A Favorite Aspect of Design

[Chris Buie]

One of my favorite elements of GCA is thinned out trees off the playing corridor.  We have rather vigorously discussed how wide fairways and playing corridors should be but not much (to my knowledge) about what is outside of that.  There are a variety of features which the golfer must contend with outside of the intended playing area: thick forests, gorse, sandy areas, water.  (Maybe we should add condos to that list).  There is a large place for many of these features in GCA.  However, my favorite is a thinned out grouping of trees with a playable surface.  Why?  First, you can find your ball and keep up the pace of play.  There is a certain level of importance to that.  My main reason is that it offers the golfer a chance for recovery - but you have to be creative - bending shots around trees and through "windows".  With a thinned out area the golfer is tempted to go for the green or make a bold gesture toward the green.  With just a few trees in the way you have to think, conceive and execute a shot that is unique.  In my view this is vastly preferrable to just punching out or having no reprimand for the wayward prior shot.  Haphazard natural areas can be great as well but don't usually offer the options or the creativity the thinned out areas do.  Thick forests are just not too fun or creative at all.
This was my favorite feature on a course I played last week (CCNC Cardinal).  There were some good golfers in the group but at one point or another all ended up looking at various "windows" through the thinned out areas off the main corridor.  Pulling off those shots was quite a pleasure and possibly even the most remarkable part of the round.  Mickelson's shot to the 13th on Sunday at ANGC this year just occurred to me while writing this.  That was a great moment, don't you think?  You don't really get those shots at say, Sahalee
As I said before, to me this is more preferrable than other features off the corridor.  
OK, you can go ahead and deconstruct my premise now.

[Tim Nugent]

Chris, to each his own. I personally don't like trees.  They cost money, and result in arbritary results.  I lose more balls due to trees than just about any other feature.  Plus I don't like balls bouncing off them.  They can turn an errant shot into "right down the middle" or a slightly mis-directed shot into OB or Lost Ball which slows play.  I would rather see the use of difficult stances to be the result of errant shots.  Also, I shy away from treed courses in the fall because of the leaf issues.
For the lessor skilled players, who don't have the ability to carve a ball left and right at will, trees can be an exponentially an greater hazard and take all the fun out of the game.

[Chris Buie]

Tim, I'm not in favor of a forest.  In fact, I'm against that for the most part.  I think a lot of courses would be much more intriguing if they were considerably thinned out.  But I do think that among the different penal elements one finds from hitting it outside of a nicely sized corridor the thinned trees present the golfer with the most interesting scenario.  There are other elements that I like to see included but I suppose it is personal preference that this is what I like.  If I had to deal with leaves instead of sand and pine straw I probably wouldn't be so keen on it.  But as I said in the original post, this works if the surface is playable.
I got a lesson in this (and golf/life in general) playing alternate shots with a friend last year.  I hooked a drive about 10 yards into the trees.  I told my friend "um, sorry about that".  He looked at me and said "are you kidding? I love shots like this".  That was something of an epiphany for me.  I now enjoy playing a lot of shots that I would have grumbled about previously.  Recovery shots are a significant part of the game.  I wonder how much attention is paid to that when a course is designed.  Allowing for interesting recovery is definitely something that endears a course to me.
In a thinned out area you are not going to lose many balls.  If you do hit outiside a wide corridor and the ball does an unpredictable pachinko dance off the limbs I personally think that is fine.  Again, I suppose it is personal preference.  
This is the one element that I think C/C may do differently than I would like to see with the restoration of #2.  They are doing a great job but the course as Ross had it had a sparse amount of trees off the intended playing area.  Right now it doesn't look very much like that and I haven't heard they are going to do anything about it.
This is just one view from the gallery, as ever.  
Wow, I just noticed I'm now a full member of this DG.  Do I get a hat or a Members Only jacket or something?  And let me take this opportunity to thank you all for being so tolerant of my babbling.  We've got world class minds at work here far beyond my knowledge level but everybody has been pretty nice about allowing my medium level knowledge into the mix.  So really, thanks for that.  I do my best to try to keep it worthwhile.

[Tim Nugent]

How about a Members Only jacket?  Do designers think about recovery shots? Probably more than you would think. But, the array of potential misses is so great it's hard to program individual options for recovery so we(I) minly just try to provide the ability to execute some sort of recovery.

[Dan Herrmann]

Chris,
Just my opinion, but I prefer minimal trees.  Promotes turf health.

And most courses were probably designed with minimal trees.  Many of these had trees planted during the "beautification" movement.

[Chris Buie]

This is partly a provincial attitude on my part.  There is rarely turf off the playing corridor in Pinehurst.  It's pine straw usually.  Either that or my drive just plowed in Mrs. Johnson's prize garden of impatiens.
Still, I haven't encountered a more interesting or enjoyable recovery shot scenario.  I'm talking about a sparse amount of trees off of a generous corridor.  That is what was originally found on the courses around here.  It is rare to see that now.  I would love to see them thin out the trees around #2.  They're trying to return it to how Ross had it and there most definitely was not the forests that are now there.