SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA | Desert Mountain was little more than an outpost in the Sonoran Desert in 1986 when developer Lyle Anderson teamed up with Jack Nicklaus to create a golf community here. Located a mere 10 miles northeast of Phoenix’s city center, the property nonetheless felt as wild and worlds apart as the 2.9 million-acre Tonto National Forest that abuts it. And that caused many in that metropolis to wonder what Anderson was thinking.
To be sure, the setting was special, with rugged mountains, flowering cacti, arroyos that filled with running rainwater when it stormed and sweeping views to greater Phoenix, aka the “Valley of the Sun.” Roadrunners and Gambel’s quail skittered across the sere soil. Mule deer bounded through stands of ironwood and mesquite trees, and every now and then, red-tailed hawks snatched cottontail rabbits from the ground with their talons and then carried them away.
But beauty aside, to say nothing of near-perfect weather for more than half the year, one had to wonder who really would want to live all the way out here.
Thousands, it turned out.
Once homes and golf courses started to be constructed per a master plan conceptualized for Anderson by Taliesin Associated Architects, which had been founded by colleagues of the late Frank Lloyd Wright, folks began flocking to Desert Mountain in droves.
Nearly four decades later, the club that in many ways put Scottsdale on the golf map and ushered in the desert golf movement in the American Southwest occupies 8,300 acres with some 5,000 residents from 49 states and eight foreign countries living in 35 individual “villages.” Amenities include seven golf courses, six of which were designed by Jack Nicklaus; seven clubhouses; 10 restaurants; a 42,000-square-foot spa and fitness center; 25 miles of trails for hiking and biking; and nine tennis courts with three types of playing surfaces as well as bocce and pickleball.
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