# Bear's Best Las Vegas: A Course Profile Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/bears-best-las-vegas-profile/ [The Course Rankings](/) Course Profiles / Nevada A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons The premise sounds like a gimmick, and for the first few holes you may treat it as one. Bear's Best Las Vegas is a course made entirely of replica holes, Jack Nicklaus's favorite holes from his own western designs, assembled in Summerlin and opened in 2001. A greatest hits album instead of a new record. Then you reach a hole with black bunker sand in the middle of the Nevada desert and the idea stops being a novelty and starts being a genuinely strange, enjoyable round of golf. The course plays par 72 at 7,194 yards with a rating of 74.0, so whatever you think of the concept, the golf itself is full sized. The replicas are drawn from named Nicklaus designs including PGA West, Desert Mountain, Desert Highlands, and his Cabo courses. These are not vague tributes. The downhill par 3 4th and the short par 4 11th use black bunker sand copied from the Old Works course in Montana. The par 5 8th is lined with pine trees in tribute to Castle Pines in Colorado. Playing it, you keep having the odd sensation of recognizing a hole from a course hundreds of miles away, transplanted into desert foothills. ## Does the concept hold up for 18 holes Mostly, yes, and the reason is selection. Nicklaus was not copying his filler holes. A designer picking his own favorites will reach for the holes with a real decision in them, a carry that tempts you, a green that punishes the greedy line. Strung together, the round plays like a sampler of desert and mountain golf at its most theatrical. The variety is the point. One hole asks you to thread a tee shot between pines that have no business growing in Las Vegas. The next drops downhill toward a green guarded by black sand. The honest concession is that a replica course can never fully escape comparison with the originals, and purists will spend the round grading the copies instead of playing them. There is also no single identity to the land itself. Great courses usually belong to their ground. Bear's Best belongs to an idea. If that trade bothers you, it will bother you for 18 holes. If it does not, the course is more fun than most of its Las Vegas competitors, which tend to blur together into the same desert target golf. The numbers deserve a second look, because they separate Bear's Best from the usual resort fare. Seven thousand one hundred ninety four yards and a 74.0 rating is a serious golf course by any measure, longer and harder than most of the tracks visitors play in Las Vegas. That was a deliberate choice. A collection of a designer's favorite holes could easily have been built as a friendly exhibition, the kind of place you play once for the story. Instead the replicas kept their original teeth, so the short par 4 11th tempts you precisely because it looks gettable, and the par 5 8th makes you earn every yard between those transplanted pines. Golfers who came expecting a theme park found a test. Some of them complained. More of them booked a second round. ## A profile with an asterisk Any honest profile has to say this plainly. Bear's Best closed to the public in June 2025 for a major renovation, with plans to reopen as a private club in late 2026 or early 2027. So the public course described here, the one where peak season visitor fees generally ran $150 to $250 with cart included, is in transition. What returns may keep the replica concept or may change it. Until it reopens, this profile is a record of what the course was for more than two decades, and a marker for what to check when the gates open again. For the wider picture while it is closed, see [our Las Vegas town ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-las-vegas-nv/) and [the Nevada state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-nevada/), where the rest of the Summerlin and Strip corridor options carry the list. A course built from borrowed holes sounds like it should feel borrowed. At its best it never did. It felt like Nicklaus showing you his scrapbook and daring you to play every page of it. Whether the private version keeps that nerve is the only question left. **Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.