What it is
We-Ko-Pa Golf Club is 36 holes of public golf on the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, two miles up the Beeline Highway from the end of Shea Boulevard and about 35 minutes from Old Town. There are two courses. Cholla, opened in 2001, is Scott Miller’s: a desert target course set down in the natural washes, with elevated tees, forced carries and the drama that Scottsdale courses of the 1990s made the regional style. Saguaro, opened in 2006, is Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw’s: wide, low, walkable, routed through hundreds of saguaros with each green a few steps from the next tee, a front nine that circles clockwise and a back nine that circles the other way.
What the two share is the thing no course in Scottsdale can offer. There is nothing on either of them. No houses along the fairways, no road crossings, no clubhouse condominiums, no sight of anything built except the clubhouse itself; the Nation owns the land and does not sell lots. The views are Four Peaks, Red Mountain, the McDowells and the Superstitions, and the silence at seven in the morning is complete.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because the best courses in Scottsdale are private and the best public ones have a cul-de-sac behind every green. Saguaro has been Golfweek’s top-ranked course you can play in Arizona for most of the last decade; Cholla is usually in the state’s top ten. Our golf without a membership note works through the Scottsdale options, and the honest conclusion is that the best round of a golf trip here is 35 minutes outside the city.
The practical version
Shea east through Fountain Hills, north on the Beeline, left at WeKoPa Way. Book online, weeks ahead for a winter weekend. The clubhouse grille does a real lunch on a patio over the course. We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort across the road has the stay-and-play packages; ADERO on the ridge above Fountain Hills is the quieter bed ten minutes back.
When to go
November through April is the season, with the rates and the tee sheet to prove it; mornings in January can start near freezing out here and be perfect by ten. May and October are the shoulder, when the rates drop and the weather is still civil before nine. Summer is the bargain and the test: rates fall by more than half, the first tee time of the day is the only sane one, and fall overseeding closes each course for a stretch, so check before you book. Our summer resort playbook has the dawn-golf rules.
How to play it
- Saguaro first, walking. The course was built for it. Take the first time of the day, carry or push, and give yourself the hour of quiet before the carts behind you catch up. Pay attention to the green-to-tee walks; they are the design.
- Cholla second, in a cart. It is the opposite argument: the land was moved to make the holes, the tees sit above the washes, the carries are real. It is louder golf and some people prefer it.
- The practice ground. The club has a full range and short-game area and a teaching staff; arrive 45 minutes early and use them.
- Lunch on the patio. The We-Ko-Pa Grille’s patio faces the course and the mountains, and it is the best meal on the property including the casino’s steakhouse, if the criterion is where you are sitting.
With non-golfers
The casino resort across the road has a pool, a spa and the smoke-free floor; Fountain Hills and its fountain are ten minutes back down the Beeline; the Nation’s outfitter runs horseback rides on the Verde. A five-hour round is a long time to leave someone at a casino, so plan the morning for them.
The neighborhood
There isn’t one, which is the point. The club and the resort sit alone between the Beeline and the Verde River, with Fountain Hills as the nearest town; our Fountain Hills guide covers it.
The story
The Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation came out of the 1990s with a casino, a settled gaming compact and about 24,000 acres along the Verde River that it had fought a federal dam to keep. Rather than lease the land to a developer, which is how most Valley golf gets built, the Nation built its own course and kept the land around it empty. Scott Miller, who had worked for Jack Nicklaus’s design firm, routed Cholla through the washes in 2000 and 2001, moving half a million cubic yards of earth to do it; the course opened to immediate national notice and the hotel followed in 2005.
For the second course the Nation hired Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, whose reputation was built on the opposite method: find the holes in the ground and disturb as little as possible. Saguaro, opened in 2006, is their desert statement. It is wide where Cholla is narrow, low where Cholla is elevated, and designed to be walked at a time when every course in Scottsdale assumed a cart. Golfweek put it at the top of its Arizona public list in 2016 and left it there for years; Golf Magazine and others followed. The club now calls itself the number one public facility in the state, and no one in Scottsdale argues very hard.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale is the self-declared golf capital of the Southwest, and its best courses are behind gates. The city’s public and resort courses, from the TPC to the Boulders and Troon North, are fine golf with houses on them. We-Ko-Pa’s existence is a quiet rebuke to the development model that built Scottsdale golf: the courses here are better because nobody was allowed to build next to them. A good portion of the players on a winter morning drove over from Scottsdale resorts, and the club’s rates assume it.
Getting there
Shea Boulevard east from the Loop 101, over the McDowell saddle, through Fountain Hills to its end at the Beeline Highway (SR 87). Turn north; after about two miles the club entrance is on the left at WeKoPa Way, the casino resort on the right. From North Scottsdale take Dynamite Boulevard east, which becomes Rio Verde Drive and meets the Beeline farther north; turn south. Allow 35 minutes from Old Town, 25 from the Shea corridor, 40 from the Camelback resorts, and add fifteen on a Saturday morning when the Four Peaks traffic is on the Beeline.