The West's Best: "F" is for Four Seasons

by Ken Van Vechten

Location. Accommodations. Spa. Amenities. Golf. Aesthetic. Food. Feel. Service.

Find a place that does each of them well and that’s a place we want to visit. And the little computer in our heads and hearts comes to the conclusion that the Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale at Troon North is one of that select group that hits on each attribute.

For players, the Four Seasons experience just might begin and end at Troon North Golf Club (but don’t let it). Its Monument and Pinnacle courses are two reasons why hyperbole can be an accepted form of communication in the golf and travel business, so roll out all the est-ending words.

Designed by Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish, Monument rightfully belongs in the pantheon of America’s best tracks: Whistling Straits, Spanish Bay, Pasatiempo, the Bandon courses, just to name some of its upper-echelon company.

Weiskopf went solo with Pinnacle, and the result was no less spectacular.

On the surface, the two courses might look like twins: strips of perfect green airbrushed into a rumpled, rolling desert of springtime wildflowers and cactus; fairways discretely framed by the type of homes that make the cover of glossy lifestyle magazines, and, more distantly, those oh-so-Arizona mountains; ambling bunkers; and massive rocks that are a functioning, integral and logical part of the routings. But don’t be deceived. Just as Spyglass Hill and Pebble Beach share the Del Monte Forest but little in the style of play, these Sonoran Desert peas came from different pods.

Choosing a favorite is a bit like choosing loin strip over filet. Pinnacle is less suitable for the mid-handicapper’s game, with its forced carries and better defenses around the greens and more contours within, semi-blind (or blind if on the wrong side of the hole) shots, more radical bunkering and greater elevation changes. The course just grabs you; its best holes, including No. 6, are perfect golf artifice, but not artificial.

Just as Pinnacle isn’t tricked up, Monument isn’t a contrivance spawned by earth-moving equipment. If you put out of your mind the seeming incongruence of turfgrass and irrigation in the desert, you’ll see these courses as being truly organic; they look, feel and play like they belong where they are.

Using winter sports analogies, Monument is bobsled — it hugs the land, banking, turning, falling (and rising) with the terrain. Pinnacle is downhill. No one will say that either isn’t a thrill.

As for The Four Seasons, it indeed offers all the gotta-have attributes. More than 200 rooms and suites are arranged in pueblo-style clusters cast upon a desert teeming in native flora — ocotillo; acacia, mesquite and palo verde trees; barrel, prickly pear, hedgehog and saguaro cactus; cholla — and each has a fireplace and patio or balcony that puts nature or city views seemingly within arm’s-length reach. The rancho-southwestern look carries over into the resort’s other public spaces, including poolside — where there’s a separate play area for the critters — and the restaurants, particularly the signature outlet, Acacia, with its balata-tender bone-in buffalo tenderloin with guajillo sauce, flame-kissed veal chop aside thyme and butternut squash risotto and various other seafood, fish and fowl delicacies.

The spa — no pretentious name, it’s just the spa — and gym are available to all guests. If a treatment is in order, the search should begin and end at the golf specialty massage.

Ultimately what caps a memorable getaway experience is that intangible sensation: the place’s aesthetic, how it makes you feel. And while there’s just no denying that the Four Seasons and Troon North feel just right, we urge a same-trip journey across town to the burg of Fountain Hills, and a very different kind but no less inspiring brand of desert golf outpost called We-Ko-Pa. To some at Fairways + Greens, it’s the best golf product in a very golf-rich region.

And now that Yavapai Nation’s original Cholla course has a younger sibling — the just-opened Ben Crenshaw-Bill Coore Saguaro Course — it’s more of a must-visit than ever.

Designed by Eagle Mountain visionary Scott Miller — who also mapped out the Coeur d’Alene Golf Resort — We-Ko-Pa is a golf course of the desert. The course looks like it belongs where it is. The playa-hugging holes work. The ridgeline-skirting holes work. The canyon-plunging holes work. The Yavapai Nation has a deep environmental ethic, and when they turned Miller loose on their ancestral lands, he had a mandate of sensitivity and a big expanse of desert upon which to allow it fruition, and him expression. Or as he says: “We had the freedom to route the golf course where it should be.”

Just the kind of phrase a Caterpillar dealer doesn’t want to hear … but a player does. FG

Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale at Troon North | 480.515.5700 | www.fourseasons.com/scottsdale

We-Ko-Pa | 480.836.9000 | www.wekopa.com