This thread reminds me of Ron Whitten's Golf digest review of the Quarry. It is old enough that I see no downside in reproducing it here. I got it from Jeff;s website
http://www.jeffreydbrauer.com/whatsnew.htmGOLF DIGEST
Course Critic
By Ron Whitten
The Quarry at Giants Ridge, Biwabik, Minnesota
In this post-persimmon age of golf, course strategies no longer involve
working a ball left-to-right or right-to-left through the air. With
forgiving clubfaces and self-correcting balls, everybody plays
point-to-point golf these days, so strategies on new courses more often than not begin once the ball hits the ground, with the terrain of each hole
dictating its shot value.
"What Jeff (Brauer) has conceived amidst deep pits and squeezed among high piles is as fine a set of golf holes as has been produced thus far in the 21st Century." Nowhere is this more evident than at The Quarry at Giants Ridge, a marvelous new creation amidst the sky blue waters of northeastern Minnesota, a scene-stealing companion to the resort's 1997 original, now called The Legend at Giants Ridge.
Landforms dictate play from the opening tee shot at The Quarry, where you
aim for a dip in the right center of the fairway to gain extra roll, to the
last approach, where you play to a high bank along the left of the green
(avoiding a lake bluff to the right) and let the ball bounce down to the
pin. In between are perhaps the most satisfying collection of sideslopes,
speed slots and backboards ever to be covered with turfgrass.
As the name suggests, this course sits within an old rock and sand quarry. I
was fortunate enough to witness what a revolting dump this abandoned strip mine had become before construction. (There is a certain irony that, back when it was active, this area was called the Embarrass Mine.) So while
course architect Jeff Brauer may modestly suggest in a press statement that, "the mining industry did 90 percent of The Quarry," I'm here to tell you
that the mining industry doesn't know squat about golf course design. But
Brauer does, and he mined his heart, soul and 25 years of design experience in sculpting this Iron Range masterpiece.
"It is already hands-down the finest course in Minnesota." What Jeff has conceived amidst deep pits and squeezed among high piles is as
fine a set of golf holes as has been produced thus far in the 21st Century.
It offers many options, and fabulous photo ops, from every tee box, most of
which are elevated. There are spots where you must get the ball airborne,
but mostly it's a feed-the-ball-to-the-target layout that you could play
with a hockey stick.
It is already hands-down the finest course in Minnesota. Hazeltine National
looks like a cornfield next to it, Interlachen like a quaint museum
artifact. In the national arena, this Quarry will swallow up all Quarries
before it, from Florida to California. It's a combination of Pebble Beach,
Pine Valley, Merion and Tobacco Road, with a bit of architectural Tabasco
sauce sprinkled in for the occasional jolt.
It is the rarest of courses, 18 holes without a single lackluster feature.
Great par-3s? Try the 269-yard fourth, from tees atop old taconite deposits
to a green whose back portion pitches front to back. Or the 189-yard
seventh, an all-or-nothing hole over a quarry chasm, where the correct
choice is to overclub. Or the 158-yard 11th, a pitch uphill over slumbering
hunks of granite to a gull-winged green.
Great par-5s? The S-shaped 575-yard second offers a shortcut to the flag,
but it's between pines, uphill over a long, skinny vein of mined sand. The
downhill, zig-zag 525-yard fifth is reachable in two even for me, but only
if I stay out of a wildflower badlands along the left and slip through a
notch in a hill onto the half-hidden green. At the 514-yard 14th, the
elevated green is even more of a hidden punchbowl, with clusters of birch
left and right ready to add insult to injury.
Long par-4s? They don't get any better than the slowly climbing 478-yard
eighth, where a drive must carry the longest portion of a diagonal waste
bunker on the right in order to provide a glimpse of the green through a
narrow gap between spoil mounds. The putting surface is right out of
Pinehurst, with shaved banks all the way around, save for one little noggin
of deep grass. There's also the controversial 454-yard 15th, where the
fairway stops abruptly about 250 yards off the tee, at which point the hole
turns left and drops 100 feet into a wetlands. Two-hundred yards away is the putting surface, wedged between sand on the left and deep depressions to the right. Big hitters grumble that they can't hit driver on 15, but I say it accomplishes the objective of forcing good players to hit one long iron, or even a fairway wood, onto a par-4 green.
As for short par-4s, long a specialty of Brauer, The Quarry at Giants Ridge
has three of the best ever seen. The 369-yard sixth plays over a vast canyonof sand, traversed by a ribbon of walkway, to a plateau fairway, with thesecond shot over a novel set of grassy, box-car-shaped depressions to a multilevel green curled around an oh-so-nasty Valley of Sin.
From its tee, the 377-yard ninth looks about 20 yards wide, crowded on all
sides by towering, barren hills of rock and stone. But the hidden fairway
fans out to a generous 50 yards, and the perched green is far wider and
deeper than it looks from the bottleneck view at the landing area.
The 323-yard 13th is the most splendid hole of all, a par-4 seemingly as
wide as it is long. It drops down, then down some more, then abruptly up.
There's an 80-yard-wide, two-level fairway split by a center bunker and a
50-yard-wide, but shallow, green sitting above a vertical wall of jungle
outgrowth. You can go for the green from the elevated tee, or play short to
the upper fairway left, or longer to the lower fairway right, or bash one
into the valley just short of the steep wall. The only improvement to this
imaginative hole would be to mow the steep slope behind the green at fairwayheight, to encourage some rebound action for shots that fly the green. Afterall, bounce and kick and roll are what this course is all about.
By any measure, The Quarry is a remarkable new golf course, a resort
destination that more than justifies the journey. It incorporates the
ancient diagonal strategies of lines and angles espoused by C.B. Macdonald
and Seth Raynor, ideas forgotten in the era of Robert Trent Jones, revived
by Pete Dye and reinvigorated by the latest generation of architects. At The
Quarry, Brauer presents them with a fresh, pulse-pounding, grip-tightening
energy that is contagious. Rounds on it will produce many high-fives and
maybe a few low lows. No one who plays The Quarry at Giants Ridge will lackfor emotion.