Where Scottsdale desert golf started
Before Troon North, before the Boulders, before anyone sold “Scottsdale desert golf” to the rest of the country, there was Desert Highlands, on the north side of Pinnacle Peak. In 1983 the developer Lyle Anderson opened a gated community here around Jack Nicklaus’s first desert course, and sold the club and the house as one purchase. Every private golf community in the north of the city, Desert Mountain included, is a copy of that idea.
It needed an advertisement, and it got the best one golf had. That Thanksgiving weekend, NBC broadcast the first Skins Game from Desert Highlands: Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson and Gary Player playing for cash on every hole. Player won $170,000, most of it on one four-foot putt. The game came back in 1984, and by then, the club says, there was nothing left to sell.
A few years later the club added something nobody in America had: an 18-hole putting course, par 41, by Gary Panks. And in November 2025 the course itself reopened after a nearly $10 million restoration by Nicklaus Design.
The plain answer to the question everyone asks: you cannot book it. Membership comes with a home, 563 families share the club, and the only way onto the first tee is with one of them. You can, however, see all of it from the top of Pinnacle Peak, for free.
How it plays
The course is par 72, laid out with restraint: turf only where the golf needs it, the Sonoran desert running right up to the fairways and greens, and an elevated first tee that sets the tone. There is no water. The holes people remember are the three par 4s with split fairways, at 6, 8 and 13, where you choose a line and a risk, and the unusual finish: back-to-back par 3s at 15 and 16, then two par 5s to close.
The 2025 restoration, led by Nicklaus Design’s Chad Goetz, rebuilt all 18 greens, each about 500 to 600 square feet bigger than before; recreated the 8th green complex, rotated and resloped to open the view; added tees on the 10th and a new back tee on the 18th; and removed the ridge on 13 that had blocked the alternate fairway, which makes that carry slightly longer. Overgrown desert that had closed off sight lines was cut back.
The putting course and the club
The putting course is the curiosity: 18 holes and more than 60,000 square feet of green, par 41, designed by Gary Panks in the mid-1980s, the first professionally designed 18-hole putting course in the United States by the club’s account. It was being rebuilt in late 2025, with new drainage and irrigation and TifEagle Bermuda sod laid that October.
Around the golf is a full club: the Ventana dining room for sunsets, Jack’s, a gastropub, and Jack’s Backyard, an outdoor room with fire pits and bocce; The Rocks, the halfway house with soft-serve; a racquet club with thirteen tennis courts and pickleball; and more than five miles of walking trails. Guests pull up to complimentary valet, get a day locker and are asked not to tip anyone.
Seeing it without a member
Take the Summit Trail at Pinnacle Peak Park: the club wraps the base of the peak, and the trail looks straight down on it. Then eat where the neighbors eat when they leave the gate: Talavera or Proof at the Four Seasons, Dynamite Grille at Troon North, the original Mastro’s on Pinnacle Peak Road, or breakfast at the Pinnacle Peak General Store.
The course that taught the desert to golfers
In the early 1980s, building golf in the Sonoran desert meant bulldozing it and planting grass wall to wall. Desert Highlands did not, partly by choice and partly by rule. Geoff Cornish and Ron Whitten, in The Architects of Golf, credit it with “the blending of golf into the hostile terrain of an arid desert” and describe the conditions: virtually every desert plant disturbed in construction had to be transplanted, and the irrigated acreage was capped. Nicklaus, who had never built in the desert, and his senior designer Bob Cupp produced a course of turf islands in native desert, the template for what the site now calls desert golf. Golf Digest ranked it 25th among America’s 100 Greatest Courses four years after it opened.
Anderson’s other invention was financial. Desert Highlands was a community where buying the lot bought the membership, so the golf course sold the houses and the houses paid for the course. That arrangement still holds: owners are members and members are owners.
The Skins Game
The first Skins Game, created by television producer Don Ohlmeyer, needed a course. By the club’s telling, Nicklaus agreed to play only if it was held at Desert Highlands, a desert layout untested for championship golf, and Ohlmeyer flew out to see it and said yes. On Thanksgiving weekend 1983, with Vin Scully calling it for NBC, Nicklaus, Palmer, Watson and Player played for money on every hole, with ties carrying over. Palmer holed a 40-foot birdie putt on 12 for $100,000. Player won the day, $170,000 in all, $150,000 of it from a four-foot birdie putt on 17 that he was said to be shaking over; Ohlmeyer later said he was hyperventilating so badly he could not take the club back on 18. The event returned in 1984, when Nicklaus won $240,000, and then moved on, but it ran on Thanksgiving weekend for the next two decades and more.
The record since
The USGA brought the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur here in 1991, when Sarah LeBrun Ingram won the first of her three titles, 6 and 5 over Martha Lang. Nicklaus came back in December 2011 to walk the course with about 200 members and Anderson, and said that “Desert Highlands and Desert Mountain are an important part of my legacy in golf course design.” The 2025 restoration, with a separate $2.5 million modernization of the golf shop and women’s locker room, is the latest round of that legacy; Platinum Clubs of America ranked the club 11th among the top 50 golf clubs in the country that year.
Nearby
Desert Highlands sits between the Pinnacle Peak and Troon corridor and the far-north club country of the Desert Mountain district. The public desert golf it inspired is a few minutes away; our golf without a membership note says where.