Peter: very cool.
My only question is, do you have good photo evidence that the hill was really that big? It seems weird to assume that everything in the brush is unchanged but the original hill was cut from thirty feet to twelve.
If Seth Raynor said the hill was thirty feet, I'd believe him. But most golfers grossly overestimate topo features. I must have had ten people tell me the drop on the 12th at Shoreacres is 100 feet, when it's not even half that. So if someone early on said the hill was thirty feet, others would have parroted them, even if it was half that.
I wondered that same thing. Here is my rationale and what I have/ don't have:
- I haven't seen a ground level photo of the hill
- An American Golfer article said "The architects have not been satisfied with what nature did in this case, and by way of helping out have dumped in no less than six thousand loads of earth to form a veritable little mountain to be carried from the tee." It's tough to calculate, because it probably wasn't a perfect mound, but V=1/3*3.1416*R^2*H. I could estimate with this formula, but I don't know how many cubic yards a "load" would have been back then.
- There is a diagram of the course that references the hill as being 30'. This was why I specifically pinned it to that value.
- When I measure the area of the hill from the 1939 aerial overlaid in Google Earth, I show that it was about 20,000 s.f. at its base.
- This is a much larger base than what shows up in the lidar, so it seems clear that it was deconstructed at some point.
- I can see from an oblique aerial that the hill blocked the view of the cross bunker from the tee. The current lidar of the hill shows that what is left is way too small to block the view.
- There are paintings of each hole that seem very accurate and I'll attach the painting of the hill here. Keep in mind that it was taken from the vantage point of looking backwards from the green toward the tee.
* Scroll right to see the full images:
Here is the reference to 30' Hill. I'm actually not sure what the source of this is- I'm sure that Anthony would know.
This is a great image and really gives the clearest indication that the current hill has been altered. What I see in the lidar seems like a pathetic little mound really.
The hill that is there now is slightly over 2x as high as the Short green pad, which is on the left. But one mystery to me is that is has the same shape as the original with sort of a diamond shape and fingers reaching out. I believe that the course was revived briefly in 1940, right after those aerials, so maybe they scalped it at that point and still kept a remnant as a feature? It was a bit ridiculous in its original shape and probably had no bearing in play by 1940 with steel shafts, etc. But I have no evidence- just a theory. If they would have scalped it after that, my theory is that they would have scraped it completely and/or not bothered to keep the original shape of it.
View from short of the green looking back across the cross bunker and toward the Hill and tee. In my draft rendering, I made the aiming knobs too small. maybe if I make them in this proportion and make the tip of them 30 feet, it will seem more realistic. In that case, the hill itself would only be, say 25 feet.
There are a few semi blind spots on this course that will be much more challenging. I would say that this hole is the easist to get right because the green and the cross bunker are so perfectly preserved (under the brush in a State park). The Short will be very easy too. And I think that I see the Road Bunker green in the lidar in somebody's yard. Luckily, it seems as if they didn't build their house right upon it.