For two years, the story out at Desert Willow was the crane. Then the lagoon. Then the water math. What actually landed on the DSRT Surf booking page this summer was a number nobody in the Valley had bet on: sessions start at $60 an hour.
That is not a rounding error. It is the cheapest hour of surfing available anywhere in the Coachella Valley, and it belongs to the newest, biggest lagoon in the region. For a project that spent two years being covered as a luxury resort story, the actual opening price reads more like a rec center than a country club. That gap between what DSRT Surf was expected to be and what it turned out to be is the real news here, and it says something specific about the piece of ground it sits on.
What's actually open right now
DSRT Surf's Phase 1 opened in late July 2026 at 105 Wave Drive, tucked between the Firecliff and Mountain View courses at Desert Willow Golf Resort. The lagoon itself is a 5.5-acre Wavegarden Cove system, a 52-module wave generator capable of producing more than 20 distinct wave profiles, from soft beginner rollers to steeper performance waves, at up to 1,000 waves an hour. It is, by the operator's own description, the largest surf lagoon in North America.
Around the water, the parts that are open now include a leisure pool, a jacuzzi, pickleball courts, and a skate area. A beach pass gets you onto the grounds without booking wave time, useful if you are the one holding a kid's towel while someone else surfs. The full-service restaurant is listed as coming soon rather than open. Group bookings start at 10 guests and scale up to full buyouts of roughly 3,500 people across the water and event spaces combined, which tells you this was built with corporate days and milestone parties in mind as much as solo sessions.
What is not open yet is Phase 2: the 139-key hotel and 57 private villas that were part of the original pitch. No date has been attached to that stage. For now, DSRT Surf is a day-use amenity sitting inside a golf resort, not yet the overnight destination the renderings promised.
The price nobody expected
Here is where the comparison gets interesting. The Coachella Valley already had one operating wave pool before DSRT Surf opened: Palm Springs Surf Club, which opened in January 2024 and charges $212 to $265 for a one-hour session. A few miles away, the long-discussed Thermal Beach Club, a gated compound built around its own lagoon, priced its surf memberships starting at $175,000 to join, a structure closer to a country club initiation fee than a ticket price.
| Facility | Access model | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| DSRT Surf, Palm Desert | Walk-up, no membership | Sessions from $60/hour |
| Palm Springs Surf Club | Walk-up, no membership | $212 to $265/hour |
| Thermal Beach Club | Membership required | Surf memberships from $175,000 to join |
Set side by side, DSRT Surf is not the premium option in that lineup. It is the value option, and it is the one that requires nothing beyond showing up and paying for an hour. That is worth sitting with, because nothing about the marketing around this project, the $200 million-plus construction, the celebrity surfer investors, the luxury hotel plans, suggested the walk-up rate would undercut the valley's existing surf park by more than half.
Why the water story keeps coming up
Any conversation about a surf lagoon in the desert eventually turns to water, and DSRT Surf's developers have clearly expected that question since before groundbreaking. The mechanism they built is called Turf for Surf: convert acreage of golf course turf at Desert Willow into drought-tolerant, native landscaping, and use the water saved there to offset what the lagoon consumes. As of the most recent figures released by developer Beach Street, that conversion covers 30 acres and is projected to save 34.8 million gallons of water annually, against the lagoon's projected annual use of 23.8 million gallons. The net effect, on paper, is an 11 million gallon annual savings, making the lagoon a net-zero water user within the resort's overall footprint.
Reporting on the broader wave pool boom in the region put a rougher number on what that means in practice: the DSRT Surf lagoon is expected to use about 8 percent of the water a typical 18-hole golf course consumes in the Coachella Valley. When Beach Street founding partner Doug Sheres addressed the obvious skepticism at the project's 2024 groundbreaking, he put it plainly.
"You might ask, 'All this great surf and this giant lagoon, is that irresponsible? You're putting all this water out there in the middle of the desert. Who would do something like that?' And the answer is, well, it's really not as irresponsible as you might think."
Whether that math holds up over years of operation is something only time will show. But the fact that the offset is tied to an existing golf resort's turf, rather than to new landscaping built from scratch, is part of why this project could be sited at Desert Willow in the first place.
Why it landed at Desert Willow specifically
Desert Willow is not one of Palm Desert's private country clubs. The City of Palm Desert developed and still owns the resort, which opened in 1997 and is operated under contract by Kemper Sports Management. That civic ownership shows up in small, practical ways residents already know: a Palm Desert Resident Golf Card runs $52 a year and comes with a three-day advance booking window, and Platinum Cardholders can book tee times up to 60 days out at rates discounted 25 to 30 percent off standard public pricing. It is, in other words, the one golf property in the city built explicitly to be affordable to the people who live nearby, not just to visitors.
That civic identity is a plausible reason DSRT Surf's public, no-membership structure fits the site so naturally. A luxury surf-and-villa complex bolted onto a private club would have been an easier sell as a members-only product. Bolted onto a municipal golf resort with a $52 resident card already in circulation, a walk-up model that charges by the hour makes more sense as the default, even with a private operator, Beach Street, running the day-to-day.
What changes for people who already live near it
If you have driven Desert Willow Drive on the way to a tee time or a dinner at the Terrace, you already know the address. What is different now is that the site has a second reason to pull off the road that has nothing to do with golf. A Saturday that used to mean a round on Firecliff or a break at the clubhouse now has a pickleball court and a leisure pool sitting a few hundred feet away, open to anyone with a beach pass, no member sponsor required.
The honest caveats matter too. The restaurant is not open yet, so a full day there still means planning your own food, since outside food and drinks are not permitted on-site. The hotel and villas that anchored a lot of the original coverage are still Phase 2, with no announced timeline. And a project this technically ambitious, drawing on 24 million gallons of water a year even under the most optimistic offset math, will be worth watching through its first full desert summer before anyone calls the water story settled.
What is settled, for now, is the access model. Palm Desert did not get a members-only lagoon. It got a day-use amenity priced closer to a public pool than a country club, built into the one resort in the city designed from the start to belong to residents as much as to guests.
If you are curious how additions like this shift the character of a block or a golf resort's surrounding streets, that is the kind of granular, on-the-ground read Mark Wise Group tracks across Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, and the rest of the Coachella Valley. Reach out anytime you want a local, senior-executed take on how a neighborhood is actually changing, not just how it is being marketed.
