Drive the loop along Rampart Boulevard past The Ridges these days and the view through the chain-link is dirt, survey stakes, and heavy equipment where a fairway used to run. That construction has been sitting there since last September, and before that, the course itself sat closed and silent for months. If you live inside The Ridges, you've had over a year to watch a 200-acre stretch of green space at the center of your own neighborhood get torn up without much explanation beyond the signage.
Here's what the signage doesn't say: when it reopens this fall as Amara Golf Club, most of the people who live around it still won't be able to walk on it.
What Actually Closed, And When
Bear's Best Las Vegas opened in 2001 as a Jack Nicklaus project built on a novel idea. Instead of designing one course, Nicklaus assembled 18 of his favorite holes from other courses he'd built around the country, from La Paloma in Tucson to the PGA West Tournament Course in La Quinta, and stitched them into a single 7,194-yard routing inside The Ridges. Golf Digest gave it 4.5 stars. For over two decades it was a daily-fee public course that happened to sit inside one of the most guard-gated neighborhoods in Las Vegas.
That arrangement ended on June 28, 2025, when Bear's Best closed to public play for good. It will not reopen as a public course. What comes back this October is something structurally different.
Two Of The New Owners Already Live Here
The buyers weren't an out-of-state investment group. Mulligan Holdings, the entity behind the $30.5 million purchase, is led by Andrew Pascal, founder of PlayStudios and a former chief operating officer at Wynn Resorts, and Mike Mixer, co-founder of Colliers International. Both men are Ridges residents. In an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Pascal framed the project as something built for the west side of Summerlin specifically, not a generic golf redevelopment dropped into any available acreage.
Part of the motivation, according to that same reporting, traces back to the Badlands golf course fight in Queensridge, a protracted legal battle over rezoning a golf property for residential development that cost everyone involved years and millions of dollars. Converting Bear's Best into a private club rather than leaving it as a public course was, in part, a way to protect the land from ever facing that same rezoning pressure. The course stays a course. It just stops being anyone's course to walk onto for a green fee.
The redevelopment is being designed with Jackson Kahn Design, a golf architecture firm, and the total investment is projected at up to $300 million, nearly ten times the original purchase price.
The Math Behind The Fence
Here is the number that changes how this story lands if you actually live in The Ridges rather than reading about it from outside: Amara Golf Club is capping membership at 250 total memberships, plus 15 additional memberships reserved specifically for the villa owners who buy into the property directly. The Ridges itself totals roughly 900 homesites spread across its guard-gated enclaves. Even if every membership went exclusively to a Ridges household, which it won't, fewer than one in three homes in the neighborhood would end up with access.
The membership structure that's circulated publicly breaks down like this:
- A $250,000 membership fee, which increases in price every time the club sells another 50 memberships
- A 50 percent holding retainer due at signing, with the remaining 50 percent due once the golf course itself is completed
- 15 memberships set aside exclusively for buyers of the club villas, separate from the 250 general memberships
None of that is unusual for a private club launch. What's worth sitting with is that this particular course has spent 23 years as something the entire neighborhood could see, hear, and occasionally play, and it is becoming something the majority of that same neighborhood will only see.
What Reopens, And On What Timeline
The redevelopment is not a renovation in the sense of resurfaced greens and a repainted clubhouse. It is closer to a full teardown and rebuild. The new clubhouse is planned as a two-level structure with underground parking, and the main entrance is being reconfigured off Flamingo Road, separate from the residential guard gates that control access into The Ridges itself. That distinction matters for daily logistics. Traffic tied to the club, valet drop-off, deliveries, member arrivals, will route through its own entrance rather than mixing with residential gate traffic.
Here's the rough sequence, based on the timeline the ownership group has laid out publicly:
- June 28, 2025: Bear's Best closes to public play
- September 2025: Demolition and redevelopment work begins
- October 2026: Projected reopening as Amara Golf Club, private membership only
- December 2027: Completion of the 15 club villas
If that October target holds, the fencing you've been driving past all summer comes down within weeks, not months.
The Rest Of West Summerlin Got More Open This Year, Not Less
There's a useful contrast sitting right next to this story. While the center of The Ridges has been tightening toward exclusivity, the amenity map just outside the gates expanded in the opposite direction.
Downtown Summerlin picked up Marufuku Ramen in the first quarter of 2026, taking over the former SkinnyFats space on Festival Plaza Drive. It's the San Francisco-based ramen shop's second Las Vegas location, following its first outpost in The Bend neighborhood that opened in February 2025. And a few minutes further south, Boca Park Fashion Village welcomed a 50,000-square-foot 99 Ranch Market on January 24, 2026, filling a storefront that had sat vacant for roughly a decade since a Vons closed there. It's the Asian grocery chain's second Las Vegas store, joining its longtime location in Chinatown Plaza on Spring Mountain Road, and it stocks more than 12,000 items including Japanese A5 Wagyu and ready-to-cook Peking duck kits, according to coverage from KLAS 8 News Now.
So the practical shape of the year is this: the piece of green space closest to home becomes harder to reach, while the everyday errands, dinner, groceries, a Saturday supermarket run, got easier and more varied within a short drive. For a neighborhood built around the idea that everything you need sits close by, that's not a downgrade. It's a redrawing of what "close by" actually means.
What This Looks Like From The Street This Fall
If you've been routing your evening walk around the perimeter fencing for over a year, that detour is close to ending. What comes back won't be the course you remember, and it won't be something most current residents can casually join without writing a six-figure check. But the fairway corridor itself stays intact, the sightlines from the streets that back up to it stay largely the same, and the neighborhood keeps the one thing that actually mattered through the rezoning fight in Queensridge: a guarantee that this particular acreage never becomes another subdivision.
That's the trade this fall actually represents. Not better or worse. Just narrower access to the same green space, offset by a wider range of everyday options just outside the gates.
If you're curious how any of this touches a specific street or enclave inside The Ridges, or you just want an update on what else is changing in western Summerlin this season, Jill Sells Vegas is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
