What it’s actually like
Keep driving north past Troon, past the last shopping center, past the point where the saguaros start outnumbering the stop signs, and the road starts to climb. The air gets a few degrees cooler, the houses get further apart and further up the hillsides, and then you hit it: a stone monument, a guardhouse, a smiling attendant, and a sign with the name of a golf club. Then another one. Then another. This is the top of Scottsdale, and it belongs to the clubs.
The biggest of them is Desert Mountain, a private golf community spread across thousands of acres of high desert against the Tonto National Forest, with six Jack Nicklaus Signature courses — Renegade, Cochise, Geronimo, Apache, Chiricahua and Outlaw — and more clubhouses than most towns have libraries. Down the hill on the north side of Pinnacle Peak is Desert Highlands, the older and smaller original, where Nicklaus built one of his first desert courses and where the Skins Game was invented in 1983. Scattered around them are Mirabel, Tom Fazio’s quiet club near the Carefree line; Whisper Rock, the tour pros’ hangout with a course designed by Phil Mickelson; and Terravita and a string of smaller gated communities that feel modest only by comparison.
Here is the honest part: you probably can’t go in. Nearly all of it is gated, the courses don’t sell tee times, and the clubhouse restaurants are for members and their guests. If you have a friend with a membership, this is the invitation to accept. If you don’t, the district is still worth the drive, because the thing the members actually bought — the high Sonoran desert, the boulder piles, the forest horizon and the night sky — is mostly on the outside of the gate.
So you experience it the way locals without a member number do: by car, by trail and by dinner reservation. Drive Cave Creek Road east until the pavement gives out into national forest. Hike the northern McDowell Sonoran Preserve trailheads ten minutes away. Play the public desert courses at Troon North and the Boulders instead, and eat at the resort restaurants just south. The golf without a membership guide covers that half in detail.
Where to eat and drink
There is essentially no public restaurant inside the gates, so the district’s dining room is really the ring of places around it. The closest is Dynamite Grille, the Troon North clubhouse restaurant that anyone can walk into, with a patio over the 18th green of the Pinnacle course and the peak itself behind it. At the Four Seasons, Talavera is the special-occasion room that Desert Highlands and Troon residents have been using for anniversaries since 2009, and Proof, An American Canteen is the casual side of the same resort, smoked meats and giant chocolate cake with no room key required.
West toward Carefree, the Boulders’ dining room Palo Verde looks out over a fairway and a duck pond, and Spotted Donkey Cantina at the resort’s Scottsdale Road entrance is the far north’s default happy hour, a patio full of tequila and people who just came off the course. South on Pinnacle Peak Road, the original Mastro’s Steakhouse is still the power dinner, and the Pinnacle Peak General Store cafe is where the landscapers, the realtors and the retired CEOs all eat chicken-fried steak at 7 a.m.
The ghosts say a lot about who lives up here. Mosaic, Deborah Knight’s chef-owned room on Jomax Road, ran from 2001 to 2009 and was, for Desert Highlands and Troon residents, the neighborhood bar in disguise — they used its happy hour the way other people use a pub. Eddie Merlot’s on Scottsdale Road was where Desert Highlands, Troon and Grayhawk went for the closing dinner and the parents’ visit, until it closed too. Out here, restaurants fight a small population and a long drive, and even the good ones don’t always win.
Getting there and parking
Loop 101 to Pima Road, then north — and keep going. Pima carries you past DC Ranch, Pinnacle Peak Road and Dynamite Boulevard, past the Pima and Dynamite trailhead, and eventually tees into Cave Creek Road; Desert Mountain’s entrance is east of that junction. Desert Highlands is further south, reached off Pinnacle Peak Road and Alma School Parkway. From Old Town, figure forty to fifty minutes; from the Airpark, closer to twenty-five. There’s no transit, ride-shares are thin after dark, and you will want your own car.
Parking inside the clubs is a non-question, because you need to be on a guest list to get past the gate. Outside, everything is free and plentiful. Brown’s Ranch on Alma School Parkway has a big lot, restrooms and water; Granite Mountain out on 136th Street has shade and restrooms but no water; and both fill on winter weekend mornings, so arrive early. Pinnacle Peak Park is the tight one — its small lot queues from November through April.
When to go
The clubs run on the snowbird calendar, and so does the road. January through April is high season: the member-guest tournaments are on, the restaurants at the Four Seasons and the Boulders are booked, and Brown’s Ranch has license plates from Minnesota. March is the sweetest month to drive and hike up here, with wildflowers on the bajadas and the air still cool.
Because this is the highest ground in the city, it runs a few degrees cooler than Old Town, which is a small mercy rather than a summer plan. In July and August the snowbirds are gone, the clubs are quiet, and the monsoon storms stacking up over the Tonto are the best free show in the Valley — watch them from a trailhead lot, not a trail. November is the local’s pick, when the heat is gone and the season hasn’t quite arrived.
How it got this way
For most of the twentieth century this was open cattle range and not much else, reached by dirt roads nobody bothered to pave. The change came in the 1980s, when Scottsdale’s four-year annexation campaign swept the northern desert into the city and developers realized the boulder country near Pinnacle Peak could sell at prices nobody had imagined. Desert Highlands, begun in 1982 by developer Lyle Anderson with a Jack Nicklaus course, was the leading edge. In 1983 it put itself on national television by hosting the first Skins Game — Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Tom Watson playing for cash on every hole — and in one weekend “Scottsdale desert golf” became a brand.
Anderson went bigger next. Desert Mountain opened in the late 1980s with Renegade, then added Cochise and Geronimo in quick succession, and kept building until there were six Nicklaus Signature courses, the last of them, Outlaw, in the 2000s. Cochise became the home of The Tradition, one of the senior tour’s majors, from 1989 through 2001 (the full story), and Nicklaus won it four times on his own layout. Through the 1990s the rest of the map filled in: Troon and Troon North to the south, Estancia behind its gates, and the Troon name itself turning into one of the biggest golf-management companies in the world. Mirabel and Whisper Rock arrived around the turn of the century, and the far north’s identity shifted for good from mesquite smoke to member numbers.
The public didn’t get shut out entirely, and that’s the part worth knowing. Pinnacle Peak reopened as a city park in 2002 after years of fighting, and in the 2010s the McDowell Sonoran Preserve pushed its trailheads north to Brown’s Ranch and Granite Mountain, putting tens of thousands of acres of protected desert within a few minutes of the club gates. The result is a strange, very Scottsdale arrangement: the golf is private, the mountains are public, and the best view in either is free.
Nearby
Directly south is Pinnacle Peak and Troon, with the peak, the Four Seasons and the public golf at Troon North. West is Carefree, with the Boulders and a town center you can actually walk. East, where the pavement and the gates give out, is the horse-property country of the Rio Verde Foothills. And back down Pima, DC Ranch and McDowell Mountain Ranch has Market Street and the closest thing to a neighborhood main street in the north.