Desert Forest sits at 2,500 feet in Carefree, Arizona, north of Phoenix, high enough that the place offers a welcome cool against the arid desert heat. Robert "Red" Lawrence built the course here in 1962, making it one of the earliest desert-style courses anywhere. He went on to shape many more layouts across the American Southwest and became known as "The Desert Fox." People like to call this the first desert course. That isn't literally true. What it can fairly claim is to be the first in the United States to embrace its setting, rather than a parkland course laid over the Sonoran ground. The genius of it is a kind of restraint. Lawrence routed the holes over the land instead of through it, doing almost no earthmoving and letting the fairways ride the medium-scale rolls of the site. The natural valleys and peaks do the work. There are no fairway bunkers, because out here they would be redundant; the sand and flora of the desert are the only hazards waiting for the tee shot. There are no cart paths scarring the view and no out-of-bounds markers. There is one water hazard in the whole 7,035 yards, and it must be avoided on the par-three 3rd. Otherwise it is Bermuda grass, bent grass greens, natural rock formations, and the open desert, which you may find yourself playing from as often as from the immaculate turf. Whether all this was a philosophy or a necessity is part of the course's charm. The naturalness may not have been a deliberate choice at all. It may have come from a paltry budget. Either way, the effect is lovely and unique, a layout that rests in harmony with its surroundings. For a long time, though, the greens let the place down. They were small and perched, and they were small and perched in nearly the same way, hole after hole. The club newsletter used to run a feature asking members to identify a green from a photograph, and the members often guessed wrong. In 2013 the club brought in Dave Zinkand, a former associate of Coore & Crenshaw, to upgrade the greens and make various other changes. "Imagine stumping an entire membership about an image of one of their own holes," he mused. He left the greens still small and still perched, but gave them a great deal more character and variety. Zinkand counts it a sign of his success that the newsletter no longer runs the contest. Lawrence's routing and Zinkand's green complexes, together, make Desert Forest one of the finest mid-20th century American courses. The course had been rearranged once before. Early in its life, the nines were flipped, because the original 17th and 18th, now the 8th and 9th, played into the setting sun. The change didn't harm the cadence of the round. Both the 9th and the 18th are dramatic enough to serve as finishers, and the two nines close with similar runs of pars, 4-5-3-5 going out and 4-5-3-4 coming home. The only thing the old numbering had in its favor was the 7th, a dramatic risk-reward par five, which would work even better near the end of a round as a potential match-decider. Meghan Bolger won the U.S. Women's Mid-Amateur here in 2007, but following in her footsteps is not easy. The club is strictly private, with roughly 250 members, and you will need to befriend one of them to tee it up. At the end of the round you come back to the clubhouse, small and low-slung and distinctly midcentury, well suited to the sturdy elegance of Red Lawrence's golf, the kind of building that seems to belong to the desert as quietly as the course does.