Golf among the granite
At the north edge of the Valley, past the last of Scottsdale, granite has been weathering into piles for about 12 million years: stacks of rounded boulders the size of houses, balanced in ways that look arranged. In 1985 the Boulders resort opened among them, and architect Jay Morrish threaded the golf through the rocks rather than clearing them. Forty years on, the result is still the most photographed resort golf in Arizona.
There are two courses at the Boulders Club, both by Morrish:
- The South Course, par 71, 6,917 yards, the public course and the famous one. Holes 6, 7 and 8 play from tees set up in the boulders, and you pass the signature Boulder Pile and Rosie’s Rock on the way.
- The North Course, par 72, 6,959 yards, the older of the two, winding through the Boulders community with Black Mountain in view. It is the members’ course.
The honest advice: this is the golf to book when the course is part of the stay, not the other way around. The resort’s casitas are molded around the same rocks you play through, and the walk from the room to dinner on the South Course’s sixth fairway is the whole point.
Booking it, and what it costs
It is semi-private. The club serves members, resort guests and daily-fee players, and it keeps one course for members each day. The club says that from December 17, 2026 the courses again rotate daily: one is the members’ course, the other is the guest course, and the online “Guest Tee Times” link books whichever course is open to guests on your date. If you have your heart set on the South, ask the golf shop (480-488-9028) which course guests get on your days before you book the room.
Tee times for resort guests and the public are booked online, with a 90-day booking window. Members book up to seven days ahead on their course.
The price is dynamic, adjusted by day, time and availability, and the club publishes no rate card; it says plainly that the earlier you book, the better your chance at a good rate. Resort guests get 15% off the booked rate when they check in for the tee time, and Troon Access members get discounts too. Sales tax and a reclaimed-water surcharge are added at check-in. Resort guests already pay the resort’s $40-a-day mandatory charge, which includes club storage.
Twilight. Afternoon rates fall here as they do everywhere, and the resort’s own guide calls the off-season twilight rates one of Arizona golf’s honest bargains. Our tee time and twilight entry has the general pattern.
Overseeding. In 2026 the club overseeded one course at a time: South closed September 14 to October 11 while the North was shared between members and the public, then North closed October 12 to November 1 while the South was shared. Both courses were cart path only from November 1 to 20. Spring 2027 aerification closes the South June 7 to 15 and the North June 21 to 29.
Dress code: men in collared shirts with sleeves and shorts at least mid-thigh; women in collared shirts, or collarless shirts with sleeves; no tank tops, T-shirts, denim or workout clothes anywhere on the course or range; soft spikes.
Caddies and lessons. The club runs a CaddieMaster program with certified caddies. The Boulders Golf Academy is led by Donald Crawley, a Golf Magazine Top 100 teacher, with packages from November 1 to May 15, including an afternoon of two hours’ instruction followed by nine holes on your own.
Stay-and-play. The resort sells golf packages through its special offers, and the Westin Kierland runs a three-night Troon Golf package that includes a round on the North or South. For the room itself, read our Boulders resort guide.
Afterwards, the Grill at the golf club has an exhibition kitchen, a fireplace and a terrace over the fairways, with dinner Thursday through Monday from 5 to 9. Palo Verde, the resort’s signature room, looks onto the South Course’s sixth fairway and a duck pond, and the Spotted Donkey Cantina at the El Pedregal marketplace is the tequila-and-tacos patio across the road.
A resort that let the rocks win
Carefree was already an eccentric idea when the Boulders arrived: a 1950s town laid out by K.T. Palmer and Tom Darlington with streets named Easy Street and Ho Hum Road. In the early 1980s Russ “Rusty” Lyon Jr. of Westcor, the company whose malls defined Phoenix sprawl, spent years walking the boulder fields on the town’s edge, and built a resort designed to bend around them. It opened in 1985, two years before the Princess and three before the Phoenician, on 1,300 acres.
The golf was given to Jay Morrish, who was in the same years designing TPC Scottsdale’s Stadium Course and the Troon courses with Tom Weiskopf. The courses he built at the Boulders are the clearest statement of the Scottsdale idea that a desert course should be fitted into the land: fairways that bend around rock piles, tees perched on them, desert left alone between. The result made the Boulders one of the resorts that sold Arizona golf to the country; it collected Golf Magazine’s Gold Medal resort award repeatedly.
The club has always been a mix. Homes went up along the fairways, a membership formed, and the two courses settled into a pattern that still confuses visitors: one for members, one for everyone else, on a schedule that changes. Under Hilton’s Curio Collection flag the club has spent millions on new greens, bunkers and cart paths, and the South in particular stays on Arizona golfers’ lists of rounds to play once.
What draws people is the same thing the resort’s architects bet on in 1985. Bobcats, javelina, coyotes and roadrunners treat the fairways as their commute, the granite turns orange at sunset, and on the South Course’s back nine you hit from a tee built into a rock pile toward a green tucked under another one. You can play golf like this nowhere else in the Valley.