There’s a rock in the middle of a green in Scottsdale. But it’s not a loose impediment. Don’t even think of moving it. You couldn’t if you tried. To call it a rock doesn’t really do it justice. It’s a 30,000-pound boulder, and it didn’t get where it is by accident.
Its placement is key to both strategy and aesthetics at The Six Shooter, a new short course at Scottsdale Country Club, which isn’t a country club in the closed-off sense. It’s open to the public. The “People’s Country Club” is how it bills itself.
It’s hard to be a truly populist club if you don’t have a course that anyone can handle. The Six Shooter is meant to be just that. Its 10-hole routing requires some skill if you want to score, but it sets up in a way that lets you bunt it around.
The architect behind it is Forrest Richardson, a Scottsdale native with a penchant for bucking convention. Among his credits is another local short course at Mountain Shadows, a highly regarded design whose 17th-and-a-half hole plays as a par 2. The Six Shooter has a par 2 as well: the 6th, which calls for a 150-foot putt across a richly contoured green. The other nine holes are all par 3s, ranging from 80 to 150 yards, arranged to allow for either 6- or 10-hole loops.
Both configurations include the 4th hole, which is where you come across the boulder. In golf, many greens have hazards around them. Vanishingly few have hazards in them, the par-3 6th at Riviera, with its center-green bunker, being the most famous example.
Richardson could have put a bunker in his green, too. But, aiming to be different, he opted for a boulder, which involved more work. It’s not just any boulder. It’s a blue one, streaked with veins of chrysocolla, a silicate mineral known to intermingle with copper and produce an almost turquoise hue. “Blue Boulder” is also the name of the hole.
Blue boulders can’t be found just anywhere. This one was pulled from a quarry outside Tucson, trucked north to Scottsdale, and set down in the heart of an 8,000-square-foot punchbowl green. It is striking to look at and, unlike a bunker, impossible to play through — an entertaining obstacle on a course designed to offer pint-size fun.
Scottsdale Country Club has a full-size course as well. It dates to 1953 and was the first course ever built in Scottsdale. Richardson played it as a kid, back when the surrounding desert was still undeveloped. He’s been hired to reimagine that course too, a renovation project slated for 2027.
First things first, though: The Six Shooter. It is scheduled to open April 30. That date is set. The boulder on the 4th green is fixed, too.