The clubhouse at Palos Verdes sits on the high point of the property, and from there the whole course falls away beneath you like an argument still being settled. Somewhere far below, more than 250 feet down, the 15th hole occupies the lowest ground on the place. Everything in between is canyon, slope, and the patient work of a man who knew how to make extreme land behave. That man was Billy Bell, foreman and right-hand man to George C. Thomas. Los Angeles is blessed with remarkable golfing ground, all canyons, barrancas, and sudden elevation, and Thomas left his signature on it at Bel Air, Riviera, and Los Angeles Country Club, three very different properties within a few miles of each other. Palos Verdes lies just down the road from those famous names, pressed hard against the mountainous body of the peninsula, and its land may be the most dramatic of them all. Bell did not fight it. He threaded it, about as delicately as anyone could have. The front nine begins on the high ground, riding along and around a canyon as if taking its measure. Then, at the par-3 fourth, it commits, dropping more than 100 feet into the canyon itself. It is the kind of shot that makes a golfer stand on the tee a moment longer than necessary, simply to look. The ground does not let you stay down there. The par-5 sixth shoots straight back up, and it reveals one of Bell's quieter bits of cleverness: he gave his par 5s, with their longer yardages, the task of tackling the site's most extreme ground. The deep canyons that break up the property often force holes into corridors, and that is where Palos Verdes finds its character. Lies are rarely flat. Shots are rarely straightforward. The ball sits above your feet or below them, and the uneven ground makes every swing feel like a small negotiation. The back nine opens by wrapping horseshoe-fashion around another canyon, and the 12th is the hole a person might fall for. It is a short par 4 whose tee shot plays over the deepest part of that canyon, a small hole with a large heart. From there the course turns almost vertical. The 13th and 14th play downhill on diagonal lines, asking players to get as close to the deep canyon as they dare. The 14th alone falls 100 feet from tee to green. Then comes the 15th, down at the bottom of everything. Its neighbors plunge or climb outright, while the 15th holds itself a little apart from that rhythm. Yet even here the approach comes from an uneven, uphill lie toward an angled green, as if the course will not let you forget, even at its lowest point, that the ground is always tilting. The 16th asks the same question with more insistence, another angled green demanding precision from a stance that never quite settles. The 17th, too, keeps faith with that steep rhythm, playing straight up or straight down the hillside. In 2013 Todd Eckenrode carried out a modest renovation, and its restraint suited the place. He expanded the short grass, opened the canyons back up, and gave fresh life to Bell's classic bunkering. The work helped restore a particular Southern California charm. Palos Verdes lacks the flash of its Hollywood neighbors, and it does not seem to want it. Its romance is subtler, the quiet appeal of an overlooked course. It belongs to a craftsman who worked beside a master and then, given a wild and difficult hillside of his own, made something clever, strategic, and deeply loyal to the ground beneath it.