The shot people remember at BIGHORN is the sixth tee on the Mountains Course. Arthur Hills put it at 1,207 feet in 1991. The fairway sits about 170 feet below. A well-struck drive hangs for something like nine seconds. That is the club in miniature: a Santa Rosa hillside above south Palm Desert, private play, and a membership licensed to owners rather than sold with the deed. Official styling is all-capital BIGHORN. Use that spelling in listings and search.
The Mountains Course opened in 1991 as a three-act round. The first six holes climb. The next six drop from that high tee, with valley views opening as you descend. The last six play against the Santa Rosa wall that gave the course its name. Hills used 44 bunkers. Ask the golf shop for current scorecard yardages if you are comparing clubs hole by hole. The Canyons Course is Tom Fazio, opened December 1998. Fazio moved more than eight million cubic yards to make waterfalls, creeks, giant palms, and wide fairways. His bunker count is 113, about 2.7 acres of sand. Two practice facilities, multiple putting areas, and a Learning Center sit on the property. Dale Abraham, a Golf Magazine Top 100 Teacher and TrackMan-certified instructor, directs the teaching program. Golf members play without tee times, subject to club policy. Each course has its own starter. The club aims for a round of about three hours and twenty minutes. The golf shop, inside the clubhouse, has been named by Golf World Business Magazine among the top private shops in the country for sixteen consecutive years.
The published clubhouse address is 255 Palowet Drive, Palm Desert. Houses sit in the Mountains and Canyons neighborhoods: custom estates, villas, and clubhouse penthouses oriented to ridge and valley views. BIGHORN Properties lists on-site. There is no public developer floor-plan catalog, because the product is custom and semi-custom rather than a named Sunrise-style collection. Membership is available to property owners only. It is not mandatory with purchase, and it is not automatic. Third-party pages describe Club and Golf categories as non-equity, non-voting, non-transferable licenses. Treat those descriptions as a starting point and get the current membership agreement from the club. Initiation and dues are not a public rate card we will reprint here. They change. Call Membership before you underwrite carrying costs, and put club approval on the same timeline as the HOA packet.
Spa and wellness, dining rooms, and The Vault fill the hours after a round. The club has hosted televised golf. Carts often carry owner colors. Chito Velasquez, the club's longtime Director of Golf Course Management, still sends members to that sixth tee when they need a reset. El Paseo is a short drive down Highway 74. Palm Springs International Airport is the practical inbound. Ironwood Country Club occupies the same south Palm Desert hillside at a lower elevation, which is why buyers often tour both in a single afternoon and should not treat them as interchangeable.
When you tour, separate the view from the paperwork. One is the sixth tee and whether the lot actually captures it. The other is whether the seller holds a golf license that can move, or whether you are applying from scratch. Norman Williams and Jacqulyn Stanton of The Stanton Williams Group at Compass work with buyers and sellers at BIGHORN Golf Club. Reach Norman at 760.464.2190 or Jacqulyn at 760.702.2557.
