Cascata Golf Club - Nevada, U.S.A.
When
it comes to golf, Cascata Golf Club is the last word
in Las Vegas extravagance. Designed by Rees Jones
and built by the MGM Grand, the course is intended
as the ultimate golf experience, open by invitation
only to the highest of high rollers. In particular,
MGM wanted to trump rival Steve Wynn's Shadow Creek
course. But when MGM bought Wynn's Mirage Resorts in
2000, it sold Cascata to Park Place Entertainment,
whose Las Vegas holdings include Caesar's Palace.
Opened in 2001, Cascata is laid out in the desert
mountains, with the fairways slippered through the
canyons offering generous landing areas. Cascata is
Italian for "waterfall," and the course takes its
name from the 417-foot cataract that cascades down
the mountain face and flows through the center of
the opulent clubhouse. Jones created waterworks
throughout the course by pumping water from nearby
Lake Mead into an ancient dry riverbed that ran
through the property, while the fairways are rimmed
by tens of thousands of individually drip-irrigated
date palms and desert plants. The price tag for the
course came to a Caesar's ransom of nearly $60
million.
Reflection Bay Golf Club - Nevada, U.S.A.
Reflection
Bay Golf Club, which opened in 1998, is a Jack
Nicklaus-designed resort course at Lake Las
Vegas, 17 miles east of the Strip in the town of
Henderson. The course is an entrancing
combination of rocky desert terrain and flatter
holes traced around the 320-acre man-made lake.
There are elevated tees, double fairways split
by native vegetation, and three waterfalls with
semi-tropical rock pools. Five of the holes play
along or across the lake, complete with a white
sandy shoreline and palm trees. Lake Las Vegas
also recently unveiled the Falls Course designed
by Tom Weiskopf that dramatically scales the
desert escarpments on the back nine. The resort
features a Florentine-inspired Ritz Carlton
Hotel with a re-creation of the Ponte Vecchio.
Cascata Golf Club and
Reflection Bay Golf Club, U.S.A.
