New greens, less turf, fewer trees all part renovating Firecliff Course in California desert

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — The two city-owned golf courses at Desert Willow Golf Resort in Palm Desert opened in 1997, and like most courses of that age, they needed some tender loving care.

“Twenty-eight years of desert vegetation growing, it just got away from us,” said Ryan Szydlowski, director of golf at Desert Willow.

Like other courses in the desert from the 1980s and 1990s, Desert Willow has been engaged in changes and renovations over the last few years. While that started at the Firecliff Course in the summer of 2024 with a switch to MiniVerde grass for its greens, the Fireclliff Course continued to see big changes with both turf reduction and the clearing out of overgrown or dead plants and trees this summer.

“In the summer of 2024, we had our original course architect, Dr. Michael Hurdzan, he helped us with the renovation for resurfacing our greens with MiniVerde and replacing our tee boxes and accomplished some turf reduction,” Szydlowski said. “The turf reduction component was to offset water use from the DSRT Surf development that is onsite. And we accomplished half of that offset on Firecliff last summer.”

This summer, the changes were more about the visual aspects of the course. By taking out more than 20 acres of irrigated turf for the Firecliff and the Mountain View courses, Szydlowski said the facility had to change some of its desertscapes.

“We have pictures of Firecliff from the late 1990s and all you see is this amazing backdrop of the mountains from every hole, really limited desertscape plants, plants that should be there,” he said. “But over the years, you’ve had the invasive plants, like baccharis, which will latch onto irrigation and take over there. So we removed a ton of dead plants, a ton of baccharis plants and really brought back and restored the floral plants that we want.”

The project cleaned up parts of the golf courses that have slowly become overgrown, impacting the playing experience for golfers.

“We have been able to restore the sight lines from a lot of tee boxes and restore the sight lines of other holes from the tee boxes,” Szydlowski said. “So if you went out to 3 Firecliff, it is a little bit of a downhill par-3, a year ago all you saw was limited parts of that par-3. And now you can see hole 2 (to the left) and hole 4 behind it.”

The combination of removing the overgrown areas and removing irrigated turf left the Firecliff Course in need of some visual renovation as well, Szydlowski said. The answer was a thought-out desertscape.

“We did that in three phases,” Szydlowski said. “A majority of it was tier one, desert granite, just crushed DG. Then tier two, where you might have impactful visual areas, we would add in some stone and rocks. And then tier three, which is the highly visual areas behind the greens, that was tier three with DG, stone and plants. So a lot of really pretty plants behind the greens, backdrops.”

The new look of the golf courses goes with the new greens from 2024. Szydlowski said Hurdzan and course superintendent Chris Bien oversaw the new greens, including taking off six inches of material from the top of the greens before planting the MiniVerde. MiniVerde, a hybrid Bermuda grass, is growing in popularity especially in the Coachella Valley because it tolerates extremes in temperatures well enough to not require overseeding in the fall. Desert Willow did not overseed its Firecliff greens last year or this year, adding only some color to its fertilizers for the areas.

“They were fumigated to make sure the (old Bermuda) green was not coming back, and we put down a new combination of sand and gravel mixture,” Szydlowski said. “Chris was able to change it up a little bit, which is why we think they are more receptive. They are extremely receptive now but they don’t ball mark.”

While the work on the Firecliff Course is finished and the turf-reduction is done on the Mountain View Course, Szydlowski said Desert Willow officials still see work left to be done on the Mountain View.

“In our eyes it is set in stone that we are going to be putting MiniVerde on Mountain View, because that’s why we work so hard,” Szydlowski said. “It is one of our reasons to have a good year ever year, because we earmark those profits for operations toward capital expenses here. That’s way, now tax dollars are used.”