A New Desert Star

BY TONY DEAR • CG EDITOR

Humans, most of them anyway, appreciate the convenience that chain stores, hotels, and restaurants offer. We like knowing what to expect. It’s why we choose Arizona for fall and winter golf. No one’s suggesting you head to India or Finland or Uruguay for your next golf trip, but how about changing it up just a little?

New Mexico probably isn’t on anyone’s ‘Top States to Play Golf in’ list, and it’s hardly crammed with famous courses, or any type of golf for that matter. The Land of Enchantment is considerably bigger than the Evergreen State. With 121,697 square miles compared to 71,300, it has less than a third the number of courses with 100 (depending on which publication you read). Washington has 320.

Among those 100-odd courses, however, are several absolute gems that together make up a great golf trip.

Take Taos Country Club, a high-desert beauty 65 miles northeast of the delightful city of Santa Fe and a couple of miles east of a deep groove in the ground where the Rio Grande cuts through basalt rocks and sediments piled high over millions of years.

We have a few good courses on similar terrain in central Washington, and the area around Bend and Sisters in Oregon likewise has its share. Taos seems to take the high-desert motif a step further than anything in the Pacific Northwest, however, meandering through an expansive stretch of sagebrush and occasionally giving you the feeling of really being out there in the wild.

Yes, there are a few residences dotted about (Taos opened in 1994 with 65 three-acre lots adjoining the course) that remind you civilization is never far away, but the panoramas west to the Tusas Mountains and the Sangre de Cristo Range on the other three sides can make you feel very small.

The course was designed by Jep Wille of Austin, Tex., who worked for designers Leon Howard, Joe Finger, and Robert von Hagge/Bruce Devlin before giving professional golf a go at the age of 37 when he joined the Golden State Tour.

In California, he just about broke even and made a good friend in fellow pro Tad Bourg from New Mexico. When Bourg left the tour, he joined three investor friends in developing Taos CC purchasing one parcel of land at a time, some of them chunks he had owned and sold years before.

Bourg says there were two main reasons he chose Wille for the job. First, he could afford him and, second, he was a big Alister Mackenzie fan who preferred lay-ofthe-land courses that didn’t involve a lot of earth moving, something that, like the choice of architect, would keep expenses down.

Because of Bourg’s thriftiness and plain good sense, together with Wille’s restraint and ability to let the land talk, Taos ended up looking and playing a lot better than the final $2 million construction bill suggested it might. There is one man-made water feature at the short 11th, but, besides that, it is an unadorned, unpretentious layout where Wille’s terrific routing (the final quintet is an especially engaging run of holes) through the sagebrush throws up numerous memorable moments.

Taos’s ‘memorable moment’ count, while impressive, can’t quite match that of Black Mesa, however, located 45 miles southwest of Taos outside the small city of Española and owned by the Santa Clara Pueblo.

Black Mesa opened in 2003 and is the sort of course where you spend most of the round gazing at the incredible terrain all around. It’s a badlands-style moonscape with plenty of changes in elevation and 18 distinctive holes that drop, climb, twist and roll over rocky ridges and through natural valleys.

The designer lucky to be given this amazing site was Houston-based Baxter Spann who says, without a moment’s hesitation, it was the finest he’s ever worked on. “The course was originally planned for another site a few miles to the south,” he says. “It was nice, but not nearly as expansive and majestic as the Santa Clara Pueblo land. When I first got on this property it was just an amazing experience.”

Black Mesa enjoyed a lot of good press during its first 10 years, but a major falling out between the Pueblo and the course lease, who co-developed and operated the course, saw it deteriorate rapidly around 2013-14. The fairways became covered in dandelion and large sections of the bentgrass greens died, making them unsightly and largely unputtable. Not surprisingly, Black Mesa dropped out of the rankings and its green fee was more or less slashed in half.

A management turnaround helped get the course back on its feet, but it was the arrival of a new superintendent in early 2018 that finally saw the course thrive once again. Aaron Sunderlin, a graduate of Ohio State who had worked at a couple of Kansas City courses, fixed the faulty irrigation system, re-laid the greens and completed a bunker renovation project that saw the removal of 150 bunkers.

The results have been astonishing and three years on, Black Mesa is looking better than ever. Taos and Black Mesa are just a couple of New Mexico must-plays that are definitely worth getting on a plane to find. The back-up cast includes Sandia, Twin Warriors, Santa Ana and the excellent University of New Mexico Championship Course in Albuquerque.

And let’s not forget Paako Ridge. The superb Ken Dye design opened in 2000 and was bought by a New York consulting firm in 2018. Since then, the property has undergone some major capital improvements in an effort to make it more upscale. It has meant a significant rise in the green fees, but if you’re coming this far, we’re assuming you’ve budgeted for it. Sound move.

Outliers not easy to get to perhaps, but worth the effort, include the excellent Ken Dye-designed Piñon Hills in Farmington, in the state’s northwest corner, which is rated

among the country’s best 10 municipals, and Rockwind Community Links outside Hobbs in the southeast, which opened in 2015 and is a complete rebuild of Ocotillo Park GC. Andy Staples’s innovative and visionary work here turned an unexceptional course into a community asset lauded by Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, Top100golfcourses.com and several other publications.

So, there you go, a golf trip you probably hadn’t considered before but which we think you really shouldn’t miss.