What it’s actually like
Come around the east side of Pinnacle Peak and the desert changes texture. The saguaros are still there, but now they share the ground with granite boulders stacked like abandoned building blocks, some the size of houses, and threaded between them, impossibly green, are fairways. This is Troon: the golf-and-resort country that wraps the peak’s east and north sides and gave its name, eventually, to golf clubs all over the world.
It comes in two parts that locals keep straight. Troon proper is Troon Country Club, the private club that opened in 1986 as Tom Weiskopf’s first design, and Troon Village, the community of custom homes around it in the bowl below Troon Mountain. Troon North, a few minutes north on Dynamite Boulevard, is the public club: two courses, Monument and Pinnacle, that taught the country what desert golf could look like, with the Four Seasons and its adobe casitas tucked against the peak next door. “We live in Troon” and “we played Troon North” are different sentences, and the lexicon entry explains the name.
What it isn’t is Pinnacle Peak. The summit, its park, Pinnacle Peak Road and the ghosts of the cowboy steakhouses are in our Pinnacle Peak guide; they’re five minutes away and you’ll do both in one trip. Troon is the quieter, richer, darker-skied half: no shopping center, no main street, just golf, stars and some very good dinners.
Where to eat and drink
All three of the area’s serious tables are open to the public, which is not true of most golf country.
Dynamite Grille is the Troon North clubhouse restaurant, breakfast through dinner on a patio over the Pinnacle course’s 18th green, with the actual Pinnacle Peak filling the sky behind it. You don’t need a tee time. Order a burger and a beer and watch the last groups putt out.
At the Four Seasons, Talavera is the special-occasion room, Spanish-accented steaks since 2009 with the boulder field lit up outside the glass; it owns the sunset. Proof, An American Canteen is the same resort’s casual side since 2012: smoked meats, pretzel knots and a ten-layer chocolate cake big enough to share with a foursome. Troon residents eat there without checking in.
The one we miss is Mosaic, Deborah Knight’s chef-owned room on Jomax Road, which from 2001 to 2009 was Troon’s neighborhood bar in disguise. For steak with a piano, the original Mastro’s is ten minutes west on Pinnacle Peak Road.
Getting there and parking
Loop 101 to Pima Road, north past DC Ranch to Pinnacle Peak Road, then east and north on Alma School Parkway toward the peak; Dynamite Boulevard runs east-west across the top past Troon North and the Four Seasons. From Old Town, figure thirty to forty minutes; from the Airpark, fifteen to twenty. There’s no transit and ride-shares are thin after dark, so drive.
Parking is free everywhere that’s public. The Four Seasons valets and self-parks, Troon North’s lot serves both the golf and Dynamite Grille, and the busiest lot in the area isn’t Troon’s at all: it’s Pinnacle Peak Park, which queues on winter weekend mornings. Troon Country Club itself is members-only.
For hiking on the east side, the Preserve’s Tom’s Thumb Trailhead on 128th Street is the big one, and George “Doc” Cavalliere Park on Alma School, 34 acres of native stone and native plants opened in 2012, is the gentle one.
When to go
Golf season is high season: January through April, when Troon North’s tee sheet books up well ahead and the Four Seasons charges its top rates; February and March are the peak. The local’s month is October, when the heat breaks, the rates haven’t climbed yet and the light on the boulders goes gold by five.
Summer is the far north’s bargain. The resort discounts hard in July and August, twilight golf gets cheap, and the monsoon storms building over the McDowells are the best free show in Arizona from the Dynamite Grille patio. The skies up here are dark enough for real stargazing any month.
How it got this way
People lived here long before the golfers. Archaeologists examined an Upland Hohokam settlement, the Pinnacle Peak Village site, about two miles east of Pinnacle Peak and Pima roads, first in 1963 and again when Troon Village was being developed in the 1980s, according to the Scottsdale historian Joan Fudala. After them came cattle, a stage road and, for most of the twentieth century, not much else.
The golf began with a borrowed name. In 1973 Tom Weiskopf won the Open Championship at Royal Troon on Scotland’s Ayrshire coast, his only major. When he and architect Jay Morrish took on their first design together, a private club in the boulders below Troon Mountain, he named it for the links that made him. Troon Country Club opened in 1986. It hosted the Ping Pro-Scratch Invitational from 1987 to 1993, the U.S. Mid-Amateur in 1990, the Arizona Open a record eleven times by 2018, the U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur in 2023 and the U.S. Mid-Amateur again in September 2025.
Troon North followed as a public club. Its Monument course, also Weiskopf and Morrish, opened in 1990 and took its name from a giant boulder in the middle of the third fairway that, the story goes, the crew couldn’t move and so played around. Pinnacle followed in the mid-1990s, and Weiskopf himself later renovated both. The Four Seasons arrived in 1999, setting 210 casitas into the boulder field beside the courses.
The name kept travelling. Dana Garmany, who helped build Troon North, set up a payroll company for its developer in 1990 and called it Troon Golf; it grew into one of the largest golf-management companies in the world, headquartered in Scottsdale, which is why “Troon” on a clubhouse sign in another country usually means the company, not the neighborhood. The neighborhood, meanwhile, stayed what it was: the place where Scottsdale learned that luxury could sit in the rocks without paving them. East of 112th Street, the desert beyond Troon falls under the city’s 2000 Dynamite Foothills plan.
Nearby
Next door to the west is Pinnacle Peak, with the park, Mastro’s and the steakhouse ghosts. North past Dynamite are the private clubs of Desert Mountain, whose guide also covers Desert Highlands, the older Nicklaus club just south of the peak; northwest the boulders carry on into Carefree. South down Pima are Silverleaf and DC Ranch, and east, past the end of the pavement, the horse country of the Rio Verde Foothills.