The Story
The land came with a name already on it. Paa-Ko — Tiwa for 'root of the cottonwood' — was an Ancestral Puebloan village of more than a thousand rooms that flourished on the east side of the Sandia Mountains centuries before anyone thought to put a flagstick there. When a golf course finally arrived along the Turquoise Trail in 2000, twenty minutes east of Albuquerque, it kept the old name and tried to earn it.
Architect Ken Dye routed the course through arroyos and stands of piñon and juniper at well over 6,500 feet of elevation, letting the holes tumble across the ridgeline rather than fighting it. The golf world noticed immediately: Golf Digest gave Paa-Ko its best-new-course honors for 2000, GOLF Magazine put it among the top ten new courses in America you could actually play, and Golfweek ranked it among the country's top modern designs.
Demand answered with more golf. In 2005 Dye returned to add a third nine, and Paa-Ko made an unusual choice that regulars love to explain on the first tee: the scorecard simply numbers the holes 1 through 27, as if the course never wanted you to stop at eighteen.
A quarter century on, Paa-Ko Ridge sits where it has almost always sat — at the top of New Mexico's rankings, and at the top of the list for anyone who wants to feel what golf is like when the air is thin, the shadows are long, and the mountains do half the architecture.