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There’s lots of talk about “stimulus this” and “stimulus that” these days, but let’s get down to what’s truly stimulating, particularly if you’re a practitioner of a certain four-lettered sport that captivates the psyche like few others.
Of course it’s golf in Reno and Tahoe. But what’s stimulating about swinging a stick at a small dimpled orb with the hope of directing it into an almost-as-small hole in the ground?
Depends where the swinging takes place. Pebble Beach? Yeah, we’ll give you that one. Scottsdale? San Diego? Hawaii? Sure, they can all whip up a pretty mean stimulus package of sights and shots, at sometimes budget-busting high-season prices. But none of the West’s other best-known golf destinations can match Reno-Tahoe for its incredibly stimulating trifecta of geographical drama, course-to-course variety and overall value.
In the decade-plus since Reno-Tahoe joined the big leagues of top-drawer golf vacation regions, it has built on a well-deserved reputation for delivering a memorable and unique experience every time. Plan three annual trips of four courses each, and you can find yourself on the first tee of a different track every round for four years. That’s right: Within an hour’s driving radius of downtown Reno there are 50 layouts to choose from, covering every conceivable style, setting and price range. One day you can pull out all the stops and go after a modern Robert Trent Jones, Jack Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer design; the next you can sample a nearly 100-year-old gem just a pitching wedge away from Lake Tahoe’s west shore, the kind of quirky routing that makes you almost want to don knickers and break out the hickory sticks.
In fact, Tahoe is as good a spot as any to begin a speed-swinging tour of the area. Not only is it one of North America’s deepest alpine lakes at over 2,000 feet, it’s got a depth of golf history to match if not surpass that of many far more famous West Coast regions, including the Monterey Peninsula. Back in Tahoe’s well-to-do heyday — from the 1920s to the 1950s, say — the lake’s piney layouts hosted big money games among Hollywood stars like Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. On a July afternoon nowadays you’re much more likely to find kids in shorts lugging their clubs against an azure, white-capped background, or couples out to soak up the sunshine and fresh air. Still, the south shore in particular still maintains its share of big-name, high-altitude hackin’ — the American Century Celebrity Championship every July, where the likes of Donald Trump, Peyton Manning and Charles Barkley — 80 stars in all — tee it up in the shadow of world-class casino-hotels.
Spill over the hill from Tahoe’s 6,200-foot elevation in a couple different directions, and the golf magic just gets more beguiling. A few miles north of Kings Beach and Tahoe City, the railroad town-turned-tourist mecca of Truckee is a hotbed of high-end resort and private course-building activity; indeed, over the past decade and a half its inventory has gone from 45 holes to 153, more than half of them open to the public and carved from nature by the likes of Jack Nicklaus. And while Truckee boasts no big water views, there’s plenty of eye candy, including long-range spies of Mt. Rose and the Sierra crest or more intimate postcard-perfect meadow and forest scenes. There is simply no more powerful mountain golf one-two punch in all the West, and maybe North America, than the Truckee-Tahoe juggernaut; figure in the Northern Sierra mini-mecca of Graeagle and environs, which offers a mix of gorgeous, player-friendly layouts that ranks among the top experiences in all of northern California — all within an hour’s drive of Truckee — and suddenly you’re talking truly world-class stuff.
Sated yet? No? Thank goodness, because we’re just getting started. In fact, once you drop down into the Reno-Carson City corridor, you’ve got a couple dozen more resort and public golf options to chew on, and all of them serve up the tastiest examples of high-desert golf extant. Many “dishes” on the menu are less than a decade old and even more fascinating, somehow more delicious, now than on the day they debuted. The creative juices of top-line designers like Arnold Palmer, John Harbottle, Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Johnny Miller run fast and deep through desert valleys, over God-given and manmade water features and around mega-hilly terrain that allow the kind of tumble-into-the-abyss tee shots you’ll be talking about for years.
Not that it’s all sagebrush and target golf. The eastern slope of the Sierra is amazingly diverse in vegetation and more lush than you think — especially corners of the Carson Valley, where tall cottonwoods rise along river and canal and bring welcome shade to more than a few well-placed fairways and greens, or in the northern reaches of the city of Sparks — known as the Spanish Springs area — where marshy outposts once occupied by duck hunters and their prey are now still home to many types of waterfowl dodging dimpled orbs instead of 12-gauge shot. Still other public tracks meander through some of Reno’s prettiest neighborhoods, bringing a measure of pure parkland bliss to this land of little rain.
Once you’ve done your best to exhaust the birdie-seeker’s banquet that is Reno-Tahoe, it’s time to find room for some stellar après golf gorging, too — in every type of eatery that a gourmet-minded player can imagine. You can take a seat in a seafood-and-steak showcase affording sunset views of the lake that’ll give anything in Hawaii a run for its tropical money, settle in with your buddies in a slickly appointed 19th hole sports bar or just join value-minded locals for a burger or dog in a classic no-frills grill. Then again, beyond the golf domain is a whole universe of dining, lodging and entertainment options — and the kind of hospitality that made this region famous long before it exploded as a hacker’s paradise.
So, if you’re not feelin’ the fore-ious fury of Reno-Tahoe’s golf stimulus package by now, check your pulse and revisit your priorities. There’s too much fairway-and-green fun to pass up in these parts, and plenty of room in your pocket to make it happen.
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