Drive along the west side of The Ridges this month and the loudest sound isn't a wedge shot landing on a green. It's graders moving dirt where 18 holes used to run toward the Spring Mountains. The golf course that gave this guard-gated community its identity for more than two decades, Bear's Best Las Vegas, played its last public round on June 30, 2025, and what comes back in its place won't be the amenity most residents grew up walking to.
For the first time since 2001, a Saturday in The Ridges doesn't start with a tee time. Here's where it starts instead, and why the shift is likely to outlast the construction fence.
A course that isn't coming back the way you remember it
Bear's Best opened in 2001 as a Jack Nicklaus design built around replica holes borrowed from courses he loved around the world, a public track that became shorthand for The Ridges itself. That version of the course is gone for good. In 2024, Mulligan Holdings Inc., led by Andrew Pascal, founder of PlayStudios and a former Wynn Resorts chief operating officer, and Mike Mixer, co-founder of Colliers International, bought the property for $30.5 million. Both men live in The Ridges, and both have been direct about why they moved fast on the deal. The land was zoned residential, the same status that turned the shuttered Badlands course across town into a years-long legal fight with the city.
"First and foremost we wanted to protect our community and this development from suffering a similar fate as Badlands," Pascal told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The plan that followed is a full teardown, not a facelift. Jackson Kahn Design, the golf architecture firm handling the redesign, is rebuilding the course under a new name, Amara Golf Club, alongside a new clubhouse and a set of villas. The $300 million project is targeting a private reopening in October 2026, with the villas expected to finish by December 2027.
Reopening doesn't mean reopened for you
Here's the detail that changes how residents should think about this season. Amara isn't coming back as a public course or even as an amenity every Ridges homeowner can walk into. Membership is capped at 250 general memberships plus 15 reserved for villa buyers, with an entry fee starting at $250,000 that climbs every time another 50 memberships sell. Add it up and access tops out around 265 people.
The Ridges itself spans roughly 380 homesites across its enclaves. That means the math doesn't clear even before anyone outside the gates applies. The course isn't closed for a construction season. For most households in the community, it's closed, full stop, replaced by a private club with a guest list shorter than the neighborhood it sits inside.
That's the real story behind the quiet at the old clubhouse. It's not a pause. It's a permanent redirection of where a Ridges Saturday happens.
The Saturday that replaced it
Residents haven't stopped having Saturdays. They've moved the routine down the hill to Downtown Summerlin, a short drive from the gates. Three things are anchoring that shift right now:
- The farmers market at The Pavilion. Every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., running May through November, vendors set up under the covered pavilion near Lazy Dog Cafe and Andiron with produce, baked goods, honey, and live music. It's the closest thing the neighborhood has to a walkable morning ritual right now, even if it requires getting in the car first.
- Aviators baseball at Las Vegas Ballpark. The 2025 Pacific Coast League champions opened a season-long, 12-game homestand against the Tacoma Rainiers and Sacramento River Cats running August 4 through 16, entering the stretch tied for the best record in all of Triple-A at 62-42. For a summer without golf, a Tuesday-through-Sunday homestand at the ballpark is filling a real gap in the calendar, according to MiLB's own announcement.
- The Summerlin Festival of Arts. This one's further out but worth marking now. The festival turns 30 this year, running October 9 through 11 at The Lawn with more than 100 juried fine artists and hours from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day, according to the festival's official page. It lands the same month Amara is supposed to reopen, which makes for an odd split calendar this fall: a members-only ribbon cutting on one side of the beltway, an open-air arts weekend the whole valley can attend on the other.
None of these are stand-ins for golf. They're what a neighborhood does when its old anchor stops being available to most of the people who live near it.
Dinner still means Italian
The dining side of the routine hasn't moved much, and that's worth saying plainly rather than dressing it up. Mastrioni's, run by Chef Pete Mastrioni since 2009 at 3330 S. Hualapai Way, is still the market-fish-and-clam-linguine stop it's always been. La Strega, helmed by Chef Gina Marinelli inside Downtown Summerlin at 3555 S. Town Center Drive, is still open nightly for modern Italian plates. What's changed is what these dinners follow. They used to be the after-round meal. Now, for a lot of Ridges residents, they're simply the plan for the evening, no scorecard required.
If you still want quiet
Not everyone in The Ridges is trading fairway mornings for farmers market crowds, and there's a reason the community was built where it was. Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area sits directly west of the gates, offering the same kind of early, quiet start that a tee time used to provide, minus the membership fee and the wait for October.
The routine didn't pause, it relocated
That's the part worth sitting with. This isn't a neighborhood on hold until a ribbon cutting. The Saturday habit that used to start on the first tee has already rebuilt itself around The Pavilion, the ballpark, and a couple of Italian dining rooms that never closed. Even after Amara opens its gates in October, most of the households in The Ridges won't be walking through them. The new routine isn't a stopgap. For a majority of this community, it's likely the routine going forward.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home search in Summerlin or want the fuller picture of daily life across the master plan, we've mapped the broader villages, parks, and everyday rhythm of the area in our guide to living in Summerlin. And if you have questions about a specific enclave inside The Ridges, what Amara's membership structure might mean for resale down the line, or anything else about this corner of Summerlin, the Darin Marques Group team spends enough time in this neighborhood to have real answers, not guesses. Contact Us.
