North at Talking Stick Golf Club - Public

Talking Stick occupies a dead flat piece of land with no real natural features on an Indian reservation. The only natural attribute is the beautiful mountains that form the backdrop to this desert course. However, they are just scenery. Many architects would therefore feel compelled to move heaps of earth to 'create' some character, but Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore know better. They moved essentially nothing. The land is flat, so the course is flat, and that's all there is to it. So many architects talk of 'working with nature' only to proceed to mold the course to suit their needs, but not Crenshaw and Coore. The greens are generally just extensions of the fairway, being raised and crowned only slightly.