Bear's Best Las Vegas

Bear's Best Las Vegas opened in 2001 as an unusual tribute course: rather than a single original routing, Jack Nicklaus and his design team assembled eighteen replica holes drawn from among the hundreds of courses he has built worldwide. Nicklaus reportedly said organizing the existing eighteen "just might have been more challenging" than creating new holes. Set in the Summerlin area on the city's west side near Red Rock Canyon, the layout reproduces standouts from designs such as PGA West, Cabo del Sol, Castle Pines, La Paloma, and Las Campanas. The team went to unusual lengths for authenticity, importing regional touches like palms echoing Mexico, pine and elevation nodding to Colorado, and even black slag sand borrowed from the Old Works course in Montana. The result plays like a traveling greatest-hits album of Nicklaus architecture.