"We're still considering this a preview year for our members," Marcella Club's Vice President of Membership Kirstin Fossey said the week Skyline opened for play. "We only have temporary amenities at this point."
That single sentence tells you more about living at Marcella Club right now than any press release. The course that has been growing in since construction broke ground in 2024, Tiger Woods and TGR Design's first mountain layout, opened to members in early July with a board of governors round, a lunch catered by Utah-based chain Jurassic Tacos, and the Utah Mammoth's mascot Tusky taking a ceremonial first tee shot with a hockey stick and an exploding golf ball. It was a real opening. It was also, by the club's own description, an unfinished one.
If you live on Jordanelle Ridge or in the Marcella Mountain neighborhood at Deer Valley East Village, that gap between "open" and "finished" is the actual texture of this season. Here is what it means in practice.
The Course Is Open. The Club Isn't.
Skyline is a real par-72 course stretching to roughly 8,064 yards, among the longest layouts in the country, and it plays. Fossey has said as much herself: "It looks more difficult than it actually is. As a golfer, it's quite playable. People who love difficult golf will be able to play it, and people who need a little more forgiveness will be able to play it as well."
What isn't finished is everything around the round. Fossey's own framing was direct: "The golf course is still in its infancy phase of development, and so it's just going to be more baked by next year." A construction update from the previous fall showed the pace of that grow-in. As of late September 2025, 14 of Skyline's 18 holes were fully grassed, with 16 green complexes in some stage of establishment. Roughly nine months later, that work had progressed enough to host members. It has not progressed enough to host a finished clubhouse.
So this season looks like:
- Open: 18 holes of championship golf, a pro shop, and temporary comfort stations
- Not yet open: the permanent clubhouse, the racquet club, and the restaurant planned for Central Park at Jordanelle Ridge
- Not yet open: Marcella on Main in Old Town Park City, which is planned to eventually include a rooftop lounge, a French brasserie, and a Chef's Table designed by James Beard Award-winning chef Galen Zamarra
- Planned for 2027: a formal grand opening with Tiger Woods himself, according to Marcella's own timeline
REEF Capital Partners CEO Jared Lucero, who helped cut the ribbon, put the moment in plainer terms than any marketing copy would: "It's the craziest thing in the world. We partnered with Tiger Woods, the hero, and so it's like a bit of a dream that this has come together." Skyline is REEF's fifth golf course build, following projects in Colorado, Hawaii, and Virginia, so the company has done this sequence before. That experience doesn't make the wait shorter. It just makes the wait predictable.
Lunch Is Next Door, Not On Site
If you finish a round at Skyline this month and want a real meal, you are not eating at Marcella. You are driving a few minutes to Jordanelle Ridge Barn & Cafe, which opened to the public on June 20 at 2013 Coyote Canyon Parkway in Heber City, part of the separate Jordanelle Ridge master-planned community next door. The cafe serves sandwiches, salads, and coffee daily from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Tuesdays.
Here's the detail worth knowing if you're trying to read the pace of development around you: the executive quoted celebrating that cafe's opening, Cody Winterton, division president of Raintree Investment Corporation, is the same person quoted a year earlier announcing Marcella's second golf course. Raintree is developing both the neighboring residential community and Marcella at Jordanelle Ridge. The same leadership team is building your future clubhouse and, in the meantime, opened the nearest real sit-down option before that clubhouse exists. That is not a coincidence. It's sequencing. Amenities that serve the broader Jordanelle Ridge corridor arrive on a faster timeline than amenities gated to a single private membership.
Sold Out Doesn't Mean Finished
Marcella's golf and ski membership was capped at 500 from the start, 350 reserved for Jordanelle Ridge homesites and 150 for Marcella Mountain properties at Deer Valley East Village. By July 2025, more than 65 percent of those memberships had already sold, a full year before the course itself opened for play. By the time Skyline opened for play in July 2026, the club had sold out entirely of combined golf-and-ski memberships. Ski-only memberships, which include ski-in ski-out access and four tee times a year at guest rates, are still available.
That full sellout is worth sitting with for a moment, because it explains something residents might otherwise find confusing. A club selling out its full membership roster usually signals that the product is complete and the wait is over. Here, the membership math finished well ahead of the physical construction. Selling every golf membership didn't fast-track the clubhouse. Grass still needs a full growing season before it can be played on, and buildings still need permits, crews, and weather windows regardless of how quickly the ownership rolls filled up. If you bought in expecting the finished four-season club described in Marcella's marketing, the honest read on where things stand is that you bought the membership on schedule and you're waiting on the buildings on a separate one.
Fossey has described the intended character of the place in the meantime: "It's the lifestyle here at Marcella that's going to set it apart from all the other clubs in the area. It is a younger demographic. It's going to be fun." That's a fair description of a club still finding its footing rather than one operating at full capacity.
What Ambush Adds When It's Ready
Skyline is currently the only course you can play. The second course, Ambush, designed by King Collins Dormer, the team behind Sweetens Cove and Landmand, broke ground in the summer of 2025. Ambush is routed along a ridgeline above the Heber Valley, with cliff-edge holes bookending the round and an aspen-lined valley running through the middle. More than a year after groundbreaking, no opening date beyond general future completion has been announced.
That means the 36-hole private club experience Marcella has promoted since its earliest announcements, one course from Tiger Woods and one from King Collins Dormer, is a next-season story at the earliest. This fall, a round at Marcella is a Skyline round, full stop.
None of this makes Marcella a disappointment. It makes it a young club moving through the part of its life that every serious golf community moves through, the stretch between the ribbon-cutting and the finished product. What's useful for the people actually living here is having an honest read on which parts of that stretch are behind you and which are still ahead. Right now, the golf is real, the lunch is next door, and the clubhouse is a year out. That's not a caveat buried in a brochure. That's Tuesday afternoon at Marcella in September 2026.
If you're weighing what a season like this means for property values, resale timing, or how Marcella compares to the more established clubs nearby, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks this corridor closely. Debbie Millar works across Deer Valley East Village, Jordanelle Ridge, and the private clubs in between. Let's Connect.
