The course Desert Mountain started with
Every club has its first course, and at Desert Mountain it is Renegade, opened in 1987 just inside the main entrance off Desert Mountain Parkway. Lyle Anderson had hired Jack Nicklaus to build a club around six courses, and Nicklaus started with an idea he never repeated: two pins on every green. A white flag set the easy hole, a gold flag the hard one, and a single course could serve a 25-handicapper and a scratch player in the same foursome.
The 2019 renovation kept the idea and changed almost everything else. Most of the old double greens became separate greens, some as far as 100 yards apart, the fairway mounding went, and the back tees went back: Renegade is now 7,933 yards, par 72, the longest of the seven, with seven sets of tees that start around 4,400.
What sets it apart from the other six is choice. Cochise has the history, Outlaw the solitude, Chiricahua the views. Renegade is the one where you decide, every hole, how hard you want the day to be. It is private, like everything at Desert Mountain, so you play it as a member’s guest.
How it plays
Renegade sits on the gentlest ground at the club, with mild elevation changes, and the club counts it among its more walkable layouts. Nicklaus built it around risk and reward: the fairway bunkers on 2, 9, 13 and 17 can be avoided from the tee if you pick the safe line, and most greens accept a shot along the ground as well as one through the air. The thing to fear is the back of the green. Approaches that land firm and release tend to roll off, so play to the front half.
The club lists 4, 9, 12 and 17 as signature holes. The par-3 14th, by GolfPass’s account of the renovation, kept its three greens, which is as close to Renegade’s original personality as any hole on the course. The turf is cool-season grass, which the club says allows play year round.
The clubhouse and the range
For years the Renegade “clubhouse” was famously a double-wide trailer. In January 2024 it reopened as a real one, by the Boulder firm DTJ Design: floating roofs, glass walls and local stone, with a modern locker room and pro shop, and The Hideout for breakfast and lunch. Next door is the club’s main practice ground, a two-sided range with a short-game area and the Jim Flick Golf Performance Center, opened in 2013.
Before and after
Members coming off Renegade usually head to Dynamite Grille or the Four Seasons when they want a table outside the gate, and so should you. For desert golf you can book yourself, see the golf without a membership note.
Two flags on every green
When Renegade opened in 1987, desert golf was four years old as a product. Nicklaus had built the first one at Desert Highlands in 1983, and the problem it had exposed was that a course through raw desert punishes a weak player brutally. Anderson’s new club had to sell memberships to people of every ability, and Nicklaus’s answer at Renegade was to build flexibility into the greens themselves. Thirteen holes had large greens with separate areas for each pin and five had genuinely separate greens, so the course could be set up as two different courses on the same day.
The 2018–2019 renovation, built by Heritage Links to a Nicklaus Design master plan, was the course’s first top-to-bottom rebuild. By GolfPass’s account it removed most of the fairway mounding, separated ten double greens into standalone greens, rebuilt seven more so their pins sit in distinct sections, and installed new irrigation; turf areas were sand-capped and cart paths and drainage reworked. The yardage went from 7,524 to 7,933. The club describes the result today as six connected double greens set with two pins each day, twelve holes with greens up to 100 yards apart, and fourteen tee-and-pin combinations per hole.
The renovation was finished in the same spring the club opened Seven, its par-3 course, and the two projects marked the members’ first big building season since they took over the club from the developer in 2011. The clubhouse followed in 2024. Renegade is the oldest course at Desert Mountain, and it is now one of the newest.