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Story by Vic Williams - Photos courtesty of LakeRidge Golf Course and Nothstar-at-Tahoe Resort
The raw materials for a world-class golf destination were here from the start. Broad swaths of warm desertscape. Dramatic mountain meadows ringed by 10,000 foot peaks. Fertile river basins, teeming natural springs, ancient coniferous forests. All the makings of a recipe that any golfer — and certainly any golf course architect — would salivate over.
While nature was indeed head chef in the amazing, multi-flavored geographical kitchen that is Reno-Tahoe golf, it took an army of talented human beings to mix the ingredients together into just the right proportions of passion, inspiration and technical know-how, cook them up with equal parts money and history and serve them to a traveling public starving for a memorable meal that they’d enjoy again and again. Think of it as the best possible birdie-seeker’s buffet: A trip through the links line here, a mountain morsel there, a taste of classic parkland play over there. Filling? Oh, yeah. Delicious? Absolutely. Nourishing for the spirit? And like a favorite restaurant, it’s tough to keep away from this spread for too long.
That was certainly the case for the dozen or so top-drawer designers whose work not only gives Reno-Tahoe’s public golf product its personality but, course for course and hole for hole, reveals a lot about each architect’s temperament and philosophy. Several of them got their feet in the door early in the region’s destination development and, recognizing the almost infinite variety in terrain and microclimate from, say, the Carson Valley to the south to Plumas County to the north — with all of Tahoe and Reno in between — came back to work some more magic.
Take Arnold Palmer, for instance, who first made his mark at the relatively flat, water-heavy Dayton Valley east of Carson City, then returned with longtime design partner Ed Seay to layout one of the two courses at ArrowCreek in south Reno, which is most definitely not flat, but laced over sagey arroyos at the foot of the Sierra. Both reflect the King’s swashbuckling approach to golf, with plenty of forced carries, risks and rewards.
Jack Nicklaus put his signature on private Montrêux Golf and Country Club, also in Reno, then headed to Truckee and came up with Old Greenwood, a resort course that ranks among the area’s best; either way you’re talking about the ample bunkering, big landing areas and challenging greens that distinguish the Bear’s work. Johnny Miller had a hand in two area courses as well — the links-like Genoa Lakes Resort Course near Minden and the newer, much different, pine-lined Timilick Tahoe in Truckee; these two courses are apt bookends for lead architect John Harbottle III’s wide-ranging talent and wealth of influences.
The big names and incredible courses keep coming: Edgewood Tahoe (designed by George in 1960s, reworked by nephew Tom Fazio in the 2000s); Robert Muir Graves (Northstar-at-Tahoe, which is really two courses in one — the front nine tight and tree’d, the back wide open); Peter Jacobsen (highly regarded Genoa’s Lakes Course with Harbottle, private alpine effort Gray’s Crossing with Jim Hardy); and the father-son Robert Trent Jones dynasty, who together and singularly are responsible for five of the area’s best known and most beloved layouts — Incline Championship and Mountain, LakeRidge, Red Hawk Lakes and the Resort at Squaw Creek. The Joneses are so versatile they can find inspiration on any site, and deliver the goods whether it’s in a desert, high-altitude or parkland context, but in Reno-Tahoe they not only showed their stuff; they raised the bar for all, in every way.
The region’s lesser-known authors shouldn’t be overlooked, either. Northern California’s Brad Bell made a bold “I can do this, too” statement at Coyote Moon, perhaps the finest mountain course in a region loaded with great ones. Keith Foster, who helped spruce up U.S. Open Southern Hills a few years ago, carved some remarkable greens out of the hills east of Sparks at D’Andrea Golf Club, while several other regional or local talents helped give Northern Nevada some of its most popular tracks — Reno’s Wolf Run, Carson City’s Silver Oak, Eagle Valley and Sunridge, Lake Tahoe old school classics like Old Brockway and Tahoe City (both stretch back to the 1920s) and, up Graeagle way, Plumas Pines and Graeagle Meadows.
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