[Jason Thurman]

Midwest Mashie participants were treated last week to two courses that derive the bulk of their character from their terrain.
 
The Mashie itself was contested at Northland Country Club. Beginning near the shore of Lake Superior, the out-and-back routing climbs some 200+ feet up a bluff before plummeting back down. The 2^nd, 3^rd, 5^th, and 10^th holes test the waling golfer’s legs and reward players who can find the humility to club up, while the golfer in a cart need not touch the throttle from the approach on 14 until the 17^th tee.
 
A preview round at White Bear Yacht Club, meanwhile, featured a collection of holes that generally finish on a green of about the same altitude as the tee. And yet, along the way, the player must traverse almost continuously rolling hills and swales that rise and fall 20+ feet multiple times over the course of many of the holes.
 
 Other courses feature more sidehill holes. Hills add challenge, character, strategy, and shotmaking demands. They also tend to add a bit of whining in the grill room. What are your favorite courses that feature hills as an integral part of their character? Do you prefer the steady, sustained uphill/downhill movements of a course like Northland? The rolling hills of a course like White Bear? The sidehill of a course like Lookout Mountain? And when does a hilly course go from a fun ride to an annoying one for you?

[Howard Riefs]

 Other courses feature more sidehill holes. Hills add challenge, character, strategy, and shotmaking demands. They also tend to add a bit of whining in the grill room. What are your favorite courses that feature hills as an integral part of their character? Do you prefer the steady, sustained uphill/downhill movements of a course like Northland? The rolling hills of a course like White Bear? The sidehill of a course like Lookout Mountain? And when does a hilly course go from a fun ride to an annoying one for you?

Since the above was in 1 pt type, here it is so you can read it:


Other courses feature more sidehill holes. Hills add challenge, character, strategy, and shotmaking demands. They also tend to add a bit of whining in the grill room. What are your favorite courses that feature hills as an integral part of their character? Do you prefer the steady, sustained uphill/downhill movements of a course like Northland? The rolling hills of a course like White Bear? The sidehill of a course like Lookout Mountain? And when does a hilly course go from a fun ride to an annoying one for you?

[PCCraig]

Interesting thread, Jason.

I grew up north of Chicago, which generally speaking the golf courses all sit on swampy, dead, flat land. (All the courses run more or less in a row on the Skokie Lagoon flood plain, so people didn't want to build houses there a 100 years ago, either).

On flat courses like that, most of the strategic interest from a round of golf comes from either severe greens or big, bold, bunkering.

It was a bit of an adjustment for me moving up to Minnesota as the land here is much more rolling and in some cases severe.

First, at Town & Country the routing attacks the most severe features of the land head on. Holes like #4 and #6 play directly at a huge landform reminiscent of early Scottish routings in a way that modern architects avoid. That course also sits essentially on a side hill with most things breaking toward the Mississippi River to the west. The greens are more subtle from an internal contour standpoint there but are tricky to read with the east to west break of the property.

After our round at White Bear, a few guys were noting how difficult of a walk the course is, despite it being somewhat short and a classic design. The humps and rolls in the fairways can take a bit out of a walker, especially on a hot afternoon like we had last week.

To me, one of the charms of White Bear is that it is half golf course and half nature hike. Despite it's shorter length, the course sits on a pretty large property and therefore generally does not play in a back and forth motion as other classic courses do on tighter properties. So you get to experience something closer to a hike when walking across the bridge on #4, or going down to the 6th green to get a glimpse of the lake filled with wood ducks, or hiking back to the far corner of the property to the wooded 14th, before coming back down the 15th & 16th into the more open prairie setting. Not to mention climbing the hill after the tee shot on the 18th to reveal the great view of the clubhouse and White Bear Lake. 

Northland sits on what we know is a very severe site. As Tyler Rae mentioned, you climb 150ft from the 2nd tee to the 3rd green, which is the same amount of elevation at Augusta National...then you keep climbing! Ross' routing is pretty spectacular in that it climbs the hill using shorter holes where the uphill slope is the primary hazard like at the 3rd where a ball hit just short of the green falls backward 80 yards. Once up at the "top" of the routing, you play a number of holes in the more wooded area surrounding the halfway house, before hitting #13 which takes you on the very dramatic trip down the hill.

If anything, Northland reminds me of a roller coaster. It clicks slowly uphill, before giving you some loops, then finishes with a grand finale of thrills before hitting the breaks at the clubhouse. 

[RJ_Daley]

I have to compliment this line.  It perfectly describes the course as I saw it.

If anything, Northland reminds me of a roller coaster. It clicks slowly uphill, before giving you some loops, then finishes with a grand finale of thrills before hitting the breaks at the clubhouse.

[Jason Thurman]

Pat, you’re definitely right about Town & Country and the way it smashes head-on into slopes, much the same way White Bear does. I can’t think of many other courses that are so aggressive about playing over, up, or down hills, head-on and with very little camber. I would say the land at Midland Hills is relatively similar in its rolling character to that at White Bear or T&C, but the course seems to cling to the side of slopes more often as opposed to smacking into them head-on like White Bear. Dan Kelly and I touched on this a bit during our round at Midland Friday – there’s something to be said for the way the slopes at Midland allow a player to use them for purpose, especially off the tee. I haven’t played it enough to know for sure, but it’s not hard for me to imagine someone fading a ball off 2 tee and riding the slope to get a little extra runout, or hugging the inside corner at 4 to get a little more runout than the person who goes down the right side and more straight up the slope. Those are just two examples, and White Bear probably offers some of the same opportunities – a tee shot down the right side on 5 will surely get a little more runout than one down the left – but it does feel like more tee shots at White Bear are going to hit into the front of a hill for most players and lose some steam. It seems to me that’s a big part of why it’s the longest 6400 yard course I’ve ever played. And it’s THE thing that stands out to me most about the course. I’ve never played anywhere else that demands a player negotiate so many slopes and rolls head-on.


And here’s another thing about White Bear that I think is interesting as I’ve thought about it, even though I don’t have a clue what it means or how I really feel about it, or if I even have a feeling about it. But it’s interesting to me that, at White Bear, the holes I would consider hilliest seem like they mostly finish at about the same elevation they started. It’s a wild, heaving ride down 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17 and 18. And yet, it seems like most of those holes finish on a green that’s roughly the same altitude as the tee (18 is probably a fair amount lower, but it definitely starts low, moves high, and then plummets). Meanwhile, holes like 2, 3, 6, 8, and 12 seem to feature broader slopes. The journey on those holes isn’t defined as much by the humps and bumps along the way, and yet we definitely finish significantly lower than where we started on each of them, and that generally doesn’t happen on the more rolling holes there with exception of maybe 13 and maybe maybe 2.


I don’t know if there’s anything actually significant about that pattern, and I don’t know if it was done on purpose (by Watson… LOL), and I don’t really know what to think about it. But it at least seems like it might mean that every hole requires the player to take its slopes into account in one way or another, and that almost every hole presents the chance that a player may need to gauge how far up/downhill any given shot might play, and that each hole gives the opportunity to try to strategically attack the slopes to create easier subsequent shots – trying to minimize blindness or sidehill lies and whatnot. And there’s something I find interesting about that.

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