AZ Golf Guides

GREATER PHOENIX/SCOTTSDALE & CENTRAL AZ

Dove Valley Ranch Golf Club

CAVE CREEK

Dove Valley Ranch Golf Club opened in 1998 to rave reviews and accolades as Arizona’s Best New Public Golf Course, and it continues to grow even more inviting as the challenging and graceful layout by Robert Trent Jones Jr. matures. Just as ancient people who once lived here conjured beauty and function from the harsh surroundings, so did the Jones Jr. team—creating a golf course that respects the natural surroundings while supporting a more comfortable lifestyle. The upscale, daily-fee facility opened as the key amenity in the new 850-acre Dove Valley Ranch master-planned golf community in north Phoenix, off Cave Creek Road near the Carefree Highway.

Following the lead of the ancient Hohokam people from a millennium ago, who opted for a peaceful existence below Black Mountain, Dove Valley Ranch Golf Club allows golfers a comparable opportunity to get away from it all—if only for a day.

Charged with preserving the prehistoric significance of the property and maintaining the natural character of the desert, the Jones Jr. team created the Dove Valley course amid specific landscape features and historic attributes, incorporating them into the overall layout without dramatically altering the environment or the natural flow of the fairways. Petroglyphs and rock-art figures etched onto large granite boulders lend a touch of antiquity to hole markers.

Dove Valley is essentially a desert-style golf course with hints of tradition, such as ample fairways and subtly contoured greens with openings in front, featuring a low, rolling mix of holes of varying difficulty. The layout is very playable, but also strategic enough to test the course-management skills of every player. According to Jones, the key was to not “over-cook” the gentle nature of this golf course, which makes Dove Valley a kinder, gentler creation from a designer usually known for his more heroic strategies.

The front nine opens as an easy warm-up for what’s to come and bears down quickly on the 2nd hole, framed by water down the right and a 20,000-square-foot bunker wrapping behind the green. The front side threads through rejuvenated open desert and closes with a large lake in play on Number 9.

The back nine tightens as it plays into the dense desert vegetation along Willow Wash, the dominant natural land feature on the golf course. The generous fairways only appear narrower by the stands of ironwood and acacia trees. Aptly named Bird Bath, the 18th challenges with a final stretch of water that runs the length of the hole. To add further visual stimulus and local flavor, the sand bunkers feature unusual reddish sand quarried from Red Mountain east of Mesa.

The Dove Valley Ranch development team deftly melded the past with the present, creating a pristine property offering a new view for affordable, contemporary, community living and top-level daily-fee golf.

DAVID HUBBARD