The club at the top of DC Ranch
Silverleaf is the word Scottsdale uses for the top of its housing market, and the Silverleaf Club is the reason the word exists. It is the private club of the guard-gated upper tier of DC Ranch, folded into the canyons of the McDowell Mountains at 18701 N Silverleaf Dr, with the McDowell Sonoran Preserve wrapped around its upper edge.
The golf course is Tom Weiskopf’s: a par 72 of 7,322 yards that opened in 2002, routed up the canyon floors so the holes climb rather than sprawl. The club pitches it as a return to the game’s golden age, which is club language for a classical, strategic design without gimmicks. The 50,000-square-foot clubhouse followed in 2004, in a style the club calls Rural Mediterranean, with antique pieces from Spain, France and Italy, a spa inspired by an ancient labyrinth, resort and lap pools, a children’s club and a fountain the club says came from a village in southwestern France.
It is private, and the gate is staffed. Nobody books a tee time here. But Silverleaf is one of the few private clubs in Scottsdale you can look down on, literally, from public land, and the restaurants its members use are outside the gate.
Membership, tours and how a visitor sees it
Two memberships. The club sells Golf and Clubhouse memberships, and both are open to non-residents; you do not need to own in Silverleaf to join. The club does not publish prices. A 2018 real-estate spotlight listed:
- Golf: $150,000 initiation, $1,512 a month
- Clubhouse: $25,000 initiation, $660 a month
Those numbers are eight years old; ask the membership office for current terms.
Tours for prospective members are by appointment on select weekdays and must be scheduled at least a week ahead through the club’s membership ambassador at (480) 515-3214.
Guests play as members’ guests, on the member’s invitation, and pay the club’s guest fees.
For everyone else, there are three good ways to see it:
- From the Preserve. The Gateway Trailhead on Thompson Peak Parkway is the start of the Gateway Loop, which climbs high enough to look down into Silverleaf’s canyons; the longer Bell Pass and Windgate routes go higher still.
- From Market Street. Market Street at DC Ranch, outside the gate on Pima Road, is where the community eats: The Living Room for wine, Market Street Kitchen for lunch, The Peacock for dinner.
- With an agent. Real-estate showings go through the gate; serious buyers get the drive.
For a Weiskopf course you can play, book Troon North or the Stadium Course at TPC Scottsdale.
Built as the top of DC Ranch
DMB broke ground on DC Ranch in 1997, on the old DC cattle range at the foot of the McDowells. Its upper reach, in the canyons, became Silverleaf, which DMB opened in 2004 as a private gated enclave of about 700 custom homesites, two years after the golf course. A 2018 real-estate spotlight counted 753 homes and homesites across eight neighborhoods on more than 2,000 acres, from villas and cottages near the clubhouse to hillside lots of one to ten acres in Upper Canyon. In 2020 a Silverleaf sale set Arizona’s home-price record, which is why the name now stands for a price bracket as much as a place; our lexicon entry has that story.
Weiskopf’s course is the other half of the story. By 2002 he had already left his mark on Scottsdale with Jay Morrish at Troon Country Club, TPC Scottsdale and Troon North; Silverleaf is his later, solo work in the same mountains, a members’ course climbing the canyon floors.
Silverleaf and the Country Club at DC Ranch are often confused. They are separate private clubs a few minutes apart in the same master plan: Silverleaf the newer, gated, Weiskopf club in the canyons; the Country Club the member-owned club lower down, with a Tom Lehman and John Fought course. Our DC Ranch and McDowell Mountain Ranch guide covers the whole district, and golf without a membership the courses anyone can book.