When we teed off at noon, we figured we had the course to ourselves. Who else would be out there in 120-degree heat? But as I walked off the tenth green, I saw we had gained a companion: a mangy coyote emerging from a grove of salt cedar trees, eyeing me a little too warily.
The folks at Furnace Creek had warned us of the dangers of heatstroke, but no one had mentioned coyotes. All I needed after my double bogey on ten was a heat-crazed carnivore looking for a baked-human lunch—on a golf course laid out at the foot of the Funeral Mountains, no less.
Turned out I didn’t have to worry. This beast wasn’t in a lean and hungry mood. He plopped himself down on the green, as exhausted as I was. “Don’t worry,” friends back East had said, “dry heat is different.” Dry heat? Don’t believe it. Heat is heat, and this was heat that made the blade of my putter too hot to touch. Heat that made grass crunch beneath my feet. Suffocating heat that made every stroll down the fairway feel like a walk into a fired-up pizza oven.
My buddies Joe and Bill, a couple of relatively sane Philadelphia lawyers, were riding in the cart. They said the breeze made their eyeballs hot. I wouldn’t have known. I was walking. Slowly. Very slowly.
As I shouldered my bag for the hike to the eleventh tee box, I turned back to see several birds coasting a few feet over the coyote’s head. The scrawny predator gave them a passing glance, then rested his head back on his front paws, tongue hanging out, panting.
That’s when it hit me: When it’s too hot for natives to walk, maybe hiking eighteen holes at Furnace Creek, carrying a bag, might not be the wisest way to spend a Saturday afternoon in mid-July.
What was it Noël Coward wrote, about mad dogs and Englishmen venturing out in the noonday sun? He forgot to include one species: middle-aged golf loons, and clearly mad ones at that.
Goodbye, Death Valley.” That’s what the pioneer wife legendarily said in 1849 as she turned her back on this desolate desert basin after her party was rescued from a monthlong exile in the hottest place in the hemisphere. They had taken a wrong turn en route to the goldfields. Miraculously, only one of the would-be prospectors had died.
More than a century and a half later, I found myself heading into the same valley. Why? Because it’s there. Because there’s nowhere I won’t go to play golf—and Furnace Creek is about as nowhere as you can get.
I’ve played in six inches of wet snow. I’ve played in wind strong enough to boomerang a nine-iron shot behind me. Eventually I started to get curious about where the limit lies: Is there a point at which golf stops being fun? If there is, I thought I might find it on a course that lies in one of the two hottest places on the planet (the other is in Libya). What if I played that course on July 15, forecast to be the hottest day of the year, teeing off at high noon in the worst of the heat? Would that beat a good day at work?
Which is how I came to be barreling down a heat-shimmering two-lane highway a couple of hours northwest of Vegas, headed to Death Valley National Park by way of Area 51 and the nuclear test site in Jackass Flats. I watched my rental car’s dashboard thermometer climb steadily as the road wound inexorably downward, surrounded by a landscape as lunar as you’ll find anywhere outside the moon itself. (Why they call it a park is beyond me. One guidebook swears Death Valley sports more than nine hundred species of plants, but during my ventures into the blighted landscape over three days—including a visit to the bizarre Devil’s Golf Course, a misnomer for more than fifty square miles of jagged rocks made of salt—I saw exactly two.)
When I passed below sea level, the thermometer hit 112.
I had begun my descent into golf madness.
The Furnace Creek Golf course, first laid out in 1931 next to two major date farms and extensively renovated and beautified by Perry Dye in 1997, is the world’s lowest course, sitting 214 feet below sea level. The oasis of choice here is the Furnace Creek Inn & Ranch Resort. Unfortunately, the storied Mission-style Inn is closed during the summer. Which leaves, for those warped enough to play Furnace Creek at that time, the more humble Ranch, a motel-like layout replete with a saloon, a coffee shop, a general store, a steak house and a pool. The pool is warm. In fact, all of the Ranch’s water is warm in the summertime—you couldn’t take a cold shower here if you wanted to. Don’t ask me why there are sunlamps in the bathrooms.
When we checked in, management enthusiastically proffered tourist literature, including a visitor’s guide to Death Valley with a cheery tale of the guy who recently hiked into the desert for fun. It was only 110 degrees. But that was in the shade. He died. And he wasn’t carrying golf clubs.
In the summer, of course, the first tee is wide open. No reservations are necessary. But certain preparations are required. Like liquid—as much as we could load into a couple of insulated bags provided by the resort. The desert sun is deceptively draining, we would discover: It doesn’t make you sweat. It just sucks you dry from the inside.
“If you start feeling light-headed, nauseous or dizzy, come back in,” advised Phil Dickinson, the resort’s director of sales and marketing, as we headed out at noon. “Don’t let yourself get weird out there.” I didn’t tell him that my golf game is always weird.
Golf shop supervisor Kim Sleichter showed us his stash of ice at the back of the nineteenth hole. “You’ll need it,” said Sleichter, a man of few words. Then he wished us well, locked up the pro shop and went home, leaving us alone on the first tee—save a couple of ravens, which were standing in the shade with their beaks open, panting. I’d never seen a bird pant before. But then, these birds were wearing all black.
My friends hadn’t come along to test their mettle or flirt with disaster or consider philosophical questions. They were there for the golf. Bill, a ten handicap, was looking to pile up a handful of birdies on a course that on paper seemed easy. Joe, a hacker who had given up the game a month before, was coming out of retirement for one reason alone: “I want to shoot a score lower than the temperature for the first time in my life,” he announced.
Mostly, they’d just come along for the ride, in a well-stocked cart. They couldn’t for the life of them comprehend why I insisted on walking—or why I’d allowed myself no concessions. I’d be carrying a full bag. After contemplating various sartorial options (I’d considered donning full Bedouin attire), I decided to dress the way I would to play a regular round. I didn’t even discard any of the dozen-plus balls I usually carry as insurance against my wicked slice. I was going to play it like a man. Or die trying.
Furnace Creek, a short (6,236 yards) par seventy, is under normal conditions a pleasant test, suitable for golfers of all skill levels. The fairways, largely unbending, are wide and fair. The greens are sloping and tough—especially in July, when despite irrigation they’re deceptively slow: They can’t be cut down too low, or they’ll expire.
Because of underground springs, water actually comes into play on a few holes. And on the second hole, before the sun really began to settle into my brain, I cleared the pond that crowds the green of this 144-yard par three, planting my tee shot thirty feet above the cup (and then three-putting). On these first few holes, I even managed to take in some of the aesthetic surroundings. The towering, multicolored mountain ranges. The exotically shaped salt cedars. The dozens of species of birds, drawn to the only aboveground water for hundreds of miles.
But by the time we reached water again, after I had hiked the par-five dogleg-right fifth and faced the lake that fronts the sixth tee, the heat had taken hold. I planted my first two drives in the lake. And was sorely tempted to follow both of them. I could feel myself dehydrating from the inside, like a grape turning into a raisin. By the seventh hole, I was slugging liquids after every shot and taking detours to every spot of shade I could find as I weaved down the fairways.
Even riding in the cart, Bill and Joe kept feeling the need to soak their heads in the ice water that sloshed in our insulated beverage bag. At one point, Joe’s key-chain thermometer climbed past 140. Maybe it had been in the sun too long. Maybe it really was 140. More likely, the mercury had been hanging too close to the baking blade of Joe’s E-Club—or, as we dubbed it after he’d flubbed another wedge attempt, his F-Club.
In fact, none of us was scoring worth a darn; my par on the short par-four ninth was our first. Then again, it’s difficult to string together two decent shots when your main concern isn’t which club to grab but which bottle: water or Gatorade? On top of that, the elevation—214 feet below sea level, remember—shaves dozens of yards off drives.
But we finished the round on an up note, with Bill’s forty-foot putt dropping for par. We then headed for the pool, which was surprisingly crowded. Apparently, Death Valley is a destination for French, German and Italian vacationers drawn by the exotic landscape. (They are, of course, too sane to play golf.) Amid the splashing bevies of young European women frolicking at poolside, we deconstructed our round.
Joe, with a 106, was delighted to have beaten the temperature. “What a great day to give up golf!” he said, mixing drinks with the airline bottles of gin he’d procured from the resort’s general store. Bill, after only three pars and no birdies, sipped a bottle of Lobotomy Bock—appropriate, considering the brain cells we’d lost on our round—and complained under his breath. He was so bummed with his 94 that he failed to notice the Eurobabes in bikinis. My score: an even 100.
After dinner and a bottle of merlot, we decided to drive into the desert in Bill’s convertible, top down, air-conditioning blasting, to a spot called Zabriskie Point—the title of the 1970 film that the late Italian virtuoso Michelangelo Antonioni hoped would be his masterpiece. It was a box-office flop, arguably the worst movie Antonioni ever made.
In the daytime at Zabriskie Point, you can hike up a steep knoll to take in an astounding view of badlands rock formations and the salt flats in the valley. At midnight, of course, all you can see is inky blackness. So we splayed out on the hood of Bill’s car and waited for our Tony Soprano moment. (In one of the last episodes of The Sopranos, you may recall, Tony drove into the desert, tripped on peyote, watched the sun rise and shouted, “I get it!”)
All we had for consciousness alteration was general-store tequila. But as I stared at a trillion stars, looking for cosmic inspiration, I realized that despite the overall weirdness of that day’s round, I hadn’t gotten it. I hadn’t pushed the envelope. I hadn’t glimpsed the other side. On some level I’d actually enjoyed much of the day.
After all, at Furnace Creek the air-conditioned bar is never more than several hundred yards from any of the greens. You can always dive into a pond if you feel heatstroke coming on. I had to face it: Midsummer golf at Furnace Creek had not threatened my life. Only my score. Which is why, the next morning, as Bill and Joe drove down to Vegas for their return flight to lawyer-land, I set out in the opposite direction, farther away from civilization.
I was in the desert. The real challenge, it stood to reason, had to be somewhere out there beyond this palmy, irrigated oasis—out where things get really weird.
It wasn’t easy to find a course more extreme than Furnace Creek. I tracked down another eighteen within a ninety-minute drive, but it was on the way back to Vegas, a well-watered layout in Pahrump, Nevada, a town with a main drag clotted by casinos, fast-food joints and the requisite Nevada twenty-four-hour gentlemen’s club. I didn’t want tacky. I wanted a test.
I called the motel in the nearest desert town to the west of Furnace Creek, two hours out of the valley. No dice, said the clerk. No golf there—or anywhere else he knew of. Calls to the park ranger came up empty, too. Finally, I called the county sheriff’s office. The guy on the phone connected me to a substation somewhere else.
“Well,” said the anonymous deputy, “I think there’s something down in Trona. I don’t know if it’s a real golf course.”
I found the town on the road map: a small spot on a small highway in a vast expanse of nothingness. And so I headed for Trona, California, a hundred-mile drive to the southwest, passing en route a cluster of buildings called Stovepipe Wells, where I stocked up on water and paused to read a sinister public-service poster outside the general store. Beneath huge, scary orange letters reading our savage summer sun! was a warning that caught my eye: The real danger in the summer desert, it said, isn’t from the sun above but from the sand beneath, which can reach temperatures of two hundred degrees.
The golf course I was looking for? All sand.
So I drove over a couple of mountain ranges, out of the park, and dropped into the Searles Valley. Just because it doesn’t sound as forbidding as Death Valley doesn’t mean I wasn’t entering the next level of the inferno.
Trona Golf Course is indicated by a small hand-painted sign on State Highway 178, just down the road from a junkyard of rusted automotive hulks, at least one dating to the 1930s. (The entrance to the course was up the road from a sign for Trona Airport, featuring a painted silhouette of a plane. A DC-3.)
No cars traveled the road in either direction. I drove down a long dirt driveway, parked in an empty lot and walked through the creaking gate in the cyclone fence that rings the course. In front of the weathered clubhouse, another warning read caution: rattlesnakes.
I began to feel as if I were in a golf movie directed by David Lynch.
“Yeah, we’re open,” said Klaus Funke, president of the Trona Golf and Social Club, laughing in disbelief at my appearance from out of nowhere—to play a round at noon? In July? On an all-sand course? Klaus and a couple of his friends were sipping beverages at the otherwise deserted counter (remember the hotel bar in The Shining?) as their swamp cooler strained to chill down the old structure. They hadn’t played golf; they’d just convened for a little Sunday refreshment. Klaus took my five dollars with a smile and told me he’d be locking the place up in a few minutes.
“Wait,” said one of his friends, sliding off a stool. “You’ll need this.” He handed me a worn square-foot patch of artificial turf. “Unless you want to hit your irons off the sand.”
I plucked a scorecard out of a rack and quickly surveyed the layout. I’d been expecting an executive course, maybe a bunch of par threes. At most, a series of short par fours.
No such luck. The second hole was a 513-yard par five. The fifth, another par five, measured 490. I had a long walk ahead of me. The thermometer on the weathered clubhouse wall read 120. But then, the dial only went up to 120.
Defiantly stupid, I was carrying a full bag again. Wearing a dark-blue shirt. And, as if I needed the added weight, I was also lugging one of Furnace Creek’s insulated bags, crammed with melted ice, bottled water and Gatorade. I knew I’d need it. Not only was there no water to drink on the course, there was virtually no shade.
As I faced the first fairway from the shelter of one of the few lonely trees, I scanned the terrain: white sand, three-foot-high desert shrubs, more white sand. I teed up a ball and off I went, alone into the void.
Laid out in 1978 so the workers from the local borax and soda-ash processing plants could have something to do in their down time, Klaus’s course isn’t all sand. A few of the tee boxes, looking like ancient burial mounds rising from the desert, sport patches of scruffy, balding grass. The greens are actual greens. Well, sort of. They appear to be fertilized by jackrabbit scat. There are no man-made bunkers, however—the whole thing is a bunker.
The sand itself comes in all consistencies: hard, soft and everything in between. Some of my shots bounded an extra thirty yards. Some plugged. But every square inch of sand was hot. At one point, I reached down and placed my palm an inch above the ground. I could feel the heat pulsing up from below.
My shot of the day was a forty-foot putt on the fifth that traveled from sand to jackrabbit scat to rough grass to the green and to the pin, where it clanked so loudly it startled me, then dropped with a clunk into the hole. It was at that point that the overwhelming silence hit me. Other than the occasional whistle of a freight train six miles away in Trona, there were no sounds at all. At Furnace Creek, the absence of sound had been peaceful. At Trona, it was spooky and increasingly unsettling.
Soon, along with the silence, the huge, unrelenting sun (think Lawrence of Arabia) and the occasional “breeze” consisting of pure extra heat, came the sense of being truly, irrevocably alone. Back in the real world, I enjoy a solitary round now and then. Here, I would have welcomed even the mouthy guy you dread hooking up with on the random muni who has to tell you his life story. Hell, after a few holes, I would have welcomed a coyote or two. With the clubhouse now padlocked and empty, I was miles from any living thing. Even the rattlers had the sense to stay out of sight.
That I was able to string together bogeys on the first five holes was a testament to my ever-quickening pace. I wasn’t pausing to overthink my shots. I was hitting them as soon as I found them, instinctively, and they were flying straighter than usual.
There was, I thought at some point, a lesson there. But it quickly evaporated from my mind. Because it was also on the fifth that I took the final step down into madness—well, into a place where, clearly, some gray matter had been baked away and I was running on empty.
I’d nailed my drive, hefted my golf bag, grabbed the sloshing bag (now down to its last two pints of warm water), turned to continue trudging—and suddenly couldn’t remember where I’d hit the ball ten seconds earlier.
I had a vague memory of a golf shot. But was it on this hole or the last? I replayed my swing in my head. In my mental replay, it looked like a lot of my other swings. But I did have a fairly certain feeling that I’d hit the ball straight. So I hiked off the tee, zigzagging vaguely around the sand, and eventually was pleased to come across a purple golf ball (I forgot to mention that white balls are invisible in vast stretches of desert). I unshouldered my clubs, dropped the water bag and hacked the sucker another 150 yards. Toward my final bogey, my last respectable hole.
Of the par-three sixth hole, I have no memory whatsoever.
On the tee-hump of the seventh hole—a 371-yard par four that seemed to stretch for at least two or three miles ahead of me—I had enough sense remaining to realize I had to make a serious decision, even though I hardly felt capable of logical thought. Do I keep going for foolish pride’s sake, or do I give it up and hike back to my car, admitting that my quest was in fact a genuinely dangerous folly?
For by now, this round of golf was not comically insane, it was truly insane. If I were felled by heatstroke, when might someone find me? Next Sunday? Next December? I had visions of a skeleton sprawled with a golf bag on its back, rattlesnakes winding in and out of its rib cage. With a raven or two standing nearby. Panting.
I had reached the point of return.
But my golf brain was still operating. I figured that if I had to make the walk in anyhow, I might as well hit a few more shots on the way. In the end, the famous axiom was proving itself: Bad golf, like bad sex, is still good. And golf in the desert beats walking over sand with no purpose at all, other than living to talk about it.
So I poured the last pint of warm water over my head and finished my round. Made a triple bogey on nine to post a 52. The hundred yards from the last green to my car was the longest walk of my life. The drive to a general store in Trona for a gallon of Gatorade was the longest mile I’ve ever navigated.
The drive back to Furnace Creek was two hours of air-conditioned bliss. Immediately I went and dove into the pool—warm water had never felt so refreshing. On a lounge chair I sipped a Lobotomy Bock and toasted myself, smiling idiotically at the uncomprehending German couple in the deck chairs to my right, who smiled right back.
I had survived. I’d found the outer limit, and gone past it. I’d played the real Devil’s Golf Course: nine holes of match play pitting golf against sanity.
Not surprisingly, it had turned out to be no match at all.
