A few weeks ago, I posted several photos of a course in Pinehurst that is scheduled to open in March next year and asked people to guess the architect. A fair few rushed in with Coore & Crenshaw based on the style of the bunkers and, in fact, they were correct.
How about here? Can you readily identify the architect firm and/or where the course is located? This is much harder as the bunker ‘style’ is of little/no help.
In addition to the three photos below, here are some hints:
*one of the architects is a regular poster on GolfClubAtlas.com (and yes that classes him as being very smart, at least smart enough to avoid any Merion/Myopia threads
)
* the site is blessed with sandy soil throughout
* the location is generally windy, enough so that the seventh hole is a 300 yard par three
that makes sense
* the course features what is being billed as the world’s biggest bunker and since it stretches out of eye-sight, it just might be!
* play is year-around and is slated to commence in the January, 2009 timeframe.
* as you may be able to discern, it’s not Oakland Trees, site of this week’s PGA Championship, but there is a connection, albeit a painful one
* this probably gives it away but its location may be the sole hot spot of golf course construction in the Americas.
Above is the 200 yard uphill eleventh with a sixty foot plus drop off the back right through that gap.
This one is taken forty yards shy of the fifteenth green. Though photos flatten green contours, some of the excellent (!) random movement are still evident.
Seen from behind, the reachable seventeenth plays dead downwind but holding the small elevated green in the foreground will be the trick. The wide fifteenth fairway is seen to the right and the 140 yard sixteenth is in the far distance.