With points hacking fully in the mainstream, loopholes close as soon as they’re discovered. I am loathed to think that I’m outsmarting the good people at Hilton, and I’m scared to share specifics because I’ve got a really good thing going, but with the right combination of credit cards, there is a points hacking instance where the Hilton Honors advantage shifts to the player.
We utilize this advantage to spend a week(ish) at a world-class hotel once or twice a year. In October 2023, our daughter, Isla, was born, and 2024 was declared a one-trip year. The plan was The Grand Wailea, a Waldorf Astoria property in Maui. Travel logistics were pretty straightforward from our home in Denver – there’s a direct flight to Maui. It’s seven hours and twenty minutes long.
Gathering points and certificates for a week-long stay was a months-long process and the closest I’ve ever come to executing a bank heist. I felt even more like Danny Ocean when I presented this trip to my wife. She was excited (though not so excited that she compared herself to Tess Ocean), but then, and only then, did we start to consider the length of the flight. Seven+ hours on a flight with a newborn and a two-year-old did not seem like the best way to start our vacation. I want to reiterate that I still executed something like a bank heist. I am still Danny Ocean. I just didn’t make a plan to get out of the vault.
I quickly and quietly booked us at the Waldorf Astoria Monarch Beach. This property also looked spectacular; the flight was five hours shorter, and our rental car could be picked up at the airport (no shuttle). I think the points redemption for our room was similar, but if The Grand Wailea was a bank heist, Orange County felt like a lesser crime. Maybe vandalism or menacing.
You’re working WAY in advance when you book five-star Hilton properties with points. With this trip, I was working close to a full year in advance. Once I had everything booked, I forgot about it for many, many months. Shortly before we left (inside the 48-hour cancellation window), my wife told me it was raining in Southern California. I checked and confirmed – torrential rains. Flooding. Rain was forecasted for the entire week.
This led to a frantic search for a new location where short flights met warm weather at Hilton properties with large rooms. The Boulders Resort in North Scottsdale checked all of our boxes. A slew of reservations were canceled and remade. Working one day in advance, there were some places where we had to settle. Our seats were in the plane’s last row, our hotel room had two double beds, and we used Sixt to rent a car, an agency we’d used before and sworn off forever.
Last-row plane seats don’t recline, but their location, combined with our preferred boarding status, gave me PLENTY of time to install our two-year-old’s car seat. I would book those seats again. We said never again to Sixt after a bad car rental experience at LAX. After some reflection, I think any car rental experience at LAX is miserable. Unfortunately, the same can be said for Phoenix.
There was a long line at Sixt, but even pre-Covid, I can remember exactly one time when I didn’t have to wait in a long line to rent a car: Des Moines, Iowa, 2:00 AM. Right to the counter, upgraded, right to the car. The upgraded rental car lightning round was awesome. So awesome that I left my prescription sunglasses somewhere near the Des Moines Thrifty. I never recovered them.
What I’m getting at is that maybe there’s no such thing as a good experience renting a car. On the plus side, the line for the Sixt in Phoenix was shorter than most of the lines at other agencies in the rental car center. On the minus side, as lines go, this one was still pretty long. After MANY tantrums from Brooks, we got our car, and it was SICK. An X5 with a nice trim package and 340 miles.
We drove this car to The Boulders in North Scottsdale. This resort is as north as you can get in Scottsdale, right on the border of Carefree. As far as I could tell, The Boulders is named for the area’s abundant pilings of MASSIVE rocks. Even when I say massive, I may be underselling these things. The stacks seem too large to be man-made (I don’t know how you would lift stones of that size) but too precariously balanced to be natural.
With the caveat that I love the desert, The Boulders is nestled within one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen. The rocks are piled within a spectacular stretch of the Sonoran Desert, the cacti are stunning.
The resort is built around two golf courses, aptly, if not creatively, named The Boulders. The courses are differentiated directionally – The North Course is members only, the South Course is open for public play.
An unnamed source gave me some other figures for Scottsdale clubs. The initiation at The Boulders is $250,000??! We were there in late February, the high season for Scottsdale golf. Public greens fees were $318. Initiation at Scottsdale National is $1M. Silverleaf, where you’re capped at eight monthly rounds, is $500K.
The South Course featured gentle land movement, straightforward greens, and ABSURD aesthetics. This is not a walking course (big stretches from tee to green). Based on the surroundings of the holes I could explore (4-7), it was obvious that the goal in construction was 18 spectacular individual holes, rather than a focus on a cohesive or even a contiguous golf course.
I asked a friend if it was worth its price point, and he said absolutely. His exact words were, “Target golf but not gimmicky, my favorite course in Arizona.” Jay Morrish designed both courses (so presumably, the target part is true). There is some fortuitous overlap between the nature path and cart path on the holes that weave through the resort. I took a good, hard look at these four holes, they impressed me enough to bite the bullet on the $318 tee time. (If you’re using this review to plan golf in Scottsdale, take heed, this friend who recommended The Boulders can HIT a target.)
The tee time was with a friend from middle and high school. This friend’s HORRIBLE WITCH of a foster mother introduced me to golf when I was in 7th grade. So this outing was more about sentimentality than course design. When the friend canceled, I decided not to play. With respect to my guy Jay Morrish, even in a spectacular setting, $400ish (tee time + club rental) is a hefty sum for target golf with three strangers.
The blow of canceling golf at The Boulders was lessened by my upcoming tee time at Desert Forest. When it comes to golf courses, I make it a point to stay informed, but I hadn’t heard of Desert Forest until Instagram targeted me with an article about it. Anytime I encounter an unknown course on any platform, I dig in.
In this instance, the article told me everything I needed to know. Links course, great walking layout, and the long-time home club of Tom Weiskopf. Weiskopf served as a design consultant, restoring the course to its former glory after a botched renovation. He also talked them out of overseeding, so the grass is dormant during their off-season (the summer).
I had never wanted to play a course so badly in my life. I tried my best to articulate this want in the one line of text Thousand Greens allows you when you request play, and I guess I did an okay job, because the request was picked up immediately.
I was slated to play Desert Forest on the last day of our vacation. Sometime before that, my wife got even more of a course preview of The Boulders during a cart ride to the spa. Citing the otherworldly aesthetics, she asked if I wouldn’t rather just play at the resort. That question gave me pause because 10 years ago, or even five years ago, using a cart to shuttle between 18 disparate golf holes spread amongst spectacular rock formations would have taken precedence over evaluating an uber-private walking layout.
In these last five years, I have become very interested in golf course architecture, where an unfortunate reality is that better doesn’t always mean more fun. The best example I can think of is Landmand, where the absurd scale of the course allows for nearly limitless tee-to-green recovery opportunities. Compare this to Ballyneal, where the stark combination of solitude and minimalism creates a unique and exceptional golf experience.
Is Ballyneal fun? Sure. Scraping and clawing for bogeys on baked-out fescue in the middle of fucking nowhere instills a ton of respect for the course and the architect. However, it is not the same kind of fun as Landmand. When it comes to pure fun, watching your ball careen off huge natural features en route to a green with an imprint of 10,000,000,000 square feet is a different ball game.
I chose to play Desert Forest. This course is in Carefree, just north (across the road) of The Boulders. The surrounding neighborhood was a bit older, and the houses were a bit more ramshackle than those in surrounding North Scottsdale. The entrance to the club was extremely modest, not just for North Scottsdale and not just for a club of Desert Forest’s caliber, but for any golf course. For any business, anywhere, really. My host would later tell me he hosts guests who have driven by the club hundreds of times without noticing it.
We can amalgamate the pro shop, dining room, and locker room as well maintained, but nothing to write home about. Outside the pro shop was a large putting green that bled into the first tee. This is the kind of thing your maintenance staff does when they’re not fucking around, and here I knew definitively that I was in for a treat. This is another place where I don’t have to bury you in detail, but turf conditions were MINT. My host told me this is a mandate from the 250 (wow!) members. The course is maintained to tournament conditions at all times.
The holes at Desert Forest were fantastic. I’ve been going over them in my head since the end of the round, and I’ve watched flyovers. It’s SO tempting to go hole-by-hole, but again, I’m going to spare you, except to say that the course features the best AND most fun collection of par 5’s I’ve ever experienced.
Outside of that, breaking Desert Forest into 18 separate parts does the course a disservice. The routing is a masterwork of interconnectivity. Desert Forest is the best course that I’ve ever played.
Before I played Desert Forest, the number one course on my all courses played list was nearby Estancia. Estancia had occupied that spot since 2006. Obviously, I still love desert golf, but the way that I evaluate golf courses has changed over the last two decades. When I played Estancia, I looked at individual holes instead of all of the culmination of those holes as the sum of all parts. I did not give any thought to the course as a walking layout.
Not everyone shares my golf course preferences, and my ranking of Desert Forest over Estancia casts me deep into a minority (GCA Darkweb, baby!). Within the framework of better vs. more fun, and evaluating an entire course instead of 18 individual holes, it must be said that beyond being cohesive and having a flawless walking layout, Desert Forest was REALLY fun. The ambiance is unreal (no houses), the holes flow together, AND one more time here, this is the best collection of golf holes that I’ve ever played.
Based on the historical and architectural chops of the place, I came to Desert Forest expecting to feel reverential about a test of golf that was kicking the shit out of me. Instead, I had an absolute blast. The course does two-ball pairings on Thursday mornings (FUN!). I don’t know the tee time intervals, but it felt like my host and I had the place to ourselves. In hindsight, I probably wasn’t the best guest – I spent three hours ambling around the course, grinning like a stunned, happy idiot.
Some other things have changed since I first played Estancia in 2006. We were traveling with our almost three-year-old, Brooks, and our four-month-old, Isla. Baby Isla was too little to get comfortable in the pack-and-play, Brooksy was too big. Brooks LOVES water, and he ALMOST knows how to swim. The combination of confidence and ineptitude does not make for a stress-free pool experience, swimming with him demands my full attention.
Sleep came at a premium on our trip. Pool time (maybe 65 hours over 7 days of pool time) had my adrenaline SURGING. On or off vacation, I have precious little time to myself or with my wife. Could my lack of sleep or the scarcity of alone time have clouded my perception?
Sure.
However, when I rehash my remembrance of Estancia and rate it against my experience at Desert Forest, I truly believe I am rendering a correct and objective review. For me, eighteen disparate holes will never rank higher than a golf course that flows, perfectly, into one flawlessly routed organism. A walking layout is always better than a riding layout.
I’ll even compare DF to the control, an afternoon spent prying my attention away from my beautiful wife and daughter to make sure that my son doesn’t drown. Considering the better vs. more fun rating framework once more, Desert Forest falls short of Brooksie Splish Splash. But it comes close, which is the highest compliment I can pay the course.
Straight Gross 