The original
Every desert course in Scottsdale is a descendant, and Desert Highlands usually gets the credit. But twenty-one years before Jack Nicklaus built there, an architect in his late sixties named Robert “Red” Lawrence laid out a course in the new town of Carefree that many in golf call the first desert course ever built. Desert Forest opened in 1962, below Black Mountain, at the center of the town Tom Darlington and K.T. Palmer had been selling since 1955.
It is not target golf. Lawrence routed the holes over the land rather than through it, with almost no earth moved, and the club still has no out-of-bounds, no water hazards and no fairway bunkers. The desert is the hazard, and the fairways run through it like the dunes of a links. It is par 72, about 7,200 yards, and built for walking, which in Arizona is rare.
It is also small, private and private-minded: a member-owned club joined by sponsored invitation, and a long way from the seven-course scale of Desert Mountain. You play it with a member or not at all.
How it plays
Desert Forest is a test of placement and nerve on rolling ground. With no fairway bunkers and no stakes, every miss is in the same place, the Sonoran desert, and you play it from there or take your penalty. The greens are bentgrass, the tees, fairways and roughs hybrid Bermuda, and the whole course except the greens is overseeded with rye from late September. Writers have long described it as simple in design and among the toughest tests in the Scottsdale area; Jeff Barr picked the 7th, 13th and 16th for his book 1001 Golf Holes You Must Play Before You Die.
The 2013 renovation, by David Zinkand, a longtime associate of Coore & Crenshaw, added tees, reopened sight lines, rebuilt the greens to modern standards and reshaped the bunkering around them. Bill Coore wrote to the board afterward that Desert Forest had long been one of his favorites and “among the most interesting in America,” and that the work had made it better.
Being a guest
The club’s customs are old-fashioned in the best sense: no phone calls on the course or in the clubhouse, shirts tucked in, no denim of any color, a round of four hours and ten minutes for a foursome, and no tipping except for caddies. The practice ground has a double-sided range and a two-acre short-game area. The membership is small, around 250 by one published count, and devoted to the game; the club describes itself as a private bubble for people who simply love golf.
Around it
Carefree is the rare golf town with a walkable downtown. Before or after, see the sundial, take tea at the English Rose on Easy Street, or stay at the Boulders or CIVANA, the old Carefree Resort. The Black Mountain Summit Trail climbs the peak the course sits under.
The Desert Fox
Red Lawrence was born in White Plains, New York, in 1893, started as a layout engineer at Westchester Country Club and spent 1921 to 1932 working for and with William Flynn at Merion, the heart of the “Philadelphia School” of American golf architecture. He later worked on courses including the Cascades at the Homestead in Virginia, was a founding member and the first president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, and in May 1958, at 65, moved to Tucson to start over in the desert. He designed courses all over Arizona after that, but Desert Forest in 1962 was the one that earned him the nickname “Desert Fox” and the one his club calls his premier design. He died in 1976 and entered the Arizona Golf Hall of Fame in 2003.
What he did was apply classic strategic principles to ground nobody had tried them on. Golf architecture writers have called Desert Forest the forerunner, by about two decades, of the target-oriented desert game, and “a demonically simple design” that fits holes between the harsher elements. Golf Magazine, in 2009, ranked it 35th among the 50 greatest courses of the previous half-century, the only Arizona course on the list; Golf Digest has had it among America’s 100 Greatest for 17 years in total, and Golfweek has kept it in its top 50.
The club has held to its character. It played host to the Goldwater Cup in its first years and again in 2003 and 2004, to the USGA Senior Amateur in 1990, won by Jackie Cummings, to the Trans-Mississippi Four-Ball in 2006, and to the USGA Women’s Mid-Amateur in 2007, when Meghan Bolger won her second straight title. In 2004 Bradley Klein wrote its history, Desert Forest Golf Club: The First Forty Years. When it needed modernizing, it hired David Zinkand, a longtime Coore & Crenshaw associate, to refine Lawrence’s course rather than replace it.
The desert golf Scottsdale sells today, carry the cactus, find the green, owes more to Desert Highlands. The quieter idea, that the desert could be a links, began here.