The intimidating one
Every multi-course club has the course the members warn their guests about, and at Desert Mountain it is Geronimo. The club calls it the most visually intimidating of its seven courses; Nicklaus called it “the strong-looking course.” It runs through steep canyons and over desert plateaus west of Cochise, with blind shots, deep ravines and fairways that look narrower from the tee than they are.
It opened on October 31, 1989, the third of Nicklaus’s six courses at the club, with Nicklaus himself, Jim Carter and a 19-year-old Phil Mickelson in the first group. Nicklaus had drawn it to be the club’s tournament course, and it lost that job to Cochise next door before it had even opened.
What distinguishes it from the other six is the shape of the land, and the ending it forces: Geronimo finishes on a par 3, a long carry to a sloping green under the clubhouse windows. It is 7,293 yards, par 72, freshly restored, and private. You play it as a member’s guest.
How it plays
The front nine is the gentler half, although it does not start that way: the 1st is a 570-yard par 5 that wants a big second shot, and Top 100 Golf Courses’ reviewers single out the 2nd and 3rd as two very strong par 4s. Nicklaus left a safe approach on many holes for the conservative player, and target fairways and island-style greens for the one who wants to play it in the air. Elevation changes produce blind tee shots and blind approaches, so take the yardage book seriously.
The two short par 4s, the 8th and the 14th, are where scores leak: one green is tiered and one is deeper than it looks. The back nine is the harder half, and the finish is the par-3 18th, a long iron or more to a two-tiered green benched into a rocky hillside in front of the Cochise/Geronimo Clubhouse. The club lists 1, 6, 11 and 18 as signature holes. Ride; the club itself says the elevation makes Geronimo a cart course.
What the 2026 restoration changed
Most of it is underground: a new pump station and HDPE pipe in place of aging PVC, single-head irrigation and remote controls. Above ground, the course was regrassed with the same turf as Cochise, tees were expanded (the par 3s most of all), pruning restored sight lines lost over three decades, a few fairway bunkers moved closer to the greens, some trees and boulders were moved or buried, and new drainage keeps the 9th from flooding with silt after a monsoon. The comfort stations at the 6th tee and between the 13th and 14th were rebuilt at ground level, without stairs.
After the round
Geronimo shares the 52,000-square-foot Cochise/Geronimo Clubhouse with Cochise. For a table outside the gate, Dynamite Grille is the nearest one anyone can book.
The tournament course that wasn’t
When Nicklaus laid out Desert Mountain’s second and third courses, the plan was for the third to be the stage. In 2011 he told the club’s members that Cochise “was not intended to be the tournament golf course”; Geronimo was. But when The Tradition arrived in the spring of 1989, Geronimo was still months from opening, and Cochise had the room for a clubhouse and galleries. The senior major stayed on Cochise for thirteen years, and Geronimo became the members’ hard course instead.
It got a taste of tournament golf before it opened. In 1988 its finished par-3 18th was borrowed for the playoff of the Desert Scramble, which Greg Norman won with a birdie putt. On opening day, October 31, 1989, Carter shot 73 and Nicklaus and Mickelson shot 74 each. Junior golf followed: the AJGA’s Rolex Tournament of Champions was played on Geronimo in 1996, when Charles Howell III and Grace Park won, and again in 2002. The course has also hosted the Southwestern Amateur, including the 100th edition in 2015. Early in its life it stretched past 7,400 yards with a 77.1 course rating, a number that explains its reputation.
The restoration that closed it for a year was the second of its kind at the club, after Cochise in 2024, and it reopened in late September 2026 with the same crew in charge: Desert Mountain’s agronomy director Todd Bohn and Chad Goetz of Nicklaus Design. The club’s own summary was “modernized below ground and thoughtfully refined above it,” which is an accurate description of what members will notice: the same intimidating course, with greener grass and better views of where the ball went.