What is Fountain Park?
Drive east on Shea for fifteen minutes, crest the ridge, and there it is: a white column of water standing several hundred feet over the desert, visible from half the east Valley. It is not in Scottsdale. It is arguably the best free thing within twenty minutes of it.
Fountain Park is 64 acres of town park at 12925 N. Saguaro Boulevard in Fountain Hills, built around a 29-acre lake, about 35 acres of turf, and the 1970 fountain that gave the town its name and its entire reason for existing. At full power — all three of its 600-horsepower pumps running — the fountain reaches roughly 560 feet, which made it the tallest fountain in the world when it was switched on. Day to day it runs on two pumps and tops out around 300 feet, pushing some 7,000 gallons a minute through an 18-inch nozzle built in Zürich. It fires for 15 minutes at the top of each hour, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and shuts down when it’s windy.
Around the water there’s an actual park, not just a viewing platform: a flat paved loop of about a mile, an amphitheater, a splash pad, a playground, ramadas, a scatter of public art, and an 18-hole disc golf course threaded across the turf. Ducks, herons, a lot of strollers. The McDowell Mountains stand behind it all, which is why the good photographs are taken from the far shore.
The whole thing began as a sales pitch — the single most successful piece of real-estate marketing in Arizona history. Fifty-plus years later the pitch is the landmark, and the landmark is free.
How to do Fountain Park right
Time it, but leave slack. The fountain runs on the hour, for a quarter hour, between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. What the schedule doesn’t tell you is that wind cancels it — the town will cut a cycle short or skip one entirely rather than soak the neighborhood — so if you’ve driven out from Scottsdale, plan to be there across two hours rather than one. Arrive ten minutes before, walk the loop while you wait.
Walk the far shore. Park near El Lago Boulevard and go clockwise. From the west and north shore you get the water column with the McDowells behind it and nothing man-made in frame; from the closest lot you get the same fountain with a parking lot behind it. Fifteen minutes of walking is the difference between a snapshot and a photograph.
Bring the kids and expect to stay. The splash pad, playground and enormous flat lawn make this a better family park than most of what Scottsdale offers on the east side, and the lake edge is reliably good for ducks, coots and the occasional heron. Combined with one fountain cycle, that’s an easy two hours. Disc golfers should note the course shares the turf with picnickers — play early.
Seasons matter more than you’d think. October through April is perfect and busy; the two big art and craft fairs each year pull serious crowds out of Scottsdale and fill every lot in town. Summer flips it: the lawn is lovely at 7 a.m. and unusable at 2 p.m., and the evening cycles — especially 8 and 9 p.m., lit — are the move from June through September. St. Patrick’s Day is the one calendar date worth the traffic: roughly 55 gallons of green dye go into the lake and the fountain throws a green column over the town.
Pair it properly. The natural full day is McDowell Mountain Regional Park at dawn, Fountain Park at ten — the county gate is fifteen minutes from the lake. ADERO Scottsdale sits on the ridge above town if you want to stay on this side. And if you’d rather keep the lake-and-lawn afternoon inside Scottsdale, Chaparral Park, Eldorado Park and the lakes along the Greenbelt do the same job without the 300-foot exclamation point. Fitting the fountain into a short trip? It’s a reasonable half-day add to our 48 hours in Scottsdale itinerary.
A chainsaw millionaire, Disneyland’s first manager, and a very large nozzle
The fountain exists because two men needed you to remember the name of a town that did not yet exist.
Robert P. McCulloch made his fortune in chainsaws and outboard engines, and he had already demonstrated what he thought of subtlety: at Lake Havasu City, his other Arizona development, he bought the London Bridge, shipped it stone by stone from England and reassembled it in the desert. His partner in the Fountain Hills venture was C.V. Wood — Charles V. Wood Jr., the man who ran the construction and opening of Disneyland and then spent a career master-planning communities. The two of them bought a cattle ranch on the far side of the McDowells in the late 1960s, in country that was then genuinely nowhere, an hour of dirt-road commitment from Phoenix.
Their problem was straightforward: how do you sell lots in empty desert to people who have never heard of the place? Wood’s answer was Disneyland logic applied to real estate. You don’t advertise the product. You build the castle — one object so improbable that people drive out to see it, and while they’re standing there, you sell them a lot.
So in 1970 they built a fountain that could throw water 560 feet into the air, out of a lake they also had to build, through an 18-inch nozzle manufactured in Zürich, driven by three 600-horsepower turbine pumps moving around 7,000 gallons a minute. At full height it took the title of the tallest fountain in the world, and it worked exactly as designed: you could see it from the highway, from Scottsdale, from airplanes. People came out to watch water, and stayed to buy land. The town grew up around a water feature the way a coral reef grows on a sunken ship.
The folklore arrived quickly. In 1979, per local account, someone in a bar bet that the fountain could be dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day — and, in the version everyone tells, that he could waterski around it while it ran. The dye happened. It kept happening. Nearly fifty years on, crews tip roughly 55 gallons of harmless green coloring into the lake every March and the town stages an Irish festival around a green column of water several hundred feet tall, which is exactly the sort of tradition a place founded on a marketing stunt deserves to have.
The community incorporated as a town at the end of the 1980s, which meant the fountain stopped being a developer’s asset and became municipal infrastructure — a line item, with pumps to rebuild and power to pay for. That’s the quiet turn in this story. Fountain Hills could have let it go. Instead the town kept it running on the hour, twelve hours a day, and built a real park around it: the amphitheater, the mile of paved loop, the splash pad and great lawn added in later renovations, the disc golf course, the art. The fountain is now generally counted the fourth-tallest in the world as taller ones have gone up elsewhere, and nobody here seems to mind, because the point was never the record.
Why it matters
Scottsdale spent decades building an identity out of taste — Bennie Gonzales’s white walls, Wright’s desert masonry, the restrained language of the Preserve. Fifteen minutes east, its neighbor built one gigantic water jet and let that be the whole personality. It’s the least subtle landmark in Maricopa County and it’s completely, unembarrassedly free — hourly, all day, with a lawn and a splash pad and a mile of flat path attached. Time a cycle from the far shore with the McDowells behind it and you’ll understand why a sales gimmick from 1970 outlived the sales office.