Shivas:
I'm in Mexico working this week, so I've had to let your over-the-top praise for Rock Creek go unchecked. Now, get a hold of yourself, man.
Why no uphill par-3? I don't know exactly ... I guess the simple answer is that we had to cover a lot of ground to get up to the seventh tee and I wanted to get it over with so I didn't put a par-3 into the climb.
#6 is a holdover from the original routing, but holes 1-5 were new when we abandoned the remote start (which would have had a par-3 at #2) ... I looked at a par-3 hole for the second half of #5, but the shot across the rocky valley on #4 had to be a tee shot, and that green site was obvious. And then I figured out #5 and I had to include that. So we needed three holes to get to that point, and I was struggling to come up with a way to do it that didn't feel like you were doing nothing but climbing the hill. Eric Iverson actually came up with the routing for 1-2-3; I hadn't considered going that direction with #1, but that really worked well, and all of a sudden we didn't have an uphill par-3.
We've got one in Mexico if it's any consolation.