SunRidge Canyon GC, Fountain Hills. Keith Foster, 1995.

This is a course where you play all the way down the hill starting at the first tee and all the way back up again, and almost all the holes are surrounded by homes. That’s normally a recipe for disaster, but given those underlying constraints, this is a pretty enjoyable course. The vast majority of the holes play down in canyons where the homes are visible but not really in range except for the most spectacularly wayward shots.

The uphill finishing stretch is tough (they’ve annoyingly dubbed it the Wicked 6), but it includes two par 3s that play downhill and two par 5s that are long but manageable in three shots, so it’s not really all that wicked. The 17^th here is a par 3 with a boomerang-shaped green and separate tees at ninety degrees, depending on which portion of the green is being used that day. I’ve yet to see a hole like this where either version of the hole seemed necessary.

Arizona 4th Decile [2014]