Ask five people who live in The Ridges how long the fence around the old golf course has been up, and you'll get five different answers, all of them measured in months rather than weeks. The honest number is fifteen. Bear's Best played its last public round on June 30, 2025, then disappeared behind chain link for a rebuild the new owners never described as cosmetic. For most of a year, driving out the western gate has meant passing a torn-up fairway on one side and, until this spring, an unfinished promise on the other: a paved trail toward Red Rock Canyon that advocates had been asking Clark County for since 2005.
Both projects are landing in the same season. The golf course is set to reopen in October under a new name and a members-only model. The trail's first mile opened in April. Neither project caused the other, and they're run by entirely different people with entirely different budgets. But they sit on opposite ends of the same half mile of road, and this fall is the first time in over a year that a resident driving that stretch will see two finished things instead of two construction sites.
Same Half Mile, Two Timelines
The Ridges wraps around Bear's Best on multiple sides, with several of its custom enclaves built directly along what used to be the fairways. The course's entrance sits off Flamingo Road, inside the 89135 zip code the community shares. Head the other direction, west toward the mountains, and you hit Charleston Boulevard where it meets Sky Vista Drive, a few minutes from the Ridges gates in the neighboring village of Stonebridge. That intersection is where Clark County broke ground on the first mile of a trail meant to eventually run nineteen miles from Summerlin to Blue Diamond Road.
For most of 2025 and early 2026, both ends of that drive looked the same: fenced, dug up, waiting. That's no longer true on either end.
What Actually Reopens in October
The new owners of Bear's Best are Mulligan Holdings, led by Andrew Pascal, formerly chief operating officer at Wynn Resorts and now CEO of PlayStudios, and business partner Mike Mixer. Both live in The Ridges. They bought the course for $30.5 million and are putting roughly $300 million into a full teardown and rebuild, working with the golf architecture firm Jackson Kahn Design on a new layout and clubhouse. The rebranded Amara Golf Club is targeting an October 2026 reopening, though construction timelines on projects this size have a way of drifting a few weeks either direction.
What comes back is not what left. Bear's Best was a public course built in 2001 around replica holes from Jack Nicklaus's favorite designs elsewhere in the world, and it had a following. Golf Digest once ranked it among the state's best places to play. Amara will not take walk-up tee times. Reporting on the project has described membership capped at 250 golf memberships plus 15 more reserved for buyers of the club villas planned alongside the course, with an initiation fee reported at $250,000 that climbs as memberships sell. The clubhouse is being rebuilt with underground parking and a new entrance off Flamingo Road.
Pascal has been direct about why he wanted the course under private control rather than public play. In comments to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he pointed to the Badlands golf course fight in Queensridge, where a developer's attempt to rezone a shuttered course for housing dragged through years of litigation the city eventually settled for hundreds of millions of dollars. Pascal said protecting the Ridges community from a similar outcome was on his mind from the start of the purchase.
That context matters for a resident more than the membership fee does. The fairways staying fairways, rather than becoming a future rezoning fight, is the part of this story that touches property values on every street that backs up to the course, whether or not anyone in the house ever joins the club.
The 16-Month Timeline
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| June 30, 2025 | Bear's Best closes to public play |
| September 2025 | Redevelopment work begins on the course and clubhouse |
| April 28, 2026 | Clark County opens Phase 1 of the Red Rock Legacy Trail at Charleston Blvd and Sky Vista Drive |
| October 1, 2026 | Red Rock Canyon's timed-entry reservation system resumes for the season |
| October 2026 (projected) | Amara Golf Club targets its reopening as a private club |
The Mile That Took Two Decades
The trail advocacy group Save Red Rock started pushing for a safe, non-motorized route into the canyon back in 2005, arguing that sharing the shoulder of State Route 159 with highway traffic was not a reasonable way to reach a conservation area three million people visit every year. Its president, Heather Fisher, has talked publicly about a friend who was killed while riding a bike near the canyon, hit by a truck on that same stretch of road. Two decades is a long time to wait for a mile of pavement, but that's roughly how long it took.
What actually opened on April 28 is a 0.99-mile, 12-foot-wide paved path running from the Charleston and Sky Vista intersection out to the existing Red Rock Canyon marker. Clark County paired it with a new traffic signal at that intersection, a real trailhead parking lot where there used to be a gravel pull-off, and a relocated highway sign so visitors can stop for photos without blocking the shoulder.
It is one mile of a planned nineteen. Phase 2, roughly 6.6 miles carrying the trail on toward the Scenic Loop and the visitor center, isn't expected to open until 2028 according to Save Red Rock's own project updates. So this isn't the finished connection between Summerlin and the canyon that residents have heard about for years. It's the first mile, and by most accounts the hardest one to build, since it involved the signal and crossing that everything downstream depends on. For a Ridges resident who wants to walk or ride toward Red Rock without merging onto a highway shoulder, it's also the first time that option has existed at all.
The Ritual That Comes Back Every October 1
None of this changes a different seasonal rule that returns on the same date the trail's second phase is still years from finishing. Red Rock Canyon's timed-entry system for the 13-mile scenic drive kicks back in on October 1 and runs through May 31, required daily between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Anyone used to driving into the canyon on a whim during the reservation-free summer window will need to book ahead again starting this week, either through Recreation.gov or by planning trips before 8 a.m. or after 5 p.m., when reservations aren't required.
The Legacy Trail's new mile doesn't touch this rule. It's a separate, county-built path for people on foot or on a bike, distinct from the reservation system that governs vehicles on the scenic loop drive itself. A Ridges resident could, in theory, walk or ride the new trailhead segment at Sky Vista any day of the week without a reservation, then still need one if they planned to drive the loop later that same afternoon.
Behind One Gate, Beside Another
What makes this fall different from the fifteen months before it isn't that something big happened. It's that two separate things, one private and one public, both stopped being under construction at roughly the same time. Amara reopens behind a gate that will require a membership fee most residents won't pay, even as it removes the eyesore and litigation risk that came with a fenced-off, half-built course sitting inside the neighborhood. The trail opens with no fee at all, built by the county rather than a developer, and gives residents a genuinely new way to leave the community on foot that didn't exist a year ago.
Neither project waited on the other. But for anyone who has spent the past year driving past two unfinished things on the way in and out of The Ridges, this is the season both of them, for the first time, actually look finished.
If you live in The Ridges and have questions about what the Amara reopening or the new trail access might mean for your own property, or you're simply trying to sort out which parts of the recent construction news are actually confirmed and which are still projections, Russell Arnold has been tracking both projects since before the fences went up.
