In the photograph of #8 that accompanied Dan Jenkins' Sports Illustrated article on his 18 Greatest Holes, the gunch between #8 and #9 appeared to be at shoetop level. You only see it like that after one of the controlled burns every few years.
No picture but here is Jenkins' write-up on #8.
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8 Prairie Dunes
Par 4 424 yds
Straight away in the distance, crawling across the horizon, are the sweeping sandhills. To the right and left, twitching in the normal 25 mph wind, are broad, swollen patches of knee-high native grass, festering clumps of yucca plants, plum thickets and sunflowers. This is the outlook from every tee at one of America's most unusual golf courses, Prairie Dunes Country Club, a course whose scenery and shot-making requirements are those of a Scottish links, but whose location—Hutchinson, Kans.—could hardly be farther from the Irish Sea.
As country clubs go, Prairie Dunes is certainly not opulent. The small clubhouse is white frame, the landscaping is, for the most part, Kansas natural and the lawn is spotted and unshaded. As for cuisine, it does exist, but a Hutchinson gourmet would prefer the Town Club for an evening out. Thus the country club is strictly a golf course, but a distinctive one.
This incongruous touch of Scotland on the Kansas plains was founded in 1937 as another golfing lark of the Emerson Carey family, a ruling dynasty in Hutchinson. It was built by Emerson Carey Jr. and his brother, Bill, who succeeded their father as benefactors of the town. Emerson Carey Sr., before his death in the '30s, had provided Hutchinson with four golf courses and a public park. The young Carey brothers hired Golf Architect Perry Maxwell to lay out a different kind of course on the unusual duneland in the area. Maxwell set forth each day with a bag of apples and a thermos to walk the ground, and he kept coming home confused. "There are 118 golf holes out there," he once said. "All I have to do is eliminate 100." Finally, he ran out of time—or apples—and he laid out Prairie Dunes.
By modern championship standards, Maxwell's 6,522-yard course is not long, but its rough more than makes up for any lack of distance. Even the best player has been known to take 15 swings or so trying to disgorge the ball from a yucca plant. The course first came to public attention in 1958, only a year after the second nine holes was completed, when a burly 18-year-old named Jack Nicklaus won the Trans-Mississippi Amateur there. Although he won, Nicklaus did not manage a round below 72, and to this day he still talks about the severity of the course. In 1962, Arnold Palmer and Nicklaus played an exhibition round at Prairie Dunes. They shot 72 and 77, and in the process Nicklaus demonstrated how to take an eight out of the matted rough.
There is also the wind. It can be so severe a factor that a hole which plays with a driver and a wedge on one day may require a driver, a spoon and a wedge the next.
The Prairie Dunes golfer constantly finds himself brooding on a windy hilltop—called a tee box by club members—from which he peers down into a swale of thorny growth. He can see little fairway on which his shot can safely land. Thus every hole becomes a challenge, but none is more challenging than the 8th. It is a long, forced dogleg to the right with no reward whatever for trying to cut across. The fairway rises gradually, bumping its way over four ancient dunes—formations that were apparently caused by the wind that whips into Hutchinson from the Arkansas River Valley. The first dune is 165 yards out from the tee and about six feet high. They get successively higher, the last one rising about 50 feet. A perfect tee shot will carry the first dune and have enough length and fade to clear the second, too. After that, the green, protected by four bunkers on the right and one more on the left, each of which is dotted with yucca plants, can be reached with a solid three-iron. The green itself, well uphill from the fairway, is large and severely contoured, inviting three excellent pin positions and making a long, curling putt a decided possibility.
My drive cleared the first grass-covered dune—called Hockaday's Hill in honor of a club member named Ray Hockaday whose drives always landed there—and the second dune as well. As promised, I had a three-iron to the green, but did not quite make it, glancing off into a right-hand bunker. Fortunately, I was in sand instead of a yucca plant. My trap shot was uneventful and my 20-foot putt woefully offline. I made the next putt from five feet for a hard bogey and leaned, more than satisfied, into the wind blowing over the Kansas sunflowers from an invisible sea.