La Quinta Resort Mountain Course

The Greater Coachella Valley - often referred to generally as Palm Springs or among Californians as simply "The Desert" - is a spacious forty five mile long valley bordered on the north by the massive plateau of Joshua Tree National park and the south by the jagged, crumbling, red rock peaks of the Santa Rosa Mountains. Given this dramatic backdrop, it is amazing that more of the golf courses here aren't built in and around these peaks - every course in the valley has exceptional views of them, but rare is the track that actually gets up into them. La Quinta Resort Mountain Course is one of the few exceptions.

The course is a model of restraint for architect Pete Dye and despite its name and location is anything but a "mountain" course. By this I mean that the only forced carry and significant elevation change are found on the par three sixteenth (above) - a revelation of a hole that is the culmination of a long courtship dance with the surrounding mountains. The course approaches them almost immediately - an aggressive line off the  fourth tee can be taken over an out-cropping and the short par three fifth is tucked into an intimate little alcove - yet no sooner are you basking in their garnet glow and sweet sage perfume when the course withdraws again into the benign meadowy heart of the resort. And there it remains for an uninspired stretch of holes that is so excruciatingly long you will think the desert is playing hard to get. But just when you've been lulled into the banality of a housing development and are certain its over between you - the desert opens up her arms and draws you lovingly into her naked bosom. 

The fourteenth and fifteenth holes play in and out of a vertiginous mountain cove (right) that echoes with the witches laughter of barking coyotes at dusk. And the sixteenth - an island par three at the base of a wide, gently sloping boulder field that looks like it was deposited by a retreating glacier (top) - is the consumation...the kiss on the lips...as close as you will come to the true heart of the desert mountains without climbing up into them with a gold pan and a mule train.