What it is
Golfland Sunsplash is two parks on one lot off the 60 freeway at Country Club Drive in Mesa. Golfland is the older half, open since 1983: several miniature golf courses of the castle-and-windmill school, kept up far better than the genre usually is, and a large arcade, open daily until around midnight all year. Sunsplash is the water park, opened beside it in 1986 and expanded ever since into the East Valley’s full-scale version: a 450,000-gallon wave pool, an 800-foot lazy river with free tubes, an activity pool, a zero-depth area and toddler pool for small children, and a tower of real slides, among them the Revolution (a seven-story drop into a spinning bowl), the Cauldron (a four-story bowl), the Master Blaster water coaster that pushes you uphill, the Sidewinder half-pipe, the Stormrider and the Double Dare, which starts with a trapdoor. Riptide, a tower slide the park bills as the Valley’s tallest, is the latest addition.
The parent company is a California mini-golf operator that dates to 1953 and runs parks across that state; Mesa and Roseville, near Sacramento, are the two with water parks attached.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale has resort pools and public pools and no water park. The day-pass note and the public pools note cover what the city has, and for a family with a four-year-old they are enough. For a family with a twelve-year-old in June, they are not, and this is the nearest answer: twenty-eight minutes, real slides, a wave pool, and a mini-golf course for the evening. CrackerJax, the Scottsdale fun park that closed in 2023, used to fill the mini-golf half of this role; Golfland is where that evening went.
The practical version
Twenty-eight minutes from Old Town via the 101 and the 60. Separate tickets for the water park and for Golfland. The water park runs mid-May to mid-September, with limited days at the edges; buy online, arrive at opening, leave by mid-afternoon. Golfland is open every day until midnight. Water shoes, sunscreen and a hat; shade is scarce.
When to go
Weekday mornings in late May and June are the best water-park days: the season is open, school is nearly or just out, and the first ninety minutes have no lines. July and August are the peak, crowded on weekends and hot everywhere; go at opening and leave by three, before the afternoon crowd and the monsoon build-up our summer playbook warns about. September is the quiet end of the season, often on weekends only. October is Golfland’s own event month, when the mini golf gets a Halloween dressing. Any evening, any month for mini golf under the lights, when the heat has gone.
What to do, in order
- The Revolution and the Master Blaster, first thing, before the lines.
- The Cauldron, the Sidewinder, the Stormrider and the Double Dare while the park is still filling.
- The wave pool at midday, when the sun is highest and the water is the only shade.
- The lazy river, 800 feet with free tubes, for the recovery.
- The kids’ areas for the small ones throughout; the zero-depth zone is next to the toddler pool.
- Golfland at night: a round of mini golf and the arcade, once the water park has closed.
With kids
Small children have the zero-depth area, the toddler pool and the kids’ slides; the height limits on the big slides start around 48 inches. Shade is the problem, so rent a canopy or bring one, and put water shoes on everyone. Our kids note has Scottsdale’s own water options; this is the summer upgrade. Dinner is Organ Stop Pizza, a few minutes east, which is the East Valley’s version of the traditional pairing.
The story
Golfland began in California in 1953 as a miniature-golf business, and by the 1980s it had grown into a small chain of family parks built around mini golf and arcades. The Mesa park opened in 1983 on Hampton Avenue beside the Superstition Freeway, which was then the growing edge of the East Valley, and in 1986 the company added the thing that made it a destination: Sunsplash, a water park, when water parks were new and the Valley had almost none. Over the next four decades the slides kept coming, each one a story higher or a trick stranger than the last, and the park settled into its role as the East Valley’s summer institution, the place every Mesa, Gilbert and Chandler teenager has a season pass to and every Scottsdale parent eventually drives to.
The company’s other Sunsplash, in Roseville, California, is the sibling, with the same slides under different names. In Mesa the arcade became a destination of its own in the 1990s, when the fighting-game era filled it on weekend nights, and the mini golf has outlasted most of its Valley competitors, including Scottsdale’s own.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale had CrackerJax from 1993 to 2023, a 28-acre fun park on Scottsdale Road with mini golf, go-karts and batting cages, and when it closed the city lost its only version of the family-amusement evening. Golfland is where that went. The water park Scottsdale never built is a longer story, told partly in the public pools note: the city built aquatic centers with slides instead, which are excellent and small. Sunsplash is the full-scale thing, half an hour away.
Getting there
The 101 south to the 60 east, exit Country Club Drive; turn south, then immediately onto Hampton Avenue, and the park is on the right, visible from the freeway. Twenty-eight minutes from Old Town, thirty-five from the Camelback corridor, forty-five from North Scottsdale. Parking is free in the park’s own lots. There is no useful transit; our getting around note has the rideshare math for a family that would rather not drive home wet.