I played out here today. I had bought a Group Golfer voucher ($29 with cart) awhile back and finally decided to use it before it expired at the end of the month. I knew the weather was supposed to be ... Continue »

I played out here today. I had bought a Group Golfer voucher ($29 with cart) awhile back and finally decided to use it before it expired at the end of the month. I knew the weather was supposed to be nice and not windy as you might normally expect here. It was gorgeous up there and that helped make for an enjoyable round. The voucher was good only after 10am on weekends, so I just walked on. Got there right at 10 and was out on the course paired with another twosome about 10:15. Front nine was a great pace, then slowed down on the back. Still, just over 4 hours, which is excellent.

The course is in decent shape coming out of winter conditions. I can imagine it's tough to keep this course up with the extreme high and low temps of Palmdale. The fairways were patchy, but mostly green. It appears the grass is really just coming in, so I can imagine it will look really nice in a few more weeks. The rough is completely dormant and just shaved down to nothing in most places. Bunkers full of great soft sand. Greens were very firm and hard to hold on approaches, but rolled smooth on putts at medium/quick speeds. Tee boxes very nice for the most part. Certainly not the best conditions you'll ever see here, but not bad for this time of year. I look forward to playing here again someday when it's in peak condition.

This is a fun desert style course that's a very nice change of pace in LA County, even though it's definitely out of the way. On one hand, though, that's a good thing because it doesn't get as overcrowded. Overall, the layout is pretty forgiving, but offers enough challenge and diversity to keep things interesting. There's not a ton of trouble to get into and the mounding around the fairways tends to be more helpful than harmful on wayward shots. As a desert style course, it doesn't quite measure up to what you might find in the Palm Springs area in terms of conditioning, design, scenery and service, but it's a unique course for LA County and they always seem to have plenty of deals going on. If I lived in North LA, I would gladly make the trek out here more often to get away from the muni drudgery!

One last thing to note is that they are redoing the arrangement of the tee boxes and the printed scorecards have not been updated. What is listed as blue on the card is now actually the gold tees on the course. What is white on the card is now blue, and so on. One of the guys I played with also mentioned they are planning to add in some black tee boxes to make it a more "championship" level course in the future. Seems the newest owners are doing a lot of good things here.