Designers/architects...what was the most difficult site you've built on?

[paul cowley]

Designers/architects...what was the most difficult site you've built on?...and/or the easiest?...and for whatever reasons if you care to share.

[Jeff_Brauer]

Paul,

The first course at Giant's Ridge.  Boulders everywhere. We removed them, patted them down, filled the holes with smaller rock and debris, plated them, etc.  Honestly, I spent all winter losing sleep over whether the subgrade was going to be a rabbit warren of gaping holes in the ground as snow melt washed the course away......

[Tom_Doak]

Paul:

To me the easiest was St. Andrews Beach ... perfect soil and not much recontouring to do.

The hardest depends on personal tastes:

1)  The Rawls Course was difficult because we had to re-shape everything ... it was dead flat and heavy clay which didn't drain anywhere.
2)  Stone Eagle was difficult just to walk around pre-construction and difficult to build because you could see every scar from every angle.
3)  Rock Creek was difficult because a simple change often required the removal of a rock as big as your car.
4)  Others [which shall remain nameless] were difficult because of difficult clients.

[Randy Thompson]

Tom,
So I am not the only one that gets dfificult clients, my average is about 85% to 90% difficult and I know with a percentage that high I gotta have some large short comings. Was gonna see a shrink but found them all difficult too!
Have you every done mountain courses, there more difficult than clients and more expensive than wives.

[Keith OHalloran]

Tom D.
I have never been to Scotland, but I have been to Sebonak and Pacific Dunes.   How did those sites compare to St Andrews? for a laymen?, they seem sandy and with contour.
Thanks

[Neil_Crafter]

My most difficult course to build was in the jungle mountains of Sarawak in Borneo. The site was a previously logged forest that receives 6 metres of rain a year. In one February we were in construction we had one metre of rain! And this rain is heavy and quick, quite often we had large sections of recently sprigged fairways washed away after very heavy downpours, regardless of what silt fences etc the constructors put in to try and prevent this. Plus boulders the size of a small house. Course took 2 and a half years to build.

Another difficult course was a nine hole extension to a public course here in Adelaide, where five holes were over an old landfill. So we had to install impervious gas membranes under all greens and tees as well as gas vents.

Here's a pic of the opening hole at the Borneo course. Massive trees too.

[Niall C]

Neil

I'd be interested to hear whether the Borneo course has had any further wash outs since it opened. Is it opne of these courses thats always destined to be fighting the elements ?

Niall

[Ian Andrew]

Muskoka Bay (working for Doug Carrick)



The site was about 85% solid granite, 10% wetland and 5% sand (the trick was finding it!

The routing was tough since the landforms were massive, we had wetlands to avoid and there were constant 40 foot cliff drops throughout all the property. We limited blasting to a few areas through routing and technique. We only blasted at three green sites to remove enough of the crown (3rd, 15th and 16th) to build a proper green into the rock setting. We made small blasts at three tees to get cart paths (3rd, 9th and 10th) down a big drop without adding a ¼ mile to the path system. We did have to haul and place a lot of 12” minus to even create paths because of the pocket wet spots and exposed rock faces everywhere. The drainage and irrigation took a lot of imagination. Everything is built on top of the rock except two fairways. It was an extremely hard build.

The hardest part of the project was finding the sand on site and then moving it around the site. It took 6 days of walking to find enough sand and establish two pits for mining. There was 8km’s (5 miles) of construction access roads created. There is 11km’s of cart path and 1 full km that is built on a foundation of packed blast rock. The most complicated aspect for me was finding all the cart paths. Doug had designed 16 elevated tee sites on the property to deal with blindness, but that left me with the complication of making a path system work without blasting. I quite literally climbed up and down 40 foot rock faces all day until I found a “buildable” route without blasting.

To top it all off was the bear problem. I had to carry a sawed off shotgun through most of the project since I was out alone a lot flagging trees and searching the site in the first year. That story is actually on my blog and well worth reading: http://ianandrewsgolfdesignblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/problem-bear.htm

[Jeff_Mingay]

Sagebrush (working with Rod Whitman, Richard Zokol, Armen Suny and others).

On a very steep mountainous property with silty, rocky soil that was difficult to shape and have hold. Building greens (and tees) on some of the slopes we dealt with was always interesting. You flatten out an area that your eyes are telling you is close, only to shoot grades and realize you're way off. The same type of slopes resulted in a number of massive fills for fairway areas as well. There were a number of rock outcrops that had to be blasted in spots - most notably at the 8th fairway, which was non-existent when we started construction. All of the blasted rock had to be hauled away, to where it could be used for base fill elsewhere. A lot of sub-surface rock had to be blasted and hammered, too, mainly for irrigation installation. We stripped every fairway area of decent topsoil that was, of course, mixed with rock and vegetation, brought it to two stockpiles/screening/mixing plants (with big rock trucks) at what are now the 7th and 15th fairways, then replaced the soil after construction/shaping. Capping the course with screened topsoil material was a time-consuming chore over a 300 + acres site. The greens were constructed without a gravel layer (or drain tile), but two separate layers of sand. This amounted to each green being shaped an average of four times including the finish grade work. Cart paths were quite tough to build in spots due to grade...  

And, it's super hot, dry and windy in the Nicola Valley throughout the summer construction months as well.

Fun though, and the course turned out pretty good  

[Randy Thompson]

Jeff,
Can you go into more detail on the green construction of two sand layers without pipe and why? Basic composition or particle size of the sand in each layer and depth or each layer, Bermuda or Bent? I am not setting you up for an attack, I love alternativa non USGA construction methods and have tried succesfully lots of alternatives in lots of different situations.

[Neil_Crafter]

Neil

I'd be interested to hear whether the Borneo course has had any further wash outs since it opened. Is it opne of these courses thats always destined to be fighting the elements ?

Niall

Niall
Once the turf got well established further wash-outs were prevented. Drainage is an ongoing issue as the fairways are not sand capped - could not afford to truck that much sand up the mountain - and the fairways are always a little wetter than we would like even though loads of perforated pipe was put in during construction. You could simply not put enough in on a site like this.

[Jeff_Mingay]

Jeff,
Can you go into more detail on the green construction of two sand layers without pipe and why? Basic composition or particle size of the sand in each layer and depth or each layer, Bermuda or Bent? I am not setting you up for an attack, I love alternativa non USGA construction methods and have tried succesfully lots of alternatives in lots of different situations.

Randy,

The green construction method at Sagebrush was devised by Armen Suny.

Basically we cored out the green cavities as is normally done. There was a decision not use pipe or gravel, in part because it's very dry in central British Columbia. It would also have been relatively expensive and time-consuming considering the size of the greens at Sagebrush. They're massive.

To be honest, the sand layers aren't precise. Thinking back, we filled the cavities with about 12-18" of a dirtier sand then topped each green area off with about 6" of a cleaner, screened sand. (I'm not sure of the basic composition or particle size. If my memory serves correctly, it was a local sand.) Chicken manure was tilled/blended into this top mix after it was spread which resulted in more grading work than usual.

The greens were planted with a 3-4 different varieties of bents that Suny selected. None of the fancy new stuff either.

Last time I played Sagebrush, the course was just over a year old. Without any bias, I think they were the truest putting surfaces I've ever played on. Smooth and fast. I've always thought that it's going to be interesting to see the profile of these greens in, say, 10 years. What's going to happen inside those cavities without drainage? I don't know.

Suny isn't concerned; which is a good sign!

[Lester George]

Lamberts Point - Landfill

Sundance -  Dead Flat

Forest Hills - Total Rock (4 million c.u. of a total 5 million c.u. moved)

[Tom_Doak]

Lester:

Under what circumstances did it make sense to move 4 million cubic yards of rock?

[Lester George]

Tom,

It made no sense at all to me.  I inherited the job and was asked to finish it for a friend of a friend.  I was the second or third architect to be consulted.  I came in about three years into the project.  I told the owner that I would have suggested another site the first day I was there.  But as I came more familiar with the site, it struck me as engineering genius.  I just had a hard time concieving cuts and fills of 100 feet or more, and there were a number of them.  The course is in Hiroshima on top of a mountain and is called Forest Hills.  Alot of the dirt was moved to arrest runoff from going down the mountain into the national forest below.  About 10 million worth of drainage.   

Anyway, they had already moved about 85% of the rock when I got there so my task was to put the features (tees, greens, bunkers, etc) on the course and finish the design with field sketches and construction oversight.  Some of the holes (about 4 if I recall) were close to grassing but I still made changes to those before they were grassed.  The other 14 or so holes I went from rough grading on to the finish.  This was back in the 90's when the Japanese still had some money.  I guess one of the more ironic things was that this course was the first public golf course in the prefecture.

Lester

[Bill_McBride]

Lester, I've heard that golf in Japan is ultra expensive but that sounds pretty stiff!  If you can share at this late date, what was the final cost and what were the green fees for that public course?

[Lester George]

Bill,

The final cost was between 80 and 90 million dolars for construction.  When it opened it cost $130 dollars (US) to play on weekdays and $150 on weekends.  At the time (late 90s) that was pretty good for daily fee in Japan.

Lester

[Bill_McBride]

Bill,

The final cost was between 80 and 90 million dolars for construction.  When it opened it cost $130 dollars (US) to play on weekdays and $150 on weekends.  At the time (late 90s) that was pretty good for daily fee in Japan.

Lester

There must have been quite a subsidy from the prefecture!   Or else they kicked the principal repayment can down the road for a long time!

[Lester George]

Bill,

The course was started as one of those expensive equity private ventures and failed due to the shaky economy.  Being that it was being built on government leased land, the prefecture stepped in and refinanced the project with public bonds and made it a public course.  I think the laon is for 75 plus years, maybe longer.

Lester

[Randy Thompson]

Lester,
Got any photos?? They actually managed to out spend Steve Wynn!

[Lester George]

Randy,

Send me an email and I'll send you some photos.

Lester

[Tiger_Bernhardt]

Myacama was a tough site.

[archie_struthers]

 

The site at Twisted Dune was benign to the eye , but much dfferent than mucking around at Greate Bay , which is only obout 7 miles away .  Lots of gravel and a little clay was prevalent at the site , and given that we removed over 3,500,000 yards and shipped it away , there was a whole lot of activity. 

The site was almost dead flat, without the fall of our neighbor a few miles west , Hidden Creek .   Moreover as stated the soils were not near as good as you would imagine on the flood plain of the Atlantic Ocean . If you dig a few feet at Hidden Creek you get the most beautiful sand as a medium , yet we kept hitting gravel .  The good news for us is that our materail was perfect for the road projects and compacted wonderfully , which made our material perfect for the job they were doing at the H-Tract , where they built the connector tunnel and the Borgata  (Atlantic City)

However pretty early into the scouring of the site for our golf course we realized that we would have to cap the fairways with sand so we isolated good material when we hit it and stockpiled it ....a little expensive  but in my mind necessary ...all n all it was quite an undertaking and I wouldn't want to do it again that way,,,