A golfer walked up to the pro shop counter at Rainmakers earlier this month, gave a name, and booked a tee time. No member number. No sponsoring resident on the reservation. Two summers ago that conversation would have ended at the door. The Robert Trent Jones II course carved into the high mountain walls above Alto has spent most of its life as a private-only tee sheet, the kind of course where Golfweek and the golf directories simply listed it as private and moved on. That changed this year. The New Mexico tourism board's own listing for the club now states it plainly: non-members can book tee times, with priority still given to club members.
What's easy to miss, if you only hear the headline, is that the same season that opened the fairway closed the walk-up option at the restaurant next to it. Rainmakers didn't get less exclusive this year. It got exclusive in a different room.
What "Open to the Public" Actually Changed
Before this year, Rainmakers sat in the same category as a handful of other Lincoln County clubs, a course you needed a membership or a member's invitation to play. Golfweek's own rankings capture that history in numbers. From 2019 through 2024, the club held New Mexico's No. 1 private course ranking in five of six years, slipping to No. 2 only in 2021. Its national ranking moved the other direction over that same stretch, sliding from 33rd overall in 2019 to a tie for 87th in both 2023 and 2024. The most recent published ranking, 101st nationally for 2025, drops the private-course label from the listing entirely. Whether that's a ranking category quirk or a reflection of the club's new booking policy, the timing lines up with when outside players started showing up on the tee sheet.
The course itself hasn't changed. It's still the same 18 holes designed by Robert Trent Jones II, still built into arroyos and rock outcroppings across 135 acres of protected wildlife habitat where elk, deer and native birds share the fairways with golfers. What changed is who can get a tee time and how. Non-members now book six days a week, with club members still getting first call on the times they want. For a resident who has a friend flying into El Paso for the weekend, that's a real change. A guest no longer needs a member to make the call for them.
The Kitchen Went the Other Way
The Restaurant at Rainmakers used to work the way most clubhouse dining rooms work: show up, get a table, order off the board. That model is gone. According to the club's own posted hours, the restaurant now runs on reservations only, with no walk-in service at all. It's closed Monday and Tuesday, open Wednesday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and open Thursday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Every one of those windows requires booking ahead.
The kitchen itself has kept moving even as the door tightened. Chef Mashon built out an Irish-themed menu of lamb stew, bangers and mash, and Guinness-braised dishes for St. Patrick's Day earlier this year, and the club's current listings flag a newly refreshed menu since then. So the food side of the operation is active and evolving. It's the access that's different. A resident who used to swing by after nine holes for a burger now needs to have called ahead, the same way they'd book a table at any reservation-only restaurant in a bigger town.
What This Means for a Homeowner With Guests in Town
Put the two changes side by side and the practical takeaway for anyone living inside the gates at Rainmakers is straightforward. Bringing a guest to play golf just got easier. Bringing that same guest to dinner afterward now takes a phone call made earlier in the day, not a decision made on the back nine. If you're hosting out-of-state family this fall and planning a round followed by a meal, the golf is the flexible part of the day and the dinner reservation is the part that needs to go on the calendar first.
The club's event and wedding business, separate from day-to-day dining, doesn't appear to be affected by the reservation-only shift. Rainmakers has long marketed the clubhouse as a venue for weddings and private gatherings, and that side of the operation runs on its own booking process regardless of the restaurant's weekly hours.
Down Airport Highway 220, the Season Is Turning Too
Spencer Theater for the Performing Arts sits just up the road from the club, and its calendar has been running on a parallel track all year. The theater's summer lineup wound down with a string of named touring acts: Sawyer Brown on August 8, the "Taste of the Spencer" fundraiser dinner on August 15, guitarist Pavlo on August 22, Femmes of Rock on August 29, and Country Classics, featuring Linda Davis, Bill Whyte and Lang Scott, on September 3. That was the last ticketed touring show on the calendar before the season shifted.
Six days later, on September 8, Rainmakers hosted its annual golf tournament benefiting Spencer Theater's operations and programming, a direct financial link between the club and the theater that goes back years. The 2025 edition of the same tournament ran at a $135 entry fee with breakfast, cart and green fees included, and the date has moved around the late-summer calendar from year to year, landing in late August some years and early September in others. This year's tournament wrapped up the ticketed side of the theater's calendar for the season.
What Fills November and December Instead
The theater doesn't go dark once the touring acts and the tournament wrap. It just switches to a different kind of access. Spencer Theater offers free public tours every Tuesday and Thursday at 10 a.m., year-round except holidays, and that schedule keeps running straight through the fall. Area school systems also use the theater at no charge for student productions during the district's Student Performing Arts Month, which the theater's own fact sheet places in the spring and again in the fall, specifically November and December. That's a stretch of the calendar built around free access rather than a box office.
The building itself is worth the free Tuesday or Thursday tour on its own terms. Architect Antoine Predock designed the $22 million theater, funded entirely by the late Dr. A.N. Spencer and Jackie Spencer Morgan of Alto, and its Crystal Lobby took seven months to model on computer before construction, assembled from 300 glass panes over an inch thick with no two cut to the same size. The lobby also holds a permanent collection of Dale Chihuly glass installations. Spencer Theater operates as what the industry calls a presentor venue, meaning it uses its own funds to book touring performers directly rather than renting the hall out to promoters, which is part of why the summer calendar reads like a hand-picked lineup rather than a rental schedule.
The Same Swap, Twice
Look at the club and the theater together and the pattern repeats. Neither one became more exclusive or less exclusive this year. Each one moved the door. Rainmakers opened its tee sheet to outside players and closed its dining room to walk-ins. Spencer Theater closed out its ticketed touring season and opened its doors for free tours and a season of student performances that cost nothing to attend. For anyone living in the neighborhood, the practical read is the same in both places: check what requires a reservation before you assume it doesn't, and check what's free before you assume it costs a ticket.
Rainmakers keeps shifting in ways that never show up on a golf app or a theater ticketing page. If you want an on-the-ground read on what's changing inside the gates, from booking policies to the fall calendar, Gavin Bigger follows Alto's resort communities closely enough to notice.
