When I look at pictures of a new course like Chambers Bay, the first thing I notice is how the playing avenues are routed through manmade valleys. The valleys look to me, albeit I’ve only seen pictures, clearly manufactured as the built up areas on the outside edges of the playing corridors tend to be rough and rumpled and the playing avenues tend to be much smoother and softer. I’ve seen this frequently lately as I’ve tried to increase my knowledge of course architecture.  I first mentioned it here on GCA about 3 years ago after seeing Crosswater in central Oregon for the first time. A fun course, but I came away wondering why a course set in a mountain meadow had to have the edges built up on so many holes. There’s a new course on the TX coast in Port Aransas where every hole it seems is a low playing area lined by large dune like mounds.
Even a lot of courses we love seem to follow this pattern even when the Architect was working with natural terrain.

Why do we see this repeated so often?

Is the routing through valleys done because the courses are more enjoyable to play?
Is it because of drainage issue…easier to get water into drains and keep water from sheeting onto the playing corridors? Is it a visual separation issue?
Am I the only one who sees this?

Joe,
I almost mentioned Kingsley and DeVries as an example of routing across and along a few ridges.
I don't think its a bad thing to run a few holes through the valleys, but more and more it seems like those who are trying to create 'ideal" golfing land use the routing through the valley template.

I was speaking to Forrest Fezler the other day about this kind of thing and he said they just "rumpled" most of a new course in Utah ala the rumpled ground at St. Andrews. Who has ever done that before on a course wide scale? This wasn't big scale stuff, it was small scale stuff done everywhere. The interesting thing was the method used by making the ground ultra malleable before shaping it like this.

The subject came up when we were trying to figure out how to work with some old historic earthen walls across some under-construction holes on a Maryland site. I'm pretty sure  this site was one of the places where the Union army tangled with that great Southern cavalry general Jeb Stewart who was trying to protect Lee's right flank as he proceeded on up to Gettysburg to fight what he thought would be the ultimate "incursion" battle in the North which might get the Union to quit the war. Or maybe the earthen walls were from the Revolutionary war we fought against them Limmies. All I know is I found a bunch of old bullet casings in the dirt.  

Don:

I don't route courses the way you are talking about, but I think others do it mostly for visual separation ... following that old cliche that Pine Valley is a great course because you can't see any hole other than the one you're on.

Architects want to control the player's perspective, and once you get out of the valleys it's harder to figure out what might be seen in the background over the ridge where a green is placed.  So they stick to what they know.

I see mounding between holes on flat ground all the time, even though the fairways are well separated and there's no safety issue, and I wonder why the heck anyone thought it was necessary.  Sometimes, I swear it's just boredom on the part of the person drawing the plans, adding a few doodles to make the plan itself look more interesting.

Don,

Also, to answer your question, while it is easier to get water to the basins, for drainage, it would be better to have the fw on a small rise where water drained away!  Having to take care of drainage somehow is one of the downsides of routing in the valleys, and valley fw's are something I suspect you would NEVER see on a Tommy N designed (or consulted) course!

Having seen the CB site, I can attest most of those valleys were man made, and the visual separation on a tight site, and probably the idea of recreating some of the linksland characteristics of Irish courses were the biggest reasons for building those.

It is possible, BTW, with Sand Hills NO. 2 or my Quarry No. 6, to effectively route an "along" the plateau or ridgetop fw and when I see that rare ridge runner fw, it really stands out to me.  It is naturally more penal, so it helps to make them a bit wider than other fws- not only for the fall off, but also because those ridge tops tend to stay windier.......

Jeff,

I nailed something? Gee thanks, but somehow, given my history on this site, I am pretty sure I will be told just how little I know about gca theory by someone!

RCD starts out in the dunes, but some of the finishing holes away from the water, like 17 and 18 are downright flat, so its kind of a mix.  But, in general, most of those Irish courses do play in the valleys.  The dunes are so steep that it was those are the only levelish spots to get a decent lie, and I am pretty sure my theories above also were recognized intuitively by early designers.

CB is a north-south site, and the east side was high, with a steep bank down to the old quarry site.  The client originally wanted 27 holes, but it was clear to most of the gca's that only 18 would fit - while there were 250 acres, that bank made much of it unuseable.  I was still surprised to see RTJII came up with a predominantly East - West routing on that site, but it seems to have worked.

Jeff
Not all soldiers walk the valleys.
While building courses in Japan I learned that many of the trails that we took to explore the property were indeed old Samari trails.
They run the ridge lines of the mountains so that they could be well above those below in the valley and thus have an advantage over them.  I am not sure what this has to do with golf course architecture, but the samari are notorious as effective warriors who were often heard but not seen.  

GCA ----- DRAINAGE, DRAINAGE, DRAINAGE.

While a hole sweeping down into a natural valley like 14 at Shinnecock) is often a thing of beauty, too often it's reflective of the modern penchant for "concave", containing design, and it's often both ugly and too clearly unnatural.  This is simply because, as Tom and Don mention, the contour seems to often stop right at fairway edge, when all of a sudden everything is smoothed flat, making the contouring just adjacent stick out like a sore thumb.

What's worse, it defies its ostensible purpose of shielding golfers on adjoining holes from each other by creating blind spots where the best one can do is yell fore and hope like heck nobody's over there.
 

An interesting case study would be my former home course, The Grand Del Mar (formerly The Meadows).

The property is a series of ridges and valleys. The ridges are generally 50-100 feet above the adjacent valleys.

I've included a map below and I've done my best to illustrate the property. As you'd expect from Fazio, the downhill transitions are shots, while the uphill transitions come from three uphill cart rides (technically, yes, they're walkable).

The result is a very cool mix of 7 valley holes, a couple of transitional holes, and 9 high holes, including 4 really spectacular ones (#4 bottom; #13-15 bottom right).

Tiger:

We won't have to spend that much money moving dirt around for Old Macdonald, and the client seems to be doing okay, so if we are ever going to use the strategy of not telling the shapers what they're doing, this would be the place for it.  If it doesn't work out, we can just let the wind blow on it for a while and it'll be good.

But, I thought it was Jeb Stuart ... no relation to Joel, unless his family changed the spelling to throw us off.