“When are we going to play pickleball again?” Susan, my mixed doubles tennis partner, asked the week after we returned from The Boulders Resort & Spa in Scottsdale, AZ. “It’s fun.”
Before this trip, we’d played pickleball a few times, and although we’d always enjoyed it, we had never felt an urge to pursue it. David Rogers, the resort’s tennis and pickleball pro, changed that. A tennis veteran with more than 40 years on court, he has lately become an enthusiastic proselytizer for pickleball. We had no sooner met up with him in the pro shop than he grabbed a basket of pickleball balls, handed us paddles, and took us to the court for a lesson, promising to teach “the unreturnable ball.”
There are several ways to reach The Boulders from Phoenix, including the Carefree Highway, a route that inspired the Gordon Lightfoot song by the same name. Lightfoot’s hit is about a lost love, but for me, there’s one line that forever invokes the feeling of serenity and escape I get as I approach The Boulders: “Carefree highway, let me slip away, slip away on you.”
The eastern end of the highway dead ends at a looming formation of million-year-old granite boulders. It’s as if the Earth itself had heaved up a great dam against the urban sprawl that has devoured acre after acre of the Valley of the Sun. The Boulders, which debuted in 1985, was one of the earliest resort developments in the valley, and it was thus able to claim this most scenic swath of this stretch of high Sonoran Desert. And since it sits at a higher elevation than Phoenix, it can be 10 or more degrees cooler.
Its 1,300 acres encompass those rocks and then spread east into a scenic desert of saguaro, prickly pear, and hedgehog cactus, marigolds, verbena, and feathery palo verde trees. Cart paths and walkways lace together 160 spacious casitas that have been unobtrusively tucked into and near the boulders. Adobe in color, they take their architectural clues from the southwest, with traditional viga ceilings, Indian print wall-hangings, leather furnishings, wood-burning fireplaces, and balconies or patios.
Most hotel rooms function as way stations: functional places to shower, change, and sleep–comfortable to be sure, but not so appealing as spaces to hang out. Our casita at The Boulders, by contrast, was a haven we were happy—even eager—to return to. Don’t misunderstand: our days were full of activities. Not just pickleball but also climbing to the top of those rocks for views of the sunset and following footpaths that looped through the desert. Susan, a golfer, lamented that I wasn’t, as we looked out from a boulder-top area at one of the two stunningly laid out Jay Moorish golf courses.
She was still talking about the course at dinner after we opted for the patio outdoors at the Palo Verde, the restaurant in the main lodge. When the waitress arrived, she handed us not paper menus but backlit tablets. For anyone who’s ever struggled to read a menu in the dim light of a restaurant—or, in this case, the evening on an outdoor patio, these menus were a welcome amenity. They did, however, quickly make clear that we faced difficult choices. Some dishes were meant to share, like goat cheese-stuffed squash blossoms. But how do you decide among braised short rib mole rojo, fresh sweet corn ravioli, and cast-iron roasted chicken with chimichurri verde? The answer is, you don’t. You narrow the choice to two and agree to share.
After dinner, we were tempted to head to the Discovery Lounge, which has a fireplace and looks out on the rocks and a lighted waterfall that plunges into the main swimming pool, which is atypically open 24 hours a day. Instead, we took the short walk back to our room. Low, soft lights lined the quiet pathways, the better to see the canopy of stars overhead. What drew us back to the room was that rarest of amenities: a wood-burning fireplace. The bellman who’d taken us to the room earlier in the day had left pressed-wood logs and instructions for starting a fire. How could we not take advantage?
The next day, we had every intention of heading back to the racquet complex, which, in addition to a dozen pickleball courts, has five tennis courts, a swimming pool, and access to the Grill Kitchen Deck & Bar at the adjacent golf clubhouse. Rogers and Jheng Wekow run the operation in tandem. Both have impressive credentials. Rogers, in addition to being the resort’s pickleball professional, has 40 years of on-court tennis experience, including stints with former Davis Cup Captain Tom Gorman at the Ritz-Carlton, Rancho Mirage; The Snowmass Club in Aspen, Colorado; and junior summer camps at the Universal Tennis Academy in Buckhead, GA. Wekow. Who is fluent in French, German, Dutch, and Spanish, was Head Tennis Professional at the Tennis Club St. Louis in Belgium, whose owner is former World No. 1 Justine Henin. For the last 25 years, however, she has been a mainstay at The Boulders, catering to resort guests and members with group and private lessons and weekly live-ball drills.
Our intentions to return to the courts succumbed to the lure of the renowned spa. Susan booked the Organic Signature facial and a Desert Zen massage, while I opted for the Tranquil Traveler. At 33,000 square feet, the spa is much more than a suite of treatment rooms. I went early, working out in the fitness center, before relaxing in the sauna and Jacuzzi. Outdoors, a patio off a grab-and-go spa café opened onto the adults-only spa pool and a meditative labyrinth. Roughly a score of classes and workout sessions are offered, among them Sonoran stretch, TRX suspension training, and Zumba, to name only a few. It’s an easy place to spend half a day, and we did.
For dinner on our last night, we walked around to the rocks to El Pedregal, a vaguely Moorish two-story marketplace with a few shops and galleries. We settled into a table on the outdoor patio of the Spotted Donkey on the second floor. It’s a place for nachos, tacos, enchiladas, fajitas, washed down with beer or any of several types of margaritas made with their own tequila. Then it was back to the room and a final evening in front of our fireplace.
We felt we’d packed quite a lot into our two days here, yet there was so much left undone, not the least of it the golf that Susan so desperately wanted me to take up. The worst omission, however, was not taking another pickleball lesson from Rogers. He’d handed us the syllabus of elements he teaches, including the art of defense and ways to finish a point. But though we didn’t make it back, our lesson with him did ignite an enthusiasm to get better and play more. We’re still tennis players first, but since this visit we’ve come to think of pickleball as a sport worth pursuing. So now that we’re back home, Susan wants to know “When are we going to play pickleball again?”
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