Matt,
I got a chuckle when you stated about the 10th hole at Alpine, "Tillie used existing terrain (before the usage of modern earthmoving equipment) to create this quirky but fun hole..."
What an absolute compliment to Tilly and his entire work crew. Not only the 10th, but the entire creation of Aldecress (Alpine) was a massive undertaking and carving of a golf course out of an extreme piece of land. If it wasn't FOR modern technology of his day it would never have come into being. This is from the book, Tillinghast: Creator of Golf Courses:
"To enable them to deal with the site conditions, they first established a large work camp, with a field office and even a commissary. These were needed as the holes were carved out of thick forest, swampland, and tremendous rock. This should not have surprised anyone as the Palisades of the Hudson River is quite close at hand, the cliffs of which are made of some of the most beautiful and strongest rock formations in North America. There was so much rock needing removal that more than thirty tractors were kept in continuous duty to accomplish the task.
"If that were not enough, the first year of the project was plagued with unseasonable and continuous rain. The second year had the opposite problem as the drought that plagued the mid-west and turned it into a dust bowl was now being felt here in the east. The tractors and vehicles were covered with such a thick layer of dust that Harold Worden observed, “They looked like ghosts.”
"Even with all of the rock being carted daily from the property, a great deal of it was piled up or crushed on site and laid out as a base for the fairways. Thousands of cubic yards of cinders, manure and peat moss were worked into the soil that covered these over. Today there is no sign of it being an artificial construction; in fact, the course gives the impression of having been carved out of the soil...
"Among the hundreds of golf courses that I have designed and constructed, Aldecress was by far the toughest course to build that I ever encountered...”
Tilly would be thrilled that someone who has seen as many courses as you have and has the strong background in golf course architecture that you do would today believe that Alpine was a course that "used existing terrain..." This is the ultimate compliment to the work that his entire team did...