Terrific course, but a tough one for us Minnesota guys who drive down there to get in our first round of the year (yes, Iowa is temperate, compared to us.)
I thought 16, 17 and 18 were a particularly tough finishing combo on the day we played it, all three holes playing into a strong headwind. I'm not wild about fairways bisected by drop-offs, with heavy rough on the downslope of the drop-off. Like Jason, I thought the drive was kind of a crap shoot, at least on our first go-round. If you played it enough times in all conditions, you'd have a better idea what to hit off the tee to either lay up or go for the lower part of the fairway.
No. 17 is just a skinny sliver of a green with a hillside and bunkers left, and water up the right side as the green angles away from you left-to-right. It was a very difficult target into the wind.
How best to play 18? Hard to say, given the wind we had that day.
That bunker that cuts into the fairway from the left almost forced a layup, since the wind was into us. There's room left of the bunker, but that's rough and cartpath territory, and doesn't give you much margin of error to hit that island fairway on your second shot. Going for the green in two was out of the question the day we were there.
I guess I need to be a better ballstriker in the wind to handle The Harvester. Still, I enjoyed the course very much.