Michael,
I had the good fortune to play Astoria CC in October. What a treat! I had been wanting to play it for many years, ever since our estimed TommyN told me years ago on here about it. If you can manage to get on here I highly recommend it. I found it to be one of the more unique places I had ever played. Sure the holes are sporty, and quirky, but when you think about when it was built, and that it was built to follow the contours of the MASSIVE sand dunes without moving much dirt.
To plagiarize how Tommy described it to me those many years ago if you can imagine the land being a giant Wavy Lays potato chip with the holes running down the bottom of the valleys. I will post a couple pictures here to illustrate. Let me say this I told someone after that trip that one of the greatest endorsements I can say is that I have played about 1400 courses in my life, and that is a lot of golf holes. And there are several holes out there that I can say with absolute certainty that I will remember for the rest of my life. There are just a bunch of holes that are unlike any golf holes most of us have ever played before, or will ever play again. And that is saying something!
Several of the holes play up these straight "half-pipe" shaped corridors between the dunes. By placing different tee boxes along the top of one of the ridges at different places and angles that give you some good angles you have to decide how much to cut off.
This is one of the courses from my recent OR trip that I hoped to post some pictures on and I guess now is the chance. Here are some pics of two holes that play up the same corridor at different points of the round. Starting with the 3rd hole...
From one of the tees on the 3rd hole giving you a feel for a little bit of angle to play the hole from.
From another tee box looking straight down the line of the hole gives you a feel for how the hole played up that "half-pipe" corridor.
Turn around 180 degrees on the tee box from the previous picture and you get a sense for what the native dunes along those same lines look like with no golf hole routed down them. This straight line set of dunes continues as far as you can see from off the property completely across the entire property of Astoria CC. As you will see the 15th hole later plays up this same corridor from the opposite direction to where the greens are back to back.
From behind the 3rd green looking back down the fairway.
Later in the round the 15th hole...
Again from the tee gives you a little angle down the corridor.
A little closer up of the shape of the 15th fairway.
Closer up view of the 15th green with the 3rd green directly behind it.
There are other holes where there are back to back tees with the greens finishing at the far ends away from each other, etc. Just a fantastic use of the unique dune shapes they had to work with.
A great fun club to play, and obviously those contours are fairly user friendly giving you overall some favorable bounces.