On Friday we headed out to Las Vegas Paiute Golf Resort for 36 holes on a day that I would have rather stayed inside. After a couple decent weather days the forecast for Friday was ugly – cold and windy (think 25ish+ mph winds). Admittedly, I let the crappy weather sour my experience, at least for the morning round on the Wolf course.

There are 54 holes at Paiute (Wolf, Snow Mountain and Sun Mountain courses – all Pete Dye designs) and I had us booked on the Wolf at 8am and then the Snow at 12:30pm. The courses alternate with what two of the three are open for play so Sun Mountain wasn’t open on the day we played.

Paiute is located on an Indian reservation about a half hour northwest of the Strip. All of the courses are out in an exposed valley (think no homes and usually windy) with Mt. Charleston to the west and another range of mountains to the east. The scenery is great in this area and those views are one of the main reasons you’ll want to add Paiute to your Las Vegas golf list.

As I mentioned we had an early morning tee time on what turned out to be a busy day. The course’s cancellation policy isn’t very good (more on that bit of drama in the next post though) so I think everyone was stuck golfing. My friend and I joined two others and all of us played in about 3.5 hours. I think we just wanted to be back inside and hurried through the round!

The Wolf course is advertised as the top course at Paiute. It is the one you seem to see the most pictures of and I think it hosts some high-level amateur events. And, you better bring your “A” game to play the Wolf or at least hope it isn’t windy. The course can play up to 7,604 yards, however I played the black tees which are 7,009 yards (72.6 rating and 131 slope). The next set of tees up are 6,483 yards so some combo tees would be awesome.

Overall, I found the Wolf to be very challenging – and I don’t really mean that in a good way. The fairways give you some room if you avoid the bunkers, but I didn’t enjoy trying to play around the green complexes. Besides the par-3’s (which are fun), most of the other holes felt the same to me – straightaway par-4’s and par-5’s that had an artificial look.

Dye squeezed in as many undulating fairways, mounds, bunkers and chipping areas as he could and the playability suffered on a windy day. Chipping areas guard all the greens and edges of the greens feed off into them. All that contour got repetitive for me as I chipped it across multiple greens. Everything here is designed for a high soft approach, just the opposite of what you want in windy conditions.

I mentioned the scenery as a positive and another is the course’s collection of par-3’s. The front nine has the 177 yard 8th which plays slightly downhill. There is a large grassy mound short of the green and a massively deep bunker on the right which gave off Whistling Straits vibes.

The back nine has the Wolf’s (and likely the whole facility’s) signature hole. The 15th is a 162 yard par-3 that plays to an island green that looks a bit like a large version of the 17th at TPC Sawgrass. The tees were back and the wind was howling into our faces, so I guessed it played more around 195 yards. I think I got the yardage right for my shot, but certainly missed the line!

The conditions were very good, however they should be for the $129 off-season green fee. The 36-hole rate of $179 makes it a better value, though. The nice thing is that Paiute sits at 2,500 feet and therefore they are able to have the cool-weather ryegrass grow all year. All the turf was full, lush and provided excellent cushion. The greens were almost blemish free (hardly any ball marks) and super fast. Putts just wouldn’t stop rolling.

As you can probably tell I didn’t care much for the Wolf’s design, however the good news is that I greatly enjoyed the Snow Mountain course – and that review is next. Still, I think the Wolf is worthy of being one of the top public courses in Nevada and one to consider when visiting Las Vegas.

Course Pictures (click any picture to scroll through the gallery):