At its heart, New Mexico is about color and scale. Georgia O'Keeffe introduced the world to the region's unmistakable desert palette beginning in the 1930s, with her vivid paintings of bleached white cattle skulls, vermilion mesas and burnt-sienna adobes. The same vast, arid mountains and open spaces that inspired O'Keeffe have more recently sparked the imaginations of golf course architects and developers, who in the past decade have established New Mexico as a full-fledged golf destination.
There's never been any question about the state's cultural richness, or its high-desert climate of warm, sunny days and crisp, cool nights (not to mention brilliantly star-filled skies). In Santa Fe alone there is world-class summer opera, the architecturally preserved seventeenth-century Plaza and galleries teeming with shoppers in search of works by contemporary artists who have inherited O'Keeffe's abiding fascination with this land.
And it's not as if golf had been previously unknown in these parts. New Mexico produced the LPGA legends Nancy Lopez and Kathy Whitworth as well as the PGA Tour veteran and Native American Notah Begay III. But with the recent openings of rugged—and remarkably well-priced—courses such as Paa-Ko Ridge (2000) and Black Mesa (2003), New Mexico has unquestionably arrived.
WHERE TO PLAY
Black Mesa ****1/2
By now, many golfers know all about the sign—the one
in the clubhouse that warns: BIG COURSE, BIG MEDICINE—IT WILL KICK YOUR BUTT. Indeed, Black Mesa
Golf Club isn't for everybody. The first hole alone could
induce shock in the unwary. It demands a blind tee shot
over an arroyo, a pond and a scrub-covered hill. From
there, the course only gets harder . . . and more
interesting . . . and more spectacular. Located a half-hour
north of Santa Fe, Black Mesa weaves over and through stark
sandstone bluffs to pre- sent a supreme but fair test. The
par-three eleventh, for example, ascends into a box canyon
ringed with rocky escarpments, but beyond a crossing
forebunker the approach is relatively open. The bunkering
throughout is magnificently varied, with some smallish
fringed scrapes that look like they merely evolved and
others formally shaped as if they came from the drafting
table of Alister MacKenzie.
115 State Road 399, La Mesilla; 505-747-8946,
blackmesagolfclub.com. YARDAGE: 7,307.PAR: 72. SLOPE: 141.
ARCHITECT: Baxter Spann, 2003. GREENS FEES: $50–$85.
Paa-Ko Ridge ****1/2
For years Ken Dye (no relation to Pete) was best known as
the architect of America's supreme value course,
Piñon Hills, in remote northwestern New Mexico. With
Paa-Ko Ridge Golf Club, situated between 6,500 and 7,000
feet on the sunrise side of the Sandia Mountains twenty
minutes from Albuquerque and less than an hour from Santa
Fe, Dye created a near- masterpiece that's readily
accessible. Paa-Ko Ridge rambles through junipers, cedars
and piñones, or small pines, occasionally skirting
arroyos and outcroppings of rock. This is high desert, to
be sure, but it's heavily forested; the mountains defining
the horizon are clothed in shades of green. The par threes
form a distinguished quartet, with two of them, the eighth
and fourteenth, checking in at 260-plus yards. But it's the
183-yard fourth you'll remember most, not for the uphill
thrust over a ravine, but for the green itself, which
unfurls in three tiers and stretches a hundred yards end to
end.
One Clubhouse Drive, Sandia Park; 505-281-6000,
paakoridge.com. YARDAGE: 7,562.PAR: 72. SLOPE: 138.
ARCHITECT: Ken Dye, 2000. GREENS FEES: $75–$89.
Pueblo de Cochiti ****
So tucked away that one might be tempted to turn the car
around, thinking there couldn't possibly be a golf course
here, this pristine layout on tribal land is worth the
effort required to find it. Perched on a plateau in the
red-rock foothills of the Jemez Mountains, nearly an hour
north of Albuquerque and forty minutes southwest of Santa
Fe, Pueblo de Cochiti Golf Course can't quite decide if it
wants to be a mountain or a desert layout—it's graced
with elements of both. Robert Trent Jones Jr. returned here
in 2000 and engineered a successful face-lift of his
original 1981 design, smoothing out a few maintenance
wrinkles and adding teeth in the form of twelve new bunkers
and an extra 350 yards. After your round, linger awhile in
the new adobe-style clubhouse, but when the coyote pups
start to howl, you'll realize it's time to rejoin
civilization.
5200 Cochiti Highway, Cochiti Lake; 505-465-2239,
pueblodecochiti.org/golfcourse.html. YARDAGE: 6,817.PAR:
72. SLOPE: 132. ARCHITECT: Robert Trent Jones Jr., 1981.
GREENS FEES: $45–$65.
