The origination and evolution of extreme "flashed sand" bunkering!?

[TEPaul]

There are a number of early photos showing examples of extreme flashed sand bunkering (seemingly nearly vertical sand faces). The most remarkable ones I've seen include #2, #10, #18 Pine Valley, a number of bunkers of Merion East (particularly #13) and #8 NGLA (Bottle hole).

The first examples of really flashed sand man-made bunkering in America is somewhat of a question, at least to me, even though architect Ron Prichard has maintained that he feels Merion East may've been the first really dedicated example of it in America.

My question for architecture and maintenance historians and analysts is-----did the architects who orginally built them (the examples above) not completely understand that such massive and fairly vertical sand upsweeps were really not maintainable and presevable back in the early days?

That would seem to be the case as most all those examples above were eventually either grassed down or even broken up into smaller bunkers apparently for stability after those original examples either collapsed or created constant maintenance problems.

I can't post photos but if someone has the "before" (steeply sand flashed) compared to "after" (grassed down)  photographic examples of the bunkers mentioned above it might be instructional as to the first origination (first examples in man-made architecture) and evolution of this kind of remarkable early bunker example.

PS:
Of course back then a bunker liner material such as Sand-Trapper or Bunker-Wol had not been invented.

[JESII]

"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."

Hunter S. Thompson


Tommy,

Gib Papizan has had the above quote as his tagline for a while now and I think it makes sense here...

With golf course construction, you can recover if you go over...but trying to find THE EDGE might be a key.

This search for the edge is another profound example of the value of a long-term relationship between an architect and the project.

As to your historical questions/examples, I have no clue...

[Tom MacWood]

Mother Nature was the inventor.

[TEPaul]

"Mother Nature was the inventor."


Tom MacWood:

Of course that is true but what I'm talking about is the origination of this kind of extreme sand flashed bunker in golf architecture that was completely man-made. Obviously it was intended to be a man-made representation of Mother Nature's natural seaside or dunesland sand formations on land that never had such things.

As Ron Prichard has said, previous to this type of man-made bunker most of the man-made bunkers in golf architecture were essentially flat-floored sand bunkers.

[Tom MacWood]

TEP
Ron Prichard also said golf course development picked up during the Great Depression.

[Patrick_Mucci]

TEPaul,

It would seem logical to assume that some early architects in America had observed or were historically connected to courses in the UK that had flashed bunkers.

Importing them would seem to be a natural tendency, provided soil substructure tolerated same.

Blowouts occur in nature.
We saw hundreds of them on our ride from North Platte to Mullen.

One has to imagine that the links or links like courses that populated the UK had their share of these.

The flashed face of the famous bunker at St Georges stands out.

Parts of PV and NGLA enjoy a sandy base, so perhaps they were a prime property in which to insert flashed bunkers.

They certainly provide a dramatic impact.

[TEPaul]

"TEP
Ron Prichard also said golf course development picked up during the Great Depression."


Tom MacWood:

I am not aware that Ron Prichard said 'golf course development picked up during the Great Depression.' Perhaps you can cite for us where he said that. Maybe you're thinking of something else Ron Prichard said in that vein which was there was a lot more redesigning done during the Great Depression than many of us realize. The reason Ron gave for this was because some clubs realized they could hire labor for a small fraction of the cost during the Great Depression (they could pay labor 10 to 20 cents on the dollar) and did so with numerous redesign projects and perhaps even some new projects such as the massive Bethpage projects (with the public works crews) inspired by such as the public works project czar Robert Moses.

My own club, is a good example of this-----eg Maxwell came in three separate times in the middle of the Great Depression. That represented about half the redesigning projects done at GMGC over about 75 years!

[Mark Bourgeois]

Mackenzie's c. 1913 lecture to greenkeepers addressed this exact issue from a construction and engineering perspective.

Collapsing faces of bunkers and trenches was an engineering design failure and therefore avoidable with proper technique. Ideal derived from observed in nature.

In this lecture I am pretty sure he addressed flashed faces, so the practice goes back at least that far.

[Bradley Anderson]

Mackenzie felt that the flashed sand bunker was easier to maintain than the grass faced bunker, on account of the fact that raking a steep slope was easier than mowing one in those days.

[TEPaul]

MarkB:

Good point about Mackenzie's 1913 lecture on flashed faced bunkers but there were examples of them that were man-made before that. I'm just trying to find where the first examples of flashed faced man-made bunkers were.

Brad:

Another good point about the maintenance aspect----eg easier to maintain flashed sand faces than to mow grassed ones.

I believe it was Niall Carlton who sent me an article on bunkers from The Tatler newspaper (Scotland) from 1908 but the examples of the inland bunkers were still flat floored with the sand area even though the grass surrounds or grass mounding within them was quite elaborate.

[ChipOat]

I'm interested in that reference to the cost of maintaining a flashed sand bunker.

When Rockaway Hunting Club rebuilt/renovated and added some bunkers about 10 years ago, they elected not to duplicate the flashed sand look of the rest of the course (the White Faces of Rockaway?).  The official rationale was that the original bunkers are more expensive to maintain.  I don't care much for the way the new bunkers look (sort of like Florida), but the budget people say it had to be done.

True?

[Patrick_Mucci]

Chipoat,

The amount of rainfall certainly has an impact on maintainance.

In south Florida, there are a number of courses with flashed sand faces, like Seminole, Pine Tree, Admiral's Cove and others.

But, those clubs seem to have the ability to afford additional maintainance costs.

[Bradley Anderson]

Has anyone mentioned Pine Valley? Those bunkers were flashed pretty steep in places, but that might have been because they couldn't get grass to grow too well in the beginning.

[Bradley Anderson]

In my estimation Mackenzie was exposing the most amount of sand on slope, in the beginning.

I think that a lot of his early work was remodeling, and all the old photos I have seen of that work show that he was building some of that bunkering above grade on what was basically a mound of soil. He seems to have turfed these mounds and and then dug these pits into them for sand. Or maybe some of these mounds were capped with sand and then turfed with sod squares, plugs, and seed. And then after the grass began to grow on this, they simply edged the grass away to expose the underlying sand. I think that was how he was able to get that serrated edge.

But Tom's question was the origin of flashed sand in America. I think that was something that was developed here by gentlemen amateur architects. They had more imagination. 

[Dunlop_White]

TEP,

Here are some webpages that show photo comparisons -- and the evolution of bunkers at Pinehurst No. 2. Ross originally flashed the sand up steep faces at No. 2. However, Hensen Maple's notes reveal that he grassed them down between 1948 - 1951 for ease of maintenance. Wash-out and erosion after summer storms proved to be a nightmare for his crew.

[TEPaul]

Dunlop:

Amazing website you have---Wow! Thanks. I owe you a phone call. Sorry, I haven't been around much.


Bradley:

I really don't know who it was (some "amateur/sportsman/gentleman" architect or someone else ) or even when or where the significantly "flashed sand" bunkering first originated but I sure would like to know.

I do think the answers are beginning to get pretty well nailed down though. I've been very interested in this question for years primarily from my discussions about it with Ron Prichard. He has long had some most interesting theories about this (and closely related matters) and as time goes on it seems like many of the things he has said about it are now becoming pretty well documented and dated.

To me it is beginning to look like the coming together at the same time of a number of factors in the evolution of golf architecture and golf including aesthetics (LA), playability and developing and improving golf balls and equipment, developing and improving construction and maintenance practices and machinery, developing golf agronomy and perhaps even the development and evolution of the Rules of Golf and the game itself. I sort of hate to use the analogy but it seems something like what is sometimes referred to as "The Perfect Storm!" 

Not to even mention that at the time it seemed to happen, the popularity of the game was totally exploding and people were coming into it who may've been asking questions and seeking answers that had never really been answered or even asked before! And it may even be that just preceding or even precipitating all this was the first on-set into golf and architecture (perhaps around the mid to late 1890s) of what we might even call the golf and golf architecture "PHILOSOPHERS."

I think this time----eg perhaps from around the mid 1890s into the 1920s a whole lot of people were really beginning to try to sort out a whole lot of things that had never been sorted out before!

As an historical sidebar, I also think the man who probably saw himself as the true transporter of the game to America from abroad was beginning to get buffeted around in the turbulence and in the end it effected him mightily and probably not in some of the ways that were to his liking in the end.

[Willie_Dow]

Tom - As you and Wayne know I purchased a disk of photos taken before the 1981 US Open at Merion by B/M for $200, which included many of the bunkers on all of the holes before the remake decided upon by Greenwood.

I don't know if I can offer these for show without B/M's OK.

One of these pictures of the "flashed sand bunkering" was on the cover of "Golf Journal" May/June 1981.  #13 @ Merion. 

[Willie_Dow]

My mistake, sorry, the #13 was not on my disk.