"TE,
I hope that you don't buy into this illusion of erosion that is being pawned off on us. A blowout bunker with thousands of golfers trancing through or by every year is far from natural. You can not create the appearance of naturalness and maintain the unstated intent.
John Kavanaugh:
I have no idea at all what you mean by "....and maintain the unstated intent."
However, the rest of what you just said is complete garbage, John. I've wondered for years if some of the things you say on here are done for effect to be subtley humorous or whether you really are sort of off-the-wall and off the mark. If you're even remotely serious with your remark above I think it basically proves you've probably always been the latter.
The fact that golfers walk through an actual natural blowout or a really good man-made imitation of one has nothing to do with the natural look of it or the natualness of it. Are YOU under some illusion that if a thousand people tramped through some wholly natural dunesland (blowouts) that somehow renders them less naturally occuring than they were BEFORE those thousand people tramped through them? And if you are, John, you really truly are off-the-mark when it comes to understanding golf course architecture and most all we talk about on here, at least when it comes to the subject and look of naturalism.
Furthermore, in a natural dunesland setting that the blowoout bunker is representative of, the natural force responsible for creating that natural blowout look is almost wholly the wind (notice the word "blow"
), while the eroded look that is also represented in natural looking bunkers is almost wholly created by the eroding force of water on earth and sand.
For fairly obvious reasons most natural looking golf bunkers are a combination of the two, and THE LOOK of a combination of the two with probably more concentration on the latter---eg THE LOOK of the eroding forces of water. On the other hand, some natualistic looking bunkers such as perhaps the original CPC style with those lacy fingers of grass into the tops of the low profile sand formations are more a respresentation of THE LOOK within some dunesland blowout formations where vegetation serves to naturally stabalize sand movement.
What you need to do more of John Kavanaugh is to get the hell off paved roads that you're used to making and walk right into some natural dunesland and look at them carefully. After that get off the road and out of your car and look at how the eroding forces of water works on the earthen banks of a stream.
And after all that if you still think that a thousand trampling feet somehow renders those formations less than naturally occuring in the first place, then I really do think you're nuts!