One of my favorite aspects of Pacific Dunes, Cape Kidnappers, and Barnbougle Dunes is that each of them has one long green-to-tee walk that just happens to be at the most beautiful place on the golf course. That wasn't really deliberate on my part -- it was just serendipity that it was hard to fit holes together in those places, and then it was easy to see that no one would mind the interruption.
At Pacific Dunes, it's the walk from 3 green to 4 tee, which had to be long because of the proximity of 12 green. It's also the first place you touch the ocean. One of the players at the women's public links championship said the first time she came around that corner, she cried, because it was so beautiful and she didn't expect it.
At Cape Kidnappers, it's the walk from 15 green to 16 tee. I hadn't planned on putting a tee back there at all, but Julian Robertson kept pushing us to make the course longer to host a potential event, so I threw out the idea of a back tee there. His wife, Josie, came out to look at it, and said it was the most beautiful spot on the course, and she thought we should convert it to a par-5 and put ALL the tees back there. It was a lot of work to get the fairway on 16 back to where ladies can reach it from that tee, but it was worth it so that everyone would take that narrow foot path along the edge of the cliffs, where the seagulls teach their young to fly every spring.
At Barnbougle, it's the walk from 4 to 5, past Reg's Hut. It's right up on the crest of the dunes, and there are often wallabies there in the morning and evening, and again, it's the first place you touch the ocean after four holes on lower ground. The strip of dunes is so narrow at that point, there was no way to have parallel holes all the way back to 4 green, so you walk forward to 5 tee to get out of the line of fire for aggressive drives on 4.