Golf at the foot of Camelback
The Phoenician’s course is the closest thing Scottsdale has to golf in the city. It sits at the southern base of Camelback Mountain, ten minutes from Old Town, around the most famous resort in town, and it is open to the public.
It is one 18-hole course, par 71, from 4,575 yards on the forward tees to 6,518 from the back. That is short by Scottsdale standards, and the course doesn’t pretend otherwise. Architect Phil Smith reshaped it from the resort’s original 27 holes during the Phoenician’s big renovation, and the club’s own description is the fair one: everything is in front of you, with no surprise bunkers or blind hazards. Fairways run through desert and saguaros, water comes into play, and Camelback or the Valley fills the view on most tees.
The honest advice: if you are staying at the Phoenician, play it, probably twice. If you are not, the big desert courses up north are a better use of one round. This is a resort course in the best sense, pleasant and pretty and over in four hours, and it is at its best on the package that makes extra loops free.
Booking it, and what it costs
Tee times are sold through the resort’s golf page or by phone at the golf shop, 480-423-2450. The course is managed by Troon Golf, which runs the booking. The resort does not publish a rate card; you see the rate for your date and time when you book.
The package is the deal. The Phoenician’s Golf Experience Package bundles a room for two with daily unlimited golf after the first round, as tee times allow. Tee times can be booked 30 days before your stay. Book it with promotional code zJ2 online or at 800-228-9290; blackout dates apply and taxes are extra. With unlimited golf, the obvious play is a morning round and a late-afternoon nine or eighteen, which is the closest a resort comes to a free twilight round.
Overseeding. The course closes once a year to overseed: in 2026 it was closed October 5 to 22. If your trip is in early or mid October, check the date before you count on golf; expect some cart path only days afterward while the rye roots.
Facilities. There is a golf shop, locker rooms and a 19th-hole dining room at the clubhouse, and the resort runs lessons and golf schools.
Afterwards, you are at a resort with serious restaurants: J&G Steakhouse for the view and the steak, Mowry & Cotton by the pool for something looser. The old golf-view dining room, Windows on the Green, closed in 2017; the view it had is still there from the clubhouse.
For a second round nearby, Camelback Golf Club, the JW Marriott Camelback Inn’s 36, is ten minutes north on the other side of Mummy Mountain.
From Keating’s 27 to Smith’s 18
The Phoenician opened in October 1988 as Charles Keating’s monument to himself: about $250 million of Italian marble, crystal and gold leaf on the grounds of two older resorts, the 1926 Jokake Inn and the postwar Paradise Inn. Golf was part of the plan from the start, a resort course spread across the lower slopes of Camelback.
The money ran out almost at once. Keating’s Lincoln Savings & Loan failed in 1989, the costliest savings-and-loan collapse in the country, and the most opulent resort in Arizona spent years in the hands of federal regulators and the investors who followed them. The golf kept running through all of it, by then as 27 holes, a sprawl of nines played in combinations, as resort golf of that era often was.
The modern course dates from the resort’s second life. Host Hotels & Resorts bought the Phoenician in 2015 for about $400 million and spent $118 million from 2016 to 2019 turning Keating’s gilt into desert modern. The golf got the same treatment. Instead of polishing 27 holes, the resort hired Phil Smith to cut them to one cohesive 18, with re-contoured fairways, new water features and rebuilt cart paths, a course with a rhythm rather than a collection of nines. The resort’s own guide puts it bluntly: 27 padded holes became 18 honest ones.
What didn’t change is the setting, which was always the point. Camelback rises behind the clubhouse, the course looks out over the city, and at dusk the Valley’s lights come on below it. Keating overspent on almost everything, but he picked the right hillside.