I played 11/1/2013 just as the course was opening up after reseeding. It looked great, although the greens were slow, but very true. I got around in 3 hours and 45 minutes just before daylight savings time ended. The twilight greens fee was under $40, which is terrific for the area.

This is an excellent value course for Palm Springs. The physical location is very much like Rustic Canyon in Ventura County, with a wash running down the middle of a flat area. It's like Rustic Canyon's pretty but not too challenging sister.

You are allowed to go down into the dry creekbed and retrieve your ball or try to hit out, so I lost only one ball all day (in the one pond on the course on 17). The fairways are quite wide in the modern mode so you can bomb away from the tee. There is only a little bit of housing on this course out by the Palm Springs airport, so it's a true desert experience with glorious views of the mountains.

This is a Schmidt-Curley course from about 1999, so it looks modern. It's a little easier than most courses from that era because the greens are flat, so you might score a little better than you'd expect from looking at what appears to be a tough course. The bunkering is impressive, however, with some traps approaching 15 feet deep. The fairways have been bulldozed into some rolls so it's not completely flat. This is a fun course to warm-up on before hitting the expensive tough courses of the region. It would be an ideal first course for somebody flying in to the Palm Springs airport.

I played Rustic Canyon at the end of March and the course was in the finest condition yet in the dozen years I've been trekking out to to Ventura County's closest equivalent to St. Andrews: this was as fast and firm and fair as I've ever seen. The greens were good enough to play a British Open upon -- not quite as fast as a U.S. Open, but worthy of a PGA event. I probably took 45 putts, but every single 3 or 4 putt was my own fault. I didn't notice a single ball mark or spike mark. I was simply overcome by the complexity of the greens -- like playing Mr. Spock in 3-d Vulcan chess -- combined with the difficulty of remaining aware of the north to south slope of the canyon.

It was the closest thing I've experienced to playing Augusta National. I'd hit a decent iron onto the huge greens only to have the ball trickle for 15 or 20 second down to the fringe.

Rustic Canyon isn't a brutally hard course, but anything other than a superbly struck shot will keep rolling under the superb maintenance conditions until it arrives at a disadvantageous location for your next shot.

I paid $36 to play mid-day on a Wednesday in about 3 hours and 55 minutes in 75 degree sunshine. Does it get better than this?

With Brookside #1, the glass is a little more full than empty. On the downside, to wedge a 7000 yard course into a rather small piece of property required some tight hole corridors, and a rather uninspired course routing (there's only one dogleg on the course). The fairways are narrow, but the trees between the holes are both attractive and not so densely planted that you are dead. Other than the terrific fourth hole, the land seems flat, but most holes go either up or down the Arroyo Seco and there are some nice small undulations in most fairways. And the greens are dramatically pitched. Billy Bell's design palette was rather limited, with mostly oval greens and oval bunkers, but the back to front slope of the greens is frequently severe, so the course is more challenging than most munis. The overall setting next to the Rose Bowl at the base of the San Gabriels is of course one of the classiest in Southern California.

As for conditioning, playing on Thursday afternoon following a UCLA home game on Saturday night, I didn't see any litter or tire treads at all from parking cars on the fairways. The one problem with the fairways appears to be that the sprinkler system doesn't cover the turf consistently, so there were both dry spots and muddy spots. To me, it seemed like they were generally overwatering the turf, perhaps to cut down on dry brown spots, causing me to take big divots. Shots hit fat might travel only 20 yards since your club would just dig in rather than bounce off the turf as on a dry course. I'd prefer a dryer course even if it was a little browner.

The greens are poa annua, which I guess must be kept fairly wet. On a sunny 80 degree Thursday afternoon in mid-September, the greens were very wet, causing big ball marks and one wedge shot just plain plugged. The grass on the greens was cut extremely short -- if the greens had been dry, some of the pin positions would have unputtable due to the steep slopes of the greens. The course was built back during the Golden Age of golf course design, back before supershort grass was feasible, so the green slopes were intended to be played with longer, slower greens.

Personally, I would prefer to have the green grass longer and dryer rather than shorter and wetter, which would seem like it would be better for maintenance, but perhaps that's not feasible with poa? The greens didn't looke too good because of all the (repaired) ballmarks, but they putted reasonably well.

Teeing off at 2:00, the beginning of twilight, we finished with about 20 minutes of daylight to spare, in about 4:30 (we let a threesome play through). We only had to wait on a few holes. For only $24 twilight, it's hard to argue with even if the course was a little too wet.

Good course, reasonably priced with a GolfQ coupon for $50 on weekdays.

From one perspective, it's a one-hole course: the magnificent par 3 14th down into the depths of the quarry, with an enormous rock face rising up behind the green. It really does give the impression you are playing golf in Yosemite Valley.

The rest of the course is more than adequate, but not many of the holes struck me as being ideal natural holes, like, say, the 10th at Sandpiper is such a joy because the land is so perfect for a golf hole. Instead, I kept thinking, "Boy, Curley and Schmidt did a good job making this awkward stretch of terrain into a decent golf hole."

From the other, less churlish perspective, Oak Quarry gives you 17 fine golf holes and one staggeringly great one, so why complain?

Further, there are no homes anywhere near the course, and you have spectacular views of snow-capped Mt. San Gorgonio on many holes, most notably the 15th where you drive out of a vast slot carved in the rock directly at Old Grayback.

One interesting thing about the course is that most of the length is in the par 3s and par 5s. From the 6600 yard blue tees, there are no par 4s over 406. For a shorter hitter like me, that's an attractive set up.

The hole corridors are adequate but not particularly generous in width, although you will lose balls in the many staked off environmental areas. Rustic Canyon this is not in terms of width, but it's more playable than many 1970-1980s courses built on similarly rugged terrain.

Conditioning seemed fine on April 14th although perhaps not up to the finickiest standards, but that's not a big issue for me. The sand in the traps seemed too hard to explode out of so I ended up chipping out.

I was a little disappointed that all the local grasses on the hillsides above the course had turned brown already this Spring, but their bushes are still verdant and some are flowering.