Why he matters
Every gated golf community in north Scottsdale — and there are dozens — descends from one experiment at the foot of Pinnacle Peak. In 1983 a Seattle engineer named Lyle Anderson opened Desert Highlands: 850 acres of boulders and saguaros, a course by Jack Nicklaus that was the first he had ever built in the desert, a gate, and a club you joined by buying a lot. That Thanksgiving the first Skins Game was played on it for a national audience, and the lots sold. Three years later Anderson bought the 8,000-acre Carefree Ranch and started Desert Mountain. The two communities set the pattern for the 1980s annexations and the northern city that filled them.
Where to find his mark today
Desert Highlands. Wrapped around the base of Pinnacle Peak, visible in full from the park’s summit trail.
Desert Mountain. The far north of the city, seven Nicklaus courses and its own neighborhood guide.
Sierra Reserve. His 2013 return, off Dynamite Road near 118th Street.
Seeing it for yourself
The communities are private, but the geography is not. The Pinnacle Peak Park trail climbs above Desert Highlands’ fairways and shows the invention whole: golf laid into desert rather than over it, the saguaros transplanted rather than bulldozed, the houses tucked below the ridgelines. The Pinnacle Peak and Troon guide covers the corridor that grew around it, and the 1983 year page puts the first Skins Game beside the year’s other news. For the northern annexations his projects helped drive, read August 1, 1984.
The full story
Anderson’s origin story, which he told often, is a flood. His father leased a nine-hole golf course near Seattle; when Lyle was six a river took it, and the family with it. He came out of the University of Washington with an electrical-engineering degree, worked as a telephone-company management trainee, sold lots part time for a Seattle golf development, put together land partnerships, and in 1975, at 32, moved to Scottsdale to buy desert. The city was annexing toward the McDowells and the land at Pinnacle Peak was cheap, beautiful and, by the conventions of the time, unbuildable for golf.
Desert Highlands was the argument that it wasn’t. Anderson hired Jack Nicklaus, who had never designed in the desert and told him, “If you let me do this, it will be the finest golf course in the Southwest.” The course threaded fairways between the boulders and transplanted the saguaros in its way, a program that became the industry standard; Gary Panks added the country’s first 18-hole putting course. The financial invention mattered more. Desert Highlands was the first private community in which the club was bundled with the real estate — buy a lot, join the club — so that the golf course sold the houses and the houses paid for the golf course. Mark Kizziar of the PGA of America put it simply: “Lyle revolutionized desert golf with Desert Highlands.” The concept has been copied more than two thousand times.
It needed an advertisement, and it got the best one in the sport. When the venue for a new made-for-television event fell through, Nicklaus suggested his new course, and the day after Thanksgiving 1983 he, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson and Gary Player played the first Skins Game at Desert Highlands for $170,000, Vin Scully calling it for NBC. Player won, $150,000 of it on one putt at the 17th. Producer Don Ohlmeyer remembered that the community had sold a few houses when the crew arrived and was nearly sold out when they came back in 1984.
Desert Mountain was the same idea at ten times the scale: the Carefree Ranch, more than 8,000 acres of the northernmost desert the city had just annexed, bought in 1986, master-planned by Frank Lloyd Wright’s successor firm, and built out over three decades with seven Nicklaus courses, from Renegade in 1987 to No. 7 in 2019, and more than 2,000 homes. The Tradition, a senior major, played there from 1989 to 2001. Anderson took the model to Santa Fe, Scotland, Gold Canyon and Hawaii, and the 2008 crash took most of those back: the Bank of Scotland installed its own directors at Las Campanas, Superstition Mountain and Hokuli’a in January 2008 and seized Loch Lomond that October; Hokuli’a’s owner filed for bankruptcy in 2013 with more than half a billion dollars of debt. “My companies,” he said, “have weathered a number of real estate cycles and have always emerged in a stronger position.” Desert Highlands and Desert Mountain, separately owned, never wobbled, and in 2013 he broke ground on Sierra Reserve, 250 lots and a small hotel off Dynamite Road — his smallest project, and a return to the city whose north he had drawn. The resort metropolis era is the one he shaped.