The pros’ club
Scottsdale has bigger private clubs and older ones, but Whisper Rock is the one tour players talk about. It is a small club in the desert of north Scottsdale, behind a guard gate in a residential community, with 36 holes and a membership of around 300, about 20 of them golf professionals by published accounts. Phil Mickelson is one of them, which makes sense: he designed half the golf.
The Lower Course, opened in 2001, was Mickelson’s first design, done with the Dallas architect Gary Stephenson. The Upper Course, opened in 2005, is Tom Fazio’s, and climbs up and through a hill of granite boulders; one reviewer’s line, that it was billed as “the Pine Valley of the Southwest,” has followed it around since.
What distinguishes Whisper Rock is how little it says. The club’s public website is a login page. There is no stay-and-play, no public event and no real estate tour that we could find that includes the golf. The only way on is an invitation from a member.
How the courses play
What is published comes from course reviewers rather than the club. Both courses, by Top 100 Golf Courses’ account, are generous once you are past the forced carries from many of the tees: wide fairways that keep the lost-ball count down in the scrub. The difficulty is at the greens. On the Lower, many green sites are deep and narrow, with waste areas and bunkers close by, so scoring depends on a short game good enough to impress the designer. The Upper, about 7,118 yards, demands accurate approaches over desert and cactus to its greens, and the reviewers’ advice is that a greenside bunker beats the Arizona scrub. We have not found published pars or full scorecards for either course, so we have left them out.
Nearby, for the rest of us
The public version of this golf is a few minutes north, at the Boulders in Carefree, where two courses thread the same kind of granite and anyone with a credit card can book a tee time. The golf without a membership note covers the others.
What the record says
Whisper Rock was developed by Gregg Tryhus, who, by Top 100 Golf Courses’ account, paired Mickelson with Stephenson to turn a boulder-strewn piece of the Sonoran Desert into a course, and the two went through 43 routings before settling on one. The club dates its own opening to 2000 and its Lower Course to 2001; Fazio’s Upper followed in 2005. Since then both courses have appeared in national and state rankings, and the club has kept its invitation-only membership near 300.
That is about all the public record holds. The club publishes no history page, no fees, no member list and no tournament schedule, and the reporting on it is mostly reviewers’ notes and pros’ anecdotes. We have kept to what could be checked. Where it sits on the map, in the far-north band of private golf that our Desert Mountain district guide describes, says the rest: this is the part of Scottsdale where the best golf is the golf you will probably never play.