Brad:
Yes, that's an in-progress photo after the first 3-4 holes were shaped. In the middle of the frame, just above center, you can see where a center pivot irrigation hub used to be [now the site of the eighth green after a considerable amount of work].
It's hard to even make out the greens since greens mix has not been added ... the white shapes you see are the tees. One of the unusual aspects of the project is that we stripped the topsoil off the next four holes and put them on the first four, so we would only have to move a lot of the topsoil once. Just picking up twelve inches of topsoil over the whole 250 acres equals 400,000 cubic yards of earthmoving, just to change blankets.
We moved 780,000 cubic yards of earth to build the project, not counting the topsoil. Probably the minimum we could have moved to get the course to drain would have been 250,000 cubic yards (plus all that topsoil ... the soil was bad, so flat = no drainage = muddy mess). So, it would have been very expensive even to create a simple course; we decided to go beyond that. Nearly half of the earth was moved to the edges of the site to block out the views of the apartments to the east and north. After the earth was moved by scrapers, three of my associates (plus Kye Goalby and one of the contractor's men) re-shaped everything to try and mimic the eroded landscape to the southeast of town. They will all be thrilled to know that they finally fooled someone.
The weird thing is that I've been back to play the course three times since we built it, and all three times, it was in calm conditions. I don't remember a single calm day when we were building it.