What it means
Desert Mountain is the private golf club community at the very top of Scottsdale, past Troon and the last shopping center, where Cave Creek Road starts climbing toward the forest. Inside the gates are about 8,300 acres of boulders, saguaros and homes, seven golf courses, several clubhouses and a membership heavy with winter residents.
Locals use the name precisely and loosely. Precisely, it is the club and the community it governs: “they’re members at Desert Mountain” means a particular club with a particular initiation fee. Loosely, it stands for the whole far-north belt of gated golf, as in “everything up by Desert Mountain,” which can mean anything north of Dynamite Boulevard and east of Carefree.
For the drives, the trailheads and the restaurants open to outsiders, read the Desert Mountain and Desert Highlands guide. This page explains the name.
Where you’ll meet it
Real estate listings for North Scottsdale, golf magazines’ best-private-club lists, member-guest invitations from January to April, and road signs on Cave Creek Road on the way to Carefree and the Tonto National Forest.
Where the word came from
The name is a developer’s, and a plain description of the setting: high desert pushed up against the hills at Scottsdale’s northern edge. Nobody has published a story about how Lyle Anderson chose it, and we found no earlier use of it as a place name on that land.
The land itself was Carefree Ranch, a working cattle ranch in the early 1980s when Anderson, fresh from his first success at Desert Highlands below Pinnacle Peak, went looking for a bigger canvas. He founded Desert Mountain in 1986 with a bet nobody had tried at that scale: a single private club with several Jack Nicklaus courses, sold together with the lots. Renegade opened in 1987 with an unusual two-pin system that let each green play two ways. Cochise, Geronimo, Apache, Chiricahua and Outlaw followed over the next two decades, giving the club six Nicklaus Signature courses, a count it still bills as unique among private clubs.
The course names mostly borrow from Apache leaders and the Chiricahua homeland in southeastern Arizona, Cochise and Geronimo among them. The club’s newest course broke the pattern: it is simply called Seven.
What it is not
Desert Mountain is not Desert Highlands, Anderson’s earlier and smaller community by Pinnacle Peak, opened in 1983, where the first Skins Game was played that year. It is not Troon, the neighboring club area to the southwest, and it is not in the town of Carefree, though the two are neighbors.
The fine print
Ownership is the detail most people get wrong. The original documents always planned for the members to buy out the developer, and in December 2010 they did, paying $73.5 million for assets that included six Nicklaus courses, six clubhouses and the common property, after raising close to $80 million among themselves. Desert Mountain has been a member-owned club since.
The seventh course arrived under member ownership. Seven, an 18-hole par-54 short course of a little over 3,000 yards, opened in 2019, the same spring a renovated Renegade reopened. It was created by members Bill Brownlee and Wendell Pickett rather than by Nicklaus, so “seven Nicklaus courses,” a phrase you will see in listings, is one too many. The club offers a separate Seven membership for people who want the short course and the social life without the full golf commitment.
Tournament golf has come and gone. Cochise hosted the Champions Tour’s season-ending Charles Schwab Cup Championship in 2012, and Nicklaus returned in 2011 to update the courses for the next generation. None of it is open to the public, which is the point: the desert golf most visitors play is elsewhere, and the golf without a membership note says where.