Desert Forest Golf Club

Desert Forest opened in 1962 in Carefree, Arizona, built by Robert "Red" Lawrence, whose desert work earned him the nickname the "Desert Fox." It is widely regarded as the Southwest's first true desert-target course, laid out beneath Black Mountain in the Sonoran Desert for founders K.T. Palmer and Tom Darlington. Lawrence's approach was strikingly minimalist: he staked a single routing, moved almost no earth, and let the native desert frame narrow, rolling fairways with no housing crowding play. The par-72 layout stretches past 7,000 yards. Longtime member and architect Tom Weiskopf has served for decades as the club's de facto in-house designer, adding back tees, converting the fairways to Bermuda, and championing a no-overseed program that lets the course firm up into a fast, dormant, links-like character each winter.