By Ken Van Vechten
Palm Springs, oh, yeah, Lee Trevino’s ace in the Skins Game and the Bob Hope tourney. No, that’s La Quinta (and the Hope is now The American Express). The Dinah Shore, then. Try again, the “Women’s Masters” was in Rancho Mirage for its long, glorious run and now resides, sadly, in Houston. OK, OK, Coachella and Stagecoach. Nada. Those music fests are in Indio.
Welcome to Palm Springs and the desert communities.
“Palm Springs” is comprised of nine cities, including the city of Palm Springs, and a number of unincorporated communities. Geographically it’s the lower-elevation, left-hand portion of the Sonoran Desert sprawling across southern Arizona and down into Mexico. Cartographers quite a while backed dubbed it Coachella Valley. Colloquially it’s called, well … The many communities of interest in the valley are generally OK with that association; it brings in tourists who then find the many divergent, interesting pieces of this larger puzzle. (If you want to get a good handle on the lay of the land, the topography, geology, and diversity of the valley, hop aboard the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway and have a gander from 8,500-feet up high.)
When the weather-has-turned reality sets in and the clubs are clamoring for some love, channel Horace Greeley and head out to a place where the best months fall during what so many dread as winter, and that would be the California desert. The ringing mountains might be dappled in snow, but that’s 11,000 feet up, and down along the floor of the Coachella Valley, the two-digit numbers to remember start with a “7,” as in degrees Fahrenheit and, hopefully, relation to par.
“I live here for two reasons,” says Mark Walencewicz, who lives in Connecticut in the summer. “I’m here for the golf, I’m here for the weather. If you are a golfer, this is where you want to live. If you are on vacation, this is where you want to golf. Obviously, from the East Coast, a lot of people prefer Florida. It’s easy to get there, there’s no time change. It’s a little more involved to get here. But look at the valley, the beauty of the desert, the mountains; look at the hotels, the restaurants, the culture; look at this weather. This is vacation, even for people who live here.”
“Here” for Walencewicz is Indian Wells, a toney enclave a dozen miles down valley from Palm Springs, to the southeast. He plays out of Indian Wells Golf Resort, a two-course, four-luxe-hotel getaway mecca sporting tracks by Clive Clark and John Fought, with the latter just about to come out of a significant 2025 revamp. The Ted Robinson-designed East and West courses, which opened in 1986, went out in the late aughts with Clark’s watery-and-flowered, risk-reward Celebrity emerging from West, and Fought reimagining the East into the stouter Players. Fought has just now completed the re-do of his original re-do, bringing two awkwardly dislocated holes into the main footprint, putting walkability back in play, plus other work across the facility, and all done in the name of enhancing everyone’s playing experience and with the prospect of an LPGA event coming someday (the Epson Tour Championship – the LPGA’s feeder tour – will be back on site in 2026 for the third consecutive year).
“Like everything,” Walencewicz shares, “it comes down to the people, the leadership, and the vision. It’s the people who work here, it’s the hospitality they offer. It’s the facilities with these two courses, the conditioning, and add in a totally revamped restaurant with a celebrity chef (Richard Blais’ Kestrel). They just took a perfectly good golf course and re-did it, to make it better for the future and to stay a few steps ahead of the competition. Give credit to city leadership and the management team for that.
“And there’s this weather.”
For added fun, the Toptracer-equipped range has “Shots in the Night” – iridescent balls, glowing targets, and laser-lighted putting games.
Indian Wells isn’t alone, as several of the valley’s cities have invested in getaway-worthy golf of a truly public nature. The city of Palm Springs has Tahquitz Creek Golf Resort, which mates an older-days parkland layout to a modern-era Ted Robinson play of sweeping fairways, free-form bunkering, sinuous and raised greens, and staggering near-at-hand views of the monolithic front of Mt. San Jacinto. Down the other direction in La Quinta and hard by the Santa Rosa Mountains, which means it’s a a sure-fire place to see indigenous Peninsular bighorn sheep, who know water and a good “salad” is more easily found on course than up in the rocky crags, SilverRock Resort’s Arnold Palmer Classic Course once hosted the PGA Tour. After years of delays and false starts, SilverRock’s residential-resort development finally is coming together, which will be a boon to locals and visitors, alike, and stabilize the foundation around a stellar play.
Nearby, the soon-to-be-40-year-old PGA West with its five resort courses is but one example of the high level of publicly accessible play available in the area, famous or infamous for the Stadium Course’s island green and a 20-foot-deep greenside bunker, among other diabolical fun Pete Dye liked to throw at players. Dye’s Mountain Course climbs into and across the foothills, creating a number of life-long-memorable holes where those bighorns normally roam.
Classic Club set mid-valley – purpose-built for the big tour – is a broad, strikingly rolling design (considering how flat the desert is there) with huge fairway swoops incised by waterways that had the likes of some notable, no-need-to-be-named prima donnas whining to such a great extent that play 52 weeks a year is now thankfully reserved for all of us.
(Note: PGA West and Classic Club are not public-entity-owned plays.)
Muni is big in the valley, and Desert Willow Golf Resort helps reiterate that fact. Borne in the wake of the success of Indian Well’s investment into publicly owned golf, the city of Palm Desert wanted a piece of the action, and when completed, the impact was immediate and complete.
“The communities in the desert, all of these cities, are driven by hotel taxes, tourism, all of those kinds of things,” explains Derek White, Desert Willow’s general manager. “That’s what really moves the needle for these cities. The cities were saying, ‘Hey, we can do this, help draw in more people and more interest to our community.’ It makes so much sense to bring in attractions that are going to attract more tourism. And what a benefit it is for our residents.”
And attractants abound on-site. Firecliff and Mountain View – designed by Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry with an assist from John Cook – are siblings, related but certainly not twins. Firecliff is slopes and contours, with stair-stepping bunkers as framework, markedly protected greens and the visual aesthetic of a native palm oasis crossed with the world’s most verdant desert arboretum. Mountain View is known to play a tad easier, mostly due to more open greens, but the outward views of three mountain ranges might be more spectacular. The practice facility is massive in breadth and depth, with the acclaimed Palm Desert Golf Academy situated at the other end. The grill room could easily function as a standalone but then we’d not have the expanse of Firecliff nine and 18 coming home in the forefront. Fractional and residential-resort-style accommodations are scattered about the building envelope. And for added measure a wave-park is under construction.
Seasonal Palm Desert resident Ellen Keller has called Desert Willow “home” for many years, and as with Walencewicz, she is smitten by what the facility and the desert offer when she’s not back home in the Upper East Side.
“Everything about Desert Willow speaks to us,” she says. “The courses are beautiful, the staff makes you think it’s a private club; there’s the dining, the views, and the academy. I was out of the game for a while and when I was able to get back into it my first call was to Paul Bucy (head of the golf academy). … When we get back for the season it just feels right.”
What sets greater Palm Springs apart from any other golf-mad destination is the “all of it all.” Beard and Michelin awards, rich tribal history, an array of top-shelf courses, a National Park – Joshua Tree – across the top side of the valley, and National Monument land ringing the south; the just-reborn, golden-era-is-back Plaza Theatre in downtown Palm Springs, other performing arts venues across the valley, the previously mentioned top-tier music fests, internationally recognized Modernism celebrations, and, the happening year-in, year-out, the Palm Springs International Film Festival; a tennis tournament in March, the BNP Paribas Open, that ranks only below majors in importance; hike to a waterfall in a true oasis.
“Northeasterners are going to find experiences in the Coachella Valley to be very different than what they’ve experienced elsewhere,” says Gary Orfield, director of tourism development for Visit Greater Palm Springs, the valley’s visitors and tourism bureau. “We’re not just about golf, which we do very well. It’s the variety: in culture, in experiences, in the geography. The desert is so varied.”
Yep, the weather is rather static, and there’s a hell of a lot of sand, red tile and stucco, and palm trees, but forget a monolithic expectation of sameness. In fact, the bureau’s motto is “Find Your Oasis.”
“Another key aspect to the desert experience is health and wellness,” Orfield notes. “I mean this quite literally when I say that 90% of the clients we deal with, the visitors we come in contact with, say they feel a true sense of peace when they are here, that stress has been lifted off their shoulders. There is something about our desert environment that lends itself to creating that peaceful feeling.”
Orfield obviously has never four-jacked after reaching a par 5 in two.