The high one
Drive to the top of Desert Mountain, through the Village of Saguaro Forest, and you reach Chiricahua, the fifth of Jack Nicklaus’s six courses at the club, opened in 1999. It is the course with altitude: it runs between about 3,000 and 3,300 feet, and its holes climb and drop across the hillsides so steadily that eight play downhill, nine uphill and one, the club says, sideways.
The payoff is the view. From Chiricahua’s high tees you look south over the whole of metro Phoenix and Scottsdale, the widest outlook at the club. The club describes the course as combining the architecture of the four that came before it, which is a polite way of saying it has a bit of everything: forced carries, canyon holes, a par 3 borrowed from a classic.
What distinguishes it from the other six is the terrain, and the clubhouse: a Tuscan farmhouse on the hill above the 18th, with the club’s Italian restaurant. It is 7,347 yards, par 72, and private.
How it plays
Chiricahua is a position course. Thick desert plants and shrubs line the fairways, so the club’s advice is to play to spots rather than for distance, and to trust that the landing areas over the canyons, washes and bunkers are wider than they look from an elevated tee. The club counts 7, 10, 14 and 15 as its signature holes.
Two of those are worth knowing about. The 10th, a long par 4 of about 482 yards to a green above a dry wash, is, in Top 100 Golf Courses’ judgment, the toughest hole on the card. The 14th, a short par 3 of about 159 yards, is Nicklaus’s nod to George C. Thomas’s 6th at Riviera in Los Angeles: a bunker in the middle of the green, which means some pins are reached only by putting around it or chipping over it.
The clubhouse
The Chiricahua Clubhouse opened in 2001, modeled on a Tuscan olive farm: mud-stacked roofs, aged gray stone and wraparound terraces at about 3,300 feet over the 18th hole. Constantino’s is the Italian dining room, with a wine tower of about 3,000 bottles, and Angelo’s handles lunch and cocktails. The club uses the building for its evening events, an Italian street festival among them.
For a dinner outside the gate, Dynamite Grille and the Four Seasons are the nearest tables anyone can book.
The fifth course
Chiricahua came twelve years after Renegade, in 1999, as Desert Mountain’s villages pushed up into the hills, and it was laid out by Nicklaus with Phil Smith, a longtime associate in his design firm. (Smith went on to rebuild Terravita across the north in 2022.) The routing takes the club’s steepest land and makes it the point: a round that rises and falls hundreds of feet, with tee boxes framed by the mountains and the Valley laid out below them.
The name, like the others at the club, comes from southeastern Arizona: the Chiricahua Mountains and the Chiricahua Apache, the people of Cochise and Geronimo. It is the club’s most scenic course and, after Outlaw, its youngest Nicklaus design. The record on it is otherwise short: no tour event that we found, a clubhouse added in 2001, and the best seat at the club for watching the Valley’s lights come on.