the busiest of the six.
Studio etiquette. These are homes. Park where the signs say, not on the desert. Leave the dog at home. Do not open unmarked doors. Ask before photographing work, and never photograph the house. Ask questions; a quiet Friday visit can turn into a half-hour demonstration. If you love something and are not sure, take a card. Most artists sell year-round from the same studio and will hold a piece a week.
Buying. Cards and small jewelry start around $20; framed originals run a few hundred to a few thousand; large bronzes reach five figures. Almost everyone takes cards, but cash smooths a small purchase in a carport. Bring packing material. For the Native American work at some stops, read our buying notes first.
Make a weekend of it. Pair the tour with the rest of November in the Foothills, see our day-trip guide for Cave Creek’s saloons and trails, and end at the Buffalo Chip for the post-tour beer.
Why the Foothills fill with artists
Cave Creek and Carefree were built for this. Cave Creek was a mining and ranching camp that stayed cheap and eccentric through the twentieth century; Carefree was laid out in the late 1950s as a resort town for people with money and taste. Between them the Foothills offered what artists want: land, light, quiet, no HOA calling a kiln a code violation, and a wealthy customer base twenty minutes down the road. By the 1970s enough painters and sculptors lived here to form a league, and by the 1990s enough had proper studios to open them to the public.
The tour’s genius is that it sells the place along with the work. Visitors who came for a landscape painting drive home having seen the landscape from a studio window, and a fair number come back to buy the house next door. The League has never charged admission, which keeps the crowd broad, and it has kept the tour on Thanksgiving weekend, when the winter residents have just arrived and the visiting relatives need somewhere to go.
How it fits the season
Hidden in the Hills opens the Scottsdale art calendar the way the tents close it. Many of the same Foothills artists take studios at the Arizona Fine Art Expo at Jomax or the Celebration of Fine Art near the 101 from January through March, so a November visit to the home studio and a February visit to the tent lets you watch a body of work develop across a winter. The difference is price and pressure: in November you are in the artist’s kitchen with a cup of coffee, and the number on the tag is the number the artist actually gets.