Desert Canyon Golf Club - Washington, U.S.A.

Desert Canyon Golf Club is indeed a course fashioned through a canyon in the high desert, but the desert is in the unlikely locale of eastern Washington State. Located in Orondo, the course provides dazzling views of the Columbia River and the triangular folds of the toffee-colored North Cascades Mountains that border the course. Designed by Desert Canyon's director of golf, Jack Frei, the target-style layout is divided between the Lakes and the Desert nines. There is also an 18-hole, par-72 putting course replete with lakes, traps, and rock formations designed by Frei and PGA tour player Rick Fehr.

Hidden Lakes Golf Resort - Idaho, U.S.A.

Hidden Lakes Golf Resort is located at Sandpoint, in the panhandle of northern Idaho that is surrounded by Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho's largest lake. The golf Course at Hidden Lakes is the realization of the dream of Jim Berg, whose older sister Eugenia and her husband Thurston Thomas "T.T." McGhee ran the property as a cattle ranch starting in 1924. Berg and his family began construction of the golf course in 1983 and it was completed in 1986, with additional revisions in 2000. The course offers vistas of the Selkirkand Cabinet Mountains, with the lower Pack River creating water hazards that are traversed by railroad-car bridges on 16 of the 18 holes-hence the course's name. The groves of cedar, birch, and evergreen that line the fairways are home to elk, deer, bear, muskrat, and especially the moose that roam the course. The clubhouse, situated along the banks of the Pack River, is built of rough-hewn logs from the area with walk-in stone fireplaces. The center support of the interior is a six-foot-thick cedar trunk with a life-size moose head carved from one of its limbs.