Palm Springs Golf Living Guide

Palm Springs' golf character today is split between spectacular, well-documented history and a much smaller present-day roster of clubs that clear this site's access-and-residential-relevance bar. The Canyon Country Club/Indian Canyons story is the headline: Donald Wexler- and Richard Harrison-designed, opened in 1962 with a $1.5 million clubhouse, host of the first Frank Sinatra Invitational, and ringed by homes once owned by Walt Disney, Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, and Jerry Lewis, with a membership roll that reportedly included Jack Benny, Robert Wagner, and President Gerald Ford. That club no longer exists in private form -- it operates today as the 36-hole public Indian Canyons Golf Resort -- so it is documented here for its historical and identity significance but does not qualify as a current golf anchor (see below). What is left with a genuine current barrier to entry is much smaller in scale: O'Donnell Golf Club, the oldest course in the Coachella Valley (built 1926 by oil magnate Thomas O'Donnell, inspired by the Old Course at St. Andrews), a 9-hole, member-only club with no public tee sheet at all; and Mission Lakes Country Club in Desert Hot Springs, a Ted Robinson-designed semi-private course built into a mid-priced planned community where golf access is a genuine, bundled homeowner benefit rather than a separately purchased privilege.

No two of Palm Springs' remaining golf-relevant properties work the same way. O'Donnell Golf Club is a small, private, member-only club -- membership required for play, guest access only by member invitation -- with modest reported fees relative to the Coachella Valley's larger equity clubs, but no on-site residential development of its own; a buyer does not acquire access to O'Donnell by purchasing a nearby home, and this site was not able to independently confirm the exact surrounding residential neighborhood this research pass (flagged below). Mission Lakes Country Club, by contrast, is a genuine residential-integration case: the community's HOA fee itself includes unlimited golf for two deeded owners per home, alongside pool, spa, and tennis/pickleball access -- one of the cleaner bundled-golf examples found anywhere in this Coachella Valley research effort. Indian Canyons Golf Resort and Escena Golf Club are both documented here but excluded as qualifying anchors: Indian Canyons is now ordinary public/resort golf with no membership structure at all (a historically important identity correction from its private Canyon Country Club era), and Escena is a daily-fee public course with only an optional, low-cost annual discount program, not a real membership tier, despite sitting inside a genuine gated residential development.