Talking Stick Golf Club - Arizona, U.S.A.

Talking Stick Golf Club in Scottsdale features two courses, the North and the South, with the North ranked in Golf week's Top 100 Modern Courses in America. Both courses were designed by the tandem of Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, and are prime examples of their emphasis on allowing the natural terrain to dictate the design, with broad fairways and carefully conceived cross-bunkers that dictate the angles of play. The North Course is a spare, treeless desert links, framed by wild native grasses, with long views across the landscape of palo verde trees, creosote, and mesquite to Camelback Mountain, the McDowell Range, and Pinnacle Peak. The South Course has a lusher, more parkland look. The courses were built on the lands of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian community and take their name from the traditional Pima calendar stick, a wooden branch carved to mark significant historical events.

Kierland Golf Club - Arizona, U.S.A.

Kierland Golf Club is a 27-hole public course located in Scottsdale, with serene views of Camelback Mountain, Mummy Mountain, Pinnacle Peak, and the McDowell Range. Designed by Scott Miller, a former associate of Jack Nicklaus, and opened in 1996, the course is now part of Kierland Commons, which fea­tures an old-fashioned town square, including a town hall and the Westin-Kierland Resort. Miller moved a gargantuan 1.3 million cubic yards of earth to create the Acacia, Ironwood, and Mesquite nines. The result is holes contoured through broad ridges and banked hillsides, framed by blond desert grasses and mesquite trees. There are more than 300 saucer-shaped bunkers on the course, as well as lakes and dry desert washes. Kierland is also the home of a Golf Digest School run by Sandy and Mike LaBauve.