A former poster here suggested in an e-mail this morning that I had done this to illustrate just how quick people were to jump to all sorts of ridiculous conclusions based on one photo. Actually, Ron sent me the photo yesterday morning. It's my favorite hole on the course and the first time I've seen it with grass on it, so I asked him to post it. But then I went out to play golf at Crystal Downs with a group of visitors from the east coast, and haven't looked in here since.
Jeez.
This is a photo of the tenth hole at Rock Creek. From the back tee it's 600 yards; the photo is taken from a bit up and to the right by the middle tee.
The scale of Rock Creek is different than most courses so a lot of the conclusions drawn about the photo are silly ... just as Ron noted in his other post about the course yesterday, the scale is big enough that distances are VERY deceptive. The road in the distance (over the trees behind the green) is about 3-4 miles away. The front nine holes are on the other side of the creek and are obscured by trees and by topography. The tee shot is about sixty feet downhill to those first bunkers on the left ... it's something like 305 to carry them (possible at elevation 4800) and get a huge turbo boost another 40 feet downhill to the bottom, so the bunkers are there to make most people play to the right where the ball will stay up. From there it's a very long second shot over a deep valley and back up to a green set on the edge of a bluff with a steep drop to the right.
Your grandma plays from the forward tee way out to the right, has to carry it about 40 yards to reach the fairway, then it's 400 yards downhill and the last 80 back up with about seventy yards of fairway to play through. She'll probably think it's pretty.
The eighth green is over there on the right, through the fairway, but the knob with native grass in the very corner of the photo protects it from being seen. (The eighth green was moved a bit back from the routing plan drawing but just because we thought the hole would be too hard if it was as long as originally planned ... it wouldn't have been in play on #10 anyway and it certainly isn't now.)
It's my favorite hole in large part because it is the first hole that drew my eye when I started working with contour maps of 3000 acres (the central piece of the 80,000 acre ranch which seemed to make sense as the location of the golf course). The hanging green site was a natural one ... at first I looked at it as a short par-4 from the landing area, but then I realized I could add a full shot to it and that you would be able to see all the key features from the tee in very dramatic fashion.
And thanks for posting, Ron.
It was fun on more levels than I had anticipated.