What it’s actually like
Turn off Pima Road at Market Street and follow Thompson Peak Parkway toward the McDowells. Before you reach the Gateway Trailhead, a staffed gate on the mountain side leads into a canyon full of terracotta roofs, stacked stone and fairways running uphill into the mountains. That’s Silverleaf, the guard-gated top tier of DC Ranch and, by most measures, the most expensive place to live in Arizona.
It’s a village inside a village. DC Ranch is a collection of residential neighborhoods around a small main street; Silverleaf is the one with its own gate, its own design review, and its own private club. DMB, the master developer, opened it in 2004 with about 700 custom homesites, sold as dirt so owners could bring their own architects, and the result is a canyon of Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial estates that look a century older than they are. At the top, the Upper Canyon lots climb the hillsides; at the bottom, the Silverleaf Club sits on North Silverleaf Drive with a Tom Weiskopf golf course routed up the canyon floor and a 50,000-square-foot clubhouse the club describes as Rural Mediterranean.
The honest part: you can’t go in. The gate is staffed, the streets are private and the club is for members. What you can do is see it the way most of Scottsdale does, from the public land above it and the public village below it. The McDowell Sonoran Preserve wraps the canyon’s back fence, and the Gateway Trailhead is its next-door neighbor. The lexicon entry explains what the word means in real-estate talk; this guide is the place.
Where to eat and drink
There are no public restaurants behind the gate, so Silverleaf’s dining room is Market Street at DC Ranch, the stone-and-stucco village center at Pima Road and Thompson Peak Parkway that opened in 2003. Fleming’s is the anniversary steakhouse and has been since the street’s early years. The Living Room on the south corner is the wine-wall lounge with a wraparound patio and live music most nights, Market Street’s living room in more than name. Down Pima, Pescada is the oyster bar the area went two decades without.
For a big night, the far-north resort rooms are fifteen minutes up Pima: Talavera at the Four Seasons in Troon, and the original Mastro’s on Pinnacle Peak Road.
Getting there and parking
Loop 101 to Pima Road or Bell Road, then east on Thompson Peak Parkway. Market Street’s lots are free and only tight at Friday dinner. The Gateway Trailhead lot, just past the Silverleaf gate, fills by about 7 a.m. on cool-season weekends; on weekdays and afternoons it’s easy.
The best public view of Silverleaf is a hike. The Gateway Loop is the moderate option; the Windgate and Bell Pass loop is the hard one, about 9.5 miles and 2,000 feet of climbing, and the higher you go the more of the canyon you see. Stay on the trail: the Preserve’s boundary with private land is real.
If you’re visiting a resident or a club member, they’ll put your name on the gate list. Showing up without one is not a tour.
When to go
Silverleaf’s calendar is the Preserve’s and the snowbirds’. November through March is when the club is fullest and the trails above it are at their best; March brings the wildflowers to the bajada around Gateway. Summer hikes mean starting at first light in June and earlier in July, and Market Street’s patios close down to the misters. October is when everyone comes back.
How it got this way
The land is DC Ranch’s, and the ranch is older than Scottsdale: the DC brand was registered in 1885, and the Brown family ran cattle on this flank of the McDowells for most of the twentieth century. DMB, the Scottsdale developer that Drew Brown, Mark Sklar and Bennett Dorrance founded in 1984 and named for their initials, turned it into an 8,300-acre master-planned community that celebrated its grand opening in 1997. The lower villages and Market Street came first. The canyons above them were held back for something more exclusive.
That something opened in stages. The Silverleaf Club opened its Weiskopf course in 2002, routed up the canyon floors so the holes climb rather than sprawl, and the clubhouse followed in 2004, the year DMB dates Silverleaf’s opening as “a private gated enclave within DC Ranch” with 700 custom homesites. Weiskopf was by then the far north’s favorite architect: his first design, Troon Country Club, had opened in 1986 a few miles north. Lots sold as land, under a design review that holds the canyon to its Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial palette, and the houses went up through the 2000s and 2010s.
The price records came after. On October 1, 2020, a Silverleaf sale of $24.1 million set the Arizona record, and on October 1, 2021, an Upper Canyon estate on Canyon Cross Way sold for $21.5 million, then the second-priciest home sale in state history, according to KTAR. Behind both is the same arrangement that makes all of DC Ranch work: the canyons back onto the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, the 30,000-plus acres Scottsdale voters taxed themselves to buy, so the view out the back window is guaranteed never to change. The Preserve is public and the enclave is private, and each one props up the other.
Where the name Silverleaf came from, the developer has never said, and we won’t guess.
Nearby
Silverleaf is surrounded by DC Ranch and McDowell Mountain Ranch, with Market Street and the community’s open villages below it. West down Thompson Peak Parkway is Grayhawk, then the Princess, TPC and WestWorld. North up Pima Road are Pinnacle Peak and Troon, and beyond them the private clubs of Desert Mountain, the other name Scottsdale uses when it means money.