The courses that made desert golf a style
Before Troon North, desert golf in Scottsdale meant a green course with some cactus at the edges. After it, the phrase meant this: grass only where the ball is supposed to land, untouched desert everywhere else, and holes that bend around granite instead of blasting through it. The rest of the Valley’s desert golf has been arguing with these two courses ever since.
There are two of them at 10320 E Dynamite Blvd, on the north slope of Pinnacle Peak, and both are public:
- Monument opened in 1990, a Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish design: par 72, 7,039 yards from the black tees. It is named for the boulder in the middle of the third fairway, which the builders reportedly tried to move and then decided to play around.
- Pinnacle followed in the mid-1990s: par 71, 7,009 yards, closer to the peak itself, finishing below the clubhouse patio.
The honest advice: this is the round to book if you have only one desert round in you. It is not the hardest course in town and not the most expensive, but it is the one the others are compared to. Then eat at the Dynamite Grille, which is open to everyone, golfer or not.
Don’t mix it up with Troon Country Club, the private club a few miles southwest; our Troon entry untangles the names.
Booking it, and what it costs
Tee times open 60 days ahead, online through the club’s site or by phone at 480-585-7700. Guests at the Four Seasons next door get preferred times, and the new Scottsdale Golf Retreat at Troon North, eight two-story villas with four king rooms each plus twelve casitas on the club campus, opened for stays in October 2026 and advertises booking access up to 360 days ahead for its guests. That is the stay-and-play here, and the only one that puts your bed a walk from the first tee.
The price is the part you cannot look up. Troon North sells tee times on dynamic pricing: the rate rises and falls with the date, the hour and demand, and the club publishes no rate card. In practice, January through April is top-of-market Scottsdale pricing, and May through September falls hard. Two things are fixed: a 5% water surcharge is added at check-in, and range balls are included. The range is only for players with a tee time or a lesson that day; there are no range passes.
Twilight exists, sold as a reduced twilight and nine-hole rate, with a warning printed on the booking page that you are not guaranteed to finish. Take it seriously in December, when the sun sets around 5:20. If you are hunting the best twilight rates at the luxury courses, the trick is the same everywhere: the later the start, the bigger the discount, and the more holes you give up.
Forecaddies came with every Thursday-to-Saturday tee time between 8 and 11 a.m. from January 18 to April 25, 2026, and the club suggests $40 a player and up as the tip. On a target course where the desert eats balls, a forecaddie is worth more than the tip.
The closures. Troon North overseeds one course at a time. In 2026 Pinnacle closed September 20 to October 8 and Monument October 4 to 24, and everything, range included, closed October 4 to 8. Summer aerification closes Pinnacle in late May and June and Monument from mid-June into September. The club posts each year’s dates on its course information page; check it before you build an October trip around a tee time. Expect cart path only for a while after each course reopens.
On the course, expect a shared cart, a GPS screen and a local desert rule: a ball in the desert can be dropped within two club-lengths of the nearest grass, no nearer the hole, for one stroke. That rule will save your round.
The holes to know. On Monument, the 3rd, a 556-yard par 5, doglegs right around the boulder that names the course, and you will spend your second shot deciding which side of it to play. On Pinnacle, the short 16th, 140 yards from the back, is described by Top 100 Golf Courses as a nod to the Postage Stamp at Royal Troon, with water and bunkers in place of the Scottish wind. Pinnacle’s back nine is where the peak fills the windshield.
Afterwards, the Dynamite Grille overlooks Pinnacle’s 18th green and the peak behind it; it serves breakfast, lunch and dinner and takes reservations at 480-585-5300, extension 219. For a bigger dinner, Talavera and Proof at the Four Seasons are five minutes away, and Pinnacle Peak Park is the morning-after hike up the same rock you just played around.
A Scottish name in the boulder fields
The name comes from a links on the Firth of Clyde. In 1973 Tom Weiskopf won the Open Championship at Royal Troon, the only major of a career that everyone agreed should have had more. When he turned to course design with Jay Morrish in the 1980s, their first course together was a private club in the boulders of north Scottsdale, and Weiskopf named it for the place he won: Troon Country Club, opened in 1986.
The second Troon came four years later and was the one that mattered to visitors. Troon North opened its Monument course to the public in 1990, a daily-fee course on the far side of Pinnacle Peak, built for a residential community but sold to anyone with a tee time. The builders found a granite boulder in the landing area of the third hole; the story told about it is that they tried to remove it, failed or gave up, and routed the fairway around it. It became the course’s name and its photograph.
The same year, Dana Garmany founded Troon Golf in Scottsdale, at first as a payroll company for Troon North’s developer and its Japanese partners. It grew into the largest golf management company in the world, which is why “Troon” on a course sign in Dubai or Florida usually means the company, not this valley. Troon still manages Troon North, along with Kierland, the Boulders, Eagle Mountain and the Phoenician in this guide.
Pinnacle followed in the mid-1990s, five years after Monument. Sources differ on whether Morrish shared the credit for it; the club’s own scorecards say only that the original designs were by Weiskopf and by Weiskopf with Morrish. In 1999 the Four Seasons opened beside the courses, and Troon North became what the national golf magazines had been calling it for a decade: a destination, not just a neighborhood club.
Weiskopf kept coming back. His later redesign reworked both layouts, and today’s scorecards carry the line “redesigned by Tom Weiskopf.” He died in Montana on August 20, 2022, at 79, with more than 40 courses to his name; Troon North is the one most people mean when they say it.
What the courses gave Scottsdale is harder to measure than rankings, though Golfweek’s 2026 list of the best courses you can play in Arizona still puts Monument 10th and Pinnacle 11th. They fixed the image of the place: a ribbon of green through granite and saguaro under a desert peak. Every brochure for a north Scottsdale resort since has used some version of that photograph. Book the real one.