The one with nothing around it
The last course Jack Nicklaus built at Desert Mountain is the one that looks least like the others. Outlaw opened in 2003 on 176 acres at the club’s eastern edge, against the Tonto National Forest, and there are no homes on it. From the tees you see washes, rolling desert, Pinnacle Peak, the McDowells and Four Peaks, and not a single patio.
Nicklaus styled it as a Scottish links in the desert: firm, rolling ground, 126 bunkers, greens from 5,000 to 14,000 square feet, and a premium on being on the correct side of each hole rather than on hitting it far. The desert wind does the rest.
What distinguishes it from the other six is that it is the course you can walk, and the one the club sends its best amateurs to: the Southwestern Amateur has been played here since 2013, and in May 2026 it shared the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball with Cochise. It is 7,107 yards, par 72, and private.
How it plays
Outlaw rewards placement and controlled distance off the tee. The club’s notes put it plainly: accuracy matters more than power, and each hole has a right side. The links influence shows up around the greens, which are big, rumpled and fed by slopes that let you play along the ground.
The club lists 4, 10, 14 and 18 as signature holes. The 10th is a short par 4 with a blind landing area and a deep collection area behind the green; overshoot it and you are chipping back up a bank. The 14th has a large green wrapped around a central depression, and a back-right pin there is the hardest flag on the course. Top 100 Golf Courses adds the short par-4 5th to that list and notes that the 18th is rated the second-hardest hole on the card, so the round does not let up at the end.
The clubhouse
The Outlaw Clubhouse opened with the course in 2003, built to look like an early-1900s Arizona ranch house: a big breezeway with an outdoor fireplace, a collection of Southwestern art, a golf shop and a practice area with its own short-approach hole. The Arizona Grill serves Southwestern food and the club’s margaritas.
Outlaw is the closest Desert Mountain course to the open forest. After the round, Cave Creek Road keeps going east past the clubhouse into the national forest, toward Bartlett Lake, which is the best drive in the north for anyone, member or not.
Why the last course was different
By 2003 Desert Mountain had five Nicklaus courses threaded through its villages, every one of them lined with homes. Outlaw was laid out on a separate 176-acre site to the east, with no real estate element at all, and Nicklaus’s brief was, in the club’s words, to “enhance the natural landscape”: bring the existing washes and rolling desert into play and move as little as possible. The links label is a little generous for a course 2,500 feet above the nearest sea, but the principles are right: firm ground, few forced carries, many ways to play each hole.
The results showed in the lists. The club cites Golfweek’s Top 100 Residential Courses, Golf Digest’s 50 Toughest Courses and its Top 50 Best New Courses among Outlaw’s honors. And when the USGA brought the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball to Desert Mountain in May 2026, Outlaw was the course chosen to share the stroke play with Cochise: 256 players in 128 two-man sides, each with a handicap of 2.4 or better, over two days, before the top 32 sides moved to Cochise for match play.
The name keeps the club’s Western theme, and the ranch-house clubhouse plays along. Of all seven Desert Mountain courses, it is the one that best shows what the members are paying for: not the houses, but the desert around them.