I had a chance to play several rounds at Calusa Pines last year. I agree that the course is really special. Like Michael, I've never been a huge fan of Florida courses, but this was an exception. The elevation changes at Calusa really make a difference on some of the holes.
An excerpt from a Golf Course News article:
Enlisting the services of Hurdzan, Fry Design, Course Doctors and superintendent Eric von Hofen, Chensoff transformed 550 acres of flat land into an undulating property that has 58 feet of elevation change and features the highest point of land in south Florida.
In order to reach such heights, Course Doctors, working with local mass excavator LeeMar, blasted through tons of rock to dig 72 acres of 25foot-deep lakes. Part of the two million cubic yards of fill from the pond excavation was then used to create the 15-acre landmass that encompasses seven holes on the private layout.
"This is a hard place to build a golf course," said director of agronomy Eric von Hofen who has worked at Calusa Pines since November of 2000. "You have to blast into coral rock to build ponds. We spent one million dollars on dynamite alone."
Once the blasting was done, the next challenge was forming the landmass.
"On the plans, it was 20 feet lower than the finished product," said lead architect Dana Fry. "The height of it was not as difficult as the scale of it. It is 58 feet high, but it goes on for a couple thousand yards in order to make it look natural."
The landmass was tied to the golf course through numerous sand and waste bunkers. There is one waste area that encompasses nine acres and the eighth green features a 27-foot tall bunker.
"Once we built that big earth mass, we had to keep water from washing the features away," said Course Doctors president Jim Sparks. "Our shapers Jeff Carsner and Steve Coe worked closely with Dana to tie in the finish work and bunker construction."
As Course Doctors completed the fine shaping, von Hofen followed behind with landscaping.
"We wanted to make the course look like it had always been there," he said. "We didn't want to build a big mound and leave it all grass." Von Hofen and his team planted 165 large oak trees (some as high as 45-feet tall and weighing 37,000 pounds), 1,200 pine trees and 900 sable palms. The final tab on construction topped out at $16 million.
They succeeded in building a great course. I thought fairways were fairly generous in size and course conditions fast & firm. Green complexes were interesting, but nothing tricked-up.
The clubhouse was built to look like it had been there for a long time and they succeeded. On the inside, the locker room has these beautiful distressed wood lockers. It seems like it belongs in the northeast rather than south Florida.
I have several pictures from the course, but no clue how to post them.