I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my.
Ball in a bride Egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Frida Egg, Frida egg, brigg Frida Egg bride egg Lie.
I'm about ready to run off the golf course.
Welcome to the Frida Egg Golf Podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison, and today we're talking about how to build a career in golf architecture, or at least we're talking about how one person accomplished that feed. My guest is Dan Hickson. He's a Portland, Oregon based golf architect who's designed a number of courses in Oregon in Washington, including Bandoned Crossings, Wine Valley, the reversible course at Silva Valley Ranch,
and the brand new Bar Run in Roseberg, Oregon. Dan's career has really run the gamut from low budget renovations to ambitious and boundary pushing new builds. And while he's somewhat under the radar nationally, he is very well established and well respected in the Pacific Northwest. I've wanted to have him on the podcast for a while and we finally found a good time when he was in town and visiting his in progress renovation at the Lake Oswego
Municipal Golf Course. So we'll open up by talking about that project, and then we'll dig into the way that Dan has built up his career from being a club pro at the Columbia Edgewater Country Club to a very prolific golf course designer. I think he's taken a really interesting path and it probably has some lessons in it for aspiring architects.
All right, let's get to it. Here is Dan Hickson? All right?
So, Dan Hickson, we were just out at the Lake Oswego Municipal Course a few minutes ago walking around that project that you're doing. You've just finished basically renovating it, doing an ambitious renovation out there. It's grassed in but hasn't opened yet. There are some more things to do on the site. So could you just like take me through that project? What did you do there?
Well, it was an eighteen hole par three course, very simple, very rudimentary design, and the city of Lake os we Go on to build a park and or excuse me, a recreation center, an aquatic center, and so that took away the first three holes and we then had to just basically start from scratch, and a lot of it was taken out trees and turned it into a nine
hole course with three par fours fairly short. That really opened up the site mostly with just tree removal of kind of poor species and poor planting.
Okay, so yeah, a lot of trees came out there. It was pretty choked before, for sure, I've played it before and it's much more open now. But a big part of the move was going from eighteen part threes to what you have now. So you know, nine holes. What's the nature of the course now.
Well, the property has some tilt to it. It has a kind of a wetland down on the bottom. And the majority of the holes on the original course were parallel to each other, just back and forth, like seven in a row and on each side, not just seven.
You know, holes two through nine or anything.
And so we were able to open up the gaps between them and basically build one hole per where the old ones were, and so again to gain some width. They had some incredibly narrow shots between the trees before. But really it was part of it was to build a you know, regulation type greens regulation type te's you know, built with California speck for the greens, and you know, capped teas and much bigger.
You know.
It was a typical Muni where you know, by May first there was no grass left on the tees for the whole season, and so we were able to really expand that part and hopefully the maintenance of it is kind of follows it.
Yeah.
Yeah, and you have some interesting greens out there too. I think that's a big deal here, right. The previous course had these sort of circular push up greens a little bit domed. Maybe they weren't designed that way, they just kind of ended up that way, and it was it was fairly repetitive what was going on. Now you have some creative shapes out there, some fun little shots, you know, what were some of the things that you.
Yeah, well, you know, it's an introduction course for a lot of people, a lot of kids it'll be their first round of golf. You know, parents and grandparents can can take children out there and play the first time, and beginners of every age and so I thought, you know, as an introduction course that they should have some exciting stuff.
So we build a.
Punch bowl green. We have kind of a partial redan, a little runaway downhill green on a par three. We have a couple of swales that run through the greens. But really just to make it more exciting golf. And I use the analogy. It wasn't my idea. Somebody else said this. I couldn't tell you who that if you were introducing somebody to the world of coffee, you wouldn't take them to the service station to get it out of a you know, a little old pot that's been
sitting on the burner for seven hours. You take them to a nice coffee shop. And I feel to introduce people into golf that they should have a little bit of creativity and imagination to see that a green, you know, isn't just flat or a dome, and you know, you got to aim to the left to make it break
in and stuff like that. And so I kind of think that's what we did pretty well, and you know, still kept it very playable and safe for higher handicappers, but a little bit of excitement that you may see on a more of a major style course, not a major tournament course, but you know, a more classic country club or something.
I feel like, I've heard the coffee analogy from Andy Johnson before from there, Yeah, maybe from or maybe he heard it from the same person you did, but it definitely holds here where. Yeah, this is the first course that a lot of people will play, and so why not make it as compelling as possible? Why does it have to be a dumbed down or mundane version of the game. If it's really fun, then presumably you're more
likely to appeal the peep exact way exactly. Yeah, all right, So you know, one one big aspect of this project, as I mentioned before, was the reduction of the footprint of the golf course, going from eighteen to nine holes. Yep, right, this is something that a lot of golfers might have a problem with that local golfers will will, you know,
usually object to projects like this. What do you think are some of the cons as well as some of the potential pros of municipality is doing this kind of thing with their golf courses where they're reducing the footprint, reducing the number of holes, but trying to improve the quality of the golf.
Yeah, it's there's there is a lot of pros and cons to that, and the one of the quick con to get it out of the way was some of the locals were worried that it would be too busy because they don't have front and back tee times on certain days of the week, and so everybody's just got
to go off on ten. And that's a that's true that the city of Lake Oswego when they made the decision to build the rec center, they looked at everything kind of more of a community aspect of it and trying to offer more on that site than just golf. And so they're building this beautiful aquatic center and all the rec facilities, and so it really becomes a hub for this community. That is a real pro to that is giving up part of this golf course.
For the good of the hole.
And you know, I've said, hey, it's going to be a I live in the same city and I'll never put my toe in that swimming pool, but I'm glad it's here because there's a real shortage for this area for swimming and for the high school kids and younger as well as adults. So that's really neat in the community aspect of it. But as far as the golf course goes, you know, the other one was really you
just basically teed off. You hit it in the trees, you chipped out, and then you hit it up to the green, and if you're not very good, you hit it in the trees again and you chipped out. So now we have you know, thirty yard to forty yard wide fair well not forty thirty yard wide fairways on the on the par fours, as well as some space around the greens and stuff with a lot of short grass around it where people can put and bump the
ball up onto the green and stuff. And so the real cons is it's what I like to think of. I mean, golf is golf, but this is kind of more like real golf in the sense that there's some room that you're not just hitting a tree every time and playing off the roots and the dirt underneath all the trees. So yeah, I'm not sure if I explained you're answered your question.
Well, well, yeah, I mean you're saying that, you know, one of the cons would be, of course you can't fit as many people on a nine hole course as you could for an eighteen whole course, but obviously have elevated the quality of the golf and also offered some space for the rest of the community to use and to come on to a property near a golf course and be in the presence of the game, but also
share space with it. You know, this is a discussion that a lot of communities are having, like should we share the golf courses that we have in this way? And it feels like in this situation it was a plus for the community. But that's an emotional decision for a lot of places, like we're going to chop off part of this golf course and give it over to another activity, Like it's tough to do, but in a lot of cases, it allows you to do something better with the golf course that remains right.
And I think, you know, I failed to mention it before.
We expanded the driving range greatly, which has been popular in the past, but we've added fifty yards and better netting for safety, as well as build a They used to have two very small, like maybe two thousand square foot each putting greens that again we're just kind of domes and you'd only have a two or three cups on each one, and we built a little over ten thousand square foot putting green that happens to be at part of the facility by the swimming pools where I
could easily see families coming putting the kids go swim hang out. It'll really serve the community in that sense, and that putting Green can be a hangout as well as the driving range, which you know, I mean, I love that part of golf when you just go out to the course and you're not quite sure what you're gonna do, but you're gonna be immersed in.
Golf, all right.
So that's the Lake Oswego Municipal Course. This is one of your many kind of recent slash ongoing projects, and we're going to get to a lot of the interesting stuff that you're doing, which is mostly around the Pacific Northwest.
But you've also.
Had, I mean to me, one of the most interesting careers in golf architecture because you didn't take the ordinary path into the profession. There have been a lot of golf architects obviously who had a competitive background, which you have, but not many of them did exactly what you did to break into this career. And so I want to rewind a little bit and maybe go back farther than that decision that you made to enter the profession, back
to your childhood. Your dad was in golf as well, I believe, and so you know you were around golf as a kid. At what point did you notice that golf architecture was a thing and become interested in that side of the game.
Yeah, youngest child with I have three older siblings, and my dad was a golf pro. He's passed. But I also have an older brother that is a golf pro, Doug. And my other two siblings, my sister and other brother. They probably love golf more than the rest of us in the family did. But anyway, when I was seven years old, my dad took me out to Eugene Country Club, which was being remodeled by Robert Trent Jones, Sr. And
that golf course was being reversed. And at that point, I mean, I had already drawn a few courses, just like the little stick figure courses on the back of a scorecard. And when I saw this construction and there was dozers and excavators and Dad was kind of pointing it out. I told him that day that that's what I wanted to do. Once I discovered I kind of just thought golf courses were there as a seven year old, you know, we played it. Dad worked at a golf course.
We'd walk around. But you know, I was captivated right there at that age, and I told him that.
And fortunately I.
Wasn't a great juden or anything, and so I wasn't smart enough to ever get a different goal. And eventually, you know, thirty years later, I made the change to it. But it was just I can remember seeing that golf course today and that point and him explaining that they were rebuilding it, and that somebody drew it and told him how to build it, and that's what I wanted
to do. So I started drawing and thinking about it right from then and just looking at courses that, oh yeah, and sort of self taught, just really from that one little moment in time.
So Eugene Country Club was a Chandler Egan course. Right.
Chandler Eagan, we might mention a good bit in this conversation. He's a Golden Age architect who worked a great deal in the Pacific Northwest, lived in Medford, Oregon for a long time and worked with many of the courses and clubs in this area. I had worked with Alistair McKenzie as well on the famous Pebble Beach renovation in the late twenties, but he is a big presence in this area.
He was the original architect at Eugene Country Club. Robert Trent Jones Sr. Came in when you were a kid, made some changes, including reversing a lot of the holes and every things like that is what was every hole reversed?
Every hole? That's so interesting.
Yeah, the first he became the eighteenth green, and vice versa all the way through.
Oh my god, so you did you do you remember noticing that aspect of the renovation, like some of the details of what he was doing, Like, oh my god, there's this guy coming in and he's reversing the golf course. I didn't know how you could do that.
Yeah, for sure, But I mean, obviously, being that young, I'm not sure if I was comprehending everything. But I do remember for many years after that when when Dad said that to me, that they were reversing it. I'd never played the course, I think as an egan course, even though my grandparents were members there. But when he
was saying they were reversing it is my train. My thoughts were when we'd play other courses, like we'd go down to our course and cottage grove, and I would look at every hole backwards, going would this hole be better going the other way, which you know, ultimately if you jop forward Sylvie's Valley Ranch, I build a reversible course. But so many years of playing golf, I would just
do that. You know, if you're putting out and I'm waiting for you to put the flag in, I'm looking back up the fairway thinking would this be a better hole if it went the other way? And would the rest of the course be better if it went the
other way, not just this hole. And it's surprisingly it's amazing how many projects remodels and stuff that I do that I propose reversing holes that you know, these two are right next to each other, and they'd be better the opposite direction for one reason or another.
And so I think that.
Subconsciously carried into the idea of Sylvie's Value Ranch, which actually Wine Valley I'd proposed to be reversible before that, but the developers at the time thought I was crazy, which they probably weren't wrong. But so yeah, it was again back to that one little half hour of time or whatever it was back in the late sixties that I made that decision.
So huh.
All right, So where did you play early on in your competitive career.
What did that look like?
Yeah, I played at Oregon State on the golf team there for a couple of years. I played junior college before that and played basketball as well, and then immediately out of school I turned pro and went to Australia, qualified for the Australian Tour and that was in the Greg Norman years. This was in the mid eighties. Greg Norman was playing. He was flying in a helicopter and four of us, would you know, jump in a very small compact car and drive to the course and he
would fly in on a helicopter. But got to play quite I think I played seven Alistair McKenzie courses there and I somewhere I still have those drawings. I saw him three or four years ago that I would make sketches at night of his holes.
Courses.
Yeah, we played Rome Melbourne, we played the Composite course there and played uh Titterengi and in Auckland, New Zealand, we played Royal Adelaide and Metropolitan and ya Yarra and a whole bunch of them. A lot of them were side that the tour didn't play on them, but we would we would sneak off on a Monday and try to play a bunch of those and so.
Great stuff. You know.
I probably should have focused more on my game than the courses, but I was just fascinated with that end of it. And then I took a year off, a couple of years off, worked as a club pro, and went back out and played the mini tours, played the TPS Tour, which was the one or two years before the Ben Hogan Tour started, which it was it was not under the PGA in those days, and it was really through Texas, Florida up to North Carolina in the
southeast mainly, and moderate success. Tried the tour one time, made it through stage one, lost in a playoff stage two to get to the finals, and and uh didn't really like the travel, and and you know it certainly didn't play as well as I had hoped to, and took a club pro job and then so played regional events for another ten or twelve years and really enjoyed that. But you know, fifth place in the Oregon Open didn't have that big a charm to me anymore, you know, so you.
Kind of settled into the life as a club pro. Were you at Columbia Edgewater right away or is that just kind of where you ended up.
Well, i'd worked in my years off between Australia and going on the mini tours. I worked at place called Forest Hills here in town, great course west of Portland and Cornelius.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, this is a course that I often recommend to people. I think it is one of the best public courses in the area, and I think probably the best, in my opinion, affordable public course. It's a Billy Bell junior and senior collaboration and it's on a really wonderful piece of land.
It's a lovely course.
The owner at the time his sons. He had twins boys, and one of them now runs it. That when I knew him, they these boys were three or four years old, and you know, now there are young adult men and with families and everything, and I think I'm going to go look at it again. We've been talking a little
bit about making a few changes out there. So I worked there and then when I came back from trying the tour school, I went to work right immediately at Columbia Edgewater and after about a year and a half. The head professional, Jerry Molds left to Pumpkin Ridge, and I took over his intern and interim and then eventually they gave me the head job and so I stayed there for I think all told eleven years nine as the head pro.
Okay, so this is a pretty plumb job for a club pro. This is one that a lot of pros would like to have. It's one of the great Portland area golf clubs. There's Columbia Edgewater, There's Waverley, There's Portland Golf Club. As far as I'm concerned, those are kind of the top clubs in the city. And so what made you think while you were working this job that I'd like to go into golf architecture.
Well, I, you know, again going way back, it had always been there and it would never go away. And you know, unfortunately, I went through a divorce at that point, which kind of gave me, you know, a chance to sort of start over again. We didn't have children, and that was a big part of it where I don't think I would take the risk of starting a career that I had zero experience and probably going to make zero dollars for a year or two, you know, if I if I was in that relationship, and so that
was a big part of it. The PGA also allowed a new category so I could I could still play in tournaments and teach if I wanted to those early years and become and I'm still a PGA member.
I'm technically still a golf pro. I'm an a.
Sixteen and but really it was, you know, just that kind of deep burning desire to try to do it. And I always I always felt confident in myself from the artistic and golf side of it.
You know, there's a lot of.
The other stuff I didn't know going in, but I figured, you know, I'd figure it out.
You know.
I felt smart enough and creative enough and resourceful enough that if I didn't know the answer to something, I could find out pretty quick.
What were some of the first jobs that you got, Well, like, how did you break into the how did you start building your client base?
Yea from something so an old teammate of mine at Oregon State, Scott Larson, who is now the superintendent emeral Valley, which is one of my first projects here. He had a construction company at the time, and so I was going to go work for him when he was building a golf course here in town, and that got delayed from permits a little bit, and so I never really went to work for him, and he, in the meantime had we got hired to do a design build.
Of course down in Sparks, Nevada. It never happened.
We got paid for the design, and so really my first project was to design a full eighteen whole course, and I had a whole bunch of topo maps and it was going to be a housing development course. It never got built, but I went down there three or four times and walked the site and it had been kind of staked out the property lines and stuff, and
so I did a full set of plans. I really just used other plans from various jobs that that Scott had collected, and so I kind of just would look at these other plans and figure out what I wanted to do. I knew the distances in the scale and even design features, you know, shapes of greens and slopes and stuff. That was pretty easy for me. But really putting it all together and I didn't have a real rush. I mean, it probably took me, oh, I don't know, three to four months to do it. And you know,
just kind of working on it every day. And in the meantime Scott occasionally would get clients customers courses. Basically this says, hey, you know, we want to reduce some bunkers and a green or two.
Can you do it yourself?
And he says, no, I got a guy that will design it for you and we'll just come and do it together. So truly we sort of started this design
build con project or company. Unfortunately for him, things turned for his company ended up shutting it down, and now he's back to a superintendent and we still talked semi regularly, and great guy, but he really got me started and just a few small projects here and there, I mean technically, the first one that broke around was at the resort at the Mountain here up on Mount Hood golf Course. There we rebuilt two greens, and then I did a few teas at another course down at Mallard Creek and
another some down in Medford and Columbia. Edgewater really helped where I work because with another former architect slash golf pro Bunny Mason, we decided to build a par three course in a short game area and so I ended up becoming the co designer of that and we built it, and so that was really big. So now people at other country clubs could come over and see what I could do, and that really sprung a whole bunch of other stuff, a lot of short.
Game areas right away, and.
Then really kind of moving along, you know, various kind of smaller clubs at first, and then Portland Golf Club hired me to do their short game area, which was huge because Portland is truly one of the top club's former Ryder Cup course, PGA of America or PGA Championship and great history of USGA events, and they hired me, and that sort of again opened a lot more doors that these other clubs thought, Hey, if Portland hires them, we can hire them and yeah, and so it just
kind of kept rolling, and last year we did a very big remodel at Portland Golf Club, biggest one I've done at to date until this year.
Next year and the next year it looks like so full circle.
Yeah, So you kind of became the regional architect here in the Pacific Northwest, especially in Oregon. Your work is
sort of all over the place. In those early days, like before you got your first big new build gig, which we'll certainly talk about in those early days, What was the the learning curve like for you, Like, what did you, aside from drawing plans and things like that which you talked about for your first job when you're out building stuff, what kind of skill set did you have to develop in order to really like be a golf architect and not be a golf pro who was designing stuff.
Well, that's interesting you say that, because I really focused on This kind of sounds funny, but I really focused on customer service.
And I mean, like I said, I kind of knew the golf and I could talk golf with anybody.
I felt comfortable talking about any golf course with you name it, I would be okay in that conversation.
I never stumbled for what to think about a golf course.
And if I disagreed with something, I usually could come up immediately why I didn't like it, And if somebody really liked it and I didn't like it, I could get a pretty good argument against that. But really I focused on I'd been around a few architects and I won't name names, but they didn't really treat the customer very well. The client the board of directors, the Greens committees, they were kind of rude to them. And I'd worked
in that business being a club pro. I'd gone through hundreds of board of director meetings and Greens committee meetings, and you know, I kind of knew what country club type people or golfers in general wanted, and they they want good customer service.
And so successful club pros are really good at that. They're great, they're great diplomats. They're like, if you if you meet the most successful club pros in the business, there all of them are really good people.
And and it's sincere and deep, and there's there's they're not phony at all, and they don't make stuff up, and they remember your name, and they smile and they listen to you and they look you in the eye. And I really focused on that and and really just try to when I talk to a club, I'd say, you know, you've got a great place here, but we can make it better. And as opposed to saying, well, this is just awful and how could you guys live with this? And who are you to tell me what
to do? And so, you know, I always felt one of my best strengths was that even though I do have an ego I was, I'm able to back it off. And for instance, if I'm in a Greens committee and somebody on the outside of that Greens committee says, hey, what about if we did this, I have to recognize that that's a better idea than mine, because a good idea is a good idea, it doesn't matter where it came from. And so it's and if it's a bad idea to diplomatically.
Tell them that we're going to do something else.
And so I think, I think, you know, I'm fortunate when I did start that golf was really turning, I.
Think to an upgrade.
You know, the Bandon World really helped people could see that there was this better golf courses out there, better thinking,
better work through all the details. And fortunately I'm pretty observant on stuff like that and could see that that you just can't build the things that were maybe getting built in the eighties and nineties with really more designed in the office, and you know, containment mound type golf courses that you know, you just hand the plans and a guy on a dozer just builds mound after mound after mound.
And so I think I'm rambling here and getting off topic, but I think I can't even remember.
You're talking about the time that you got into the business.
In the Pacific Northwest especially, people were starting to understand what design build golf looked like, correct, and that was probably helpful for you, and you were running kind of a design build operation or you know, you had some control over the build process from fairly earlier in your career, it sounds like, and that is something that sets your courses and your work apart from a lot of other regional golf architects that that I've come to know over
the years. You know, every region kind of has its guy, right, Often it's an ASGCA guy, and some of them are really good. Others are a little bit cookie cutter, and the work isn't that compelling. But you know what sets your work apart and has for years, is that there's a little bit of craftsmanship to it. There's that design build element, and so I guess it was probably helpful for there to be some examples of that around for sure. And then the other part of it that I'm curious
about is the taste element. Right, Good architects need to have good taste, need to like have seen really good golf courses and understood what makes them good for you. Was a lot of that from your experience in Australia, you know, when you think about developing your taste, you know, when you look at a golf hole, like what makes it look good to you? What makes it feel like a good golf hole? Where do you think you got that from? Or is that just an eight?
I think it's just probably a little bit of both.
I think, you know, again, at such an early age, I would always look at courses in like our family and buddies and teammates when we would we'd play a tournament somewhere, I would always ask, Hey, what's your favorite hole on that course? What else you like about that course? What do you like about that course? What do you think of this hole? Is that crazy or is it a good hole? And so I sort of always had that interest in it. And even the really bad courses
have some really good things on them. It might just be a little bump here or there next to a green, or the way that green sits into a corner somewhere. And so I think, you know, you can learn a lot just looking at anything, and a lot of times you're learning what not to do, and that's you know, the whole mounding thing and just the you know, the over elevation of teas, a lot of stuff like that, and the overplanting of trees.
Just really hurts the site.
And granted, I'm not like a lot of guys that have played you know, eight thousand courses or two thousand courses around the world and all the top hundred stuff. You know, I've played twenty or thirty of them. But I think I'm really observant towards our local areas. And you know, one real advantage I think I have, or at least I call it my advantage. I don't know if it's an advantage over anybody else, but I feel
like it's an advantage to the customer. Is like Portland Golf Club last year, it's like half an hour away. I probably went out there close to one hundred days. And so a guy shapes a bunker and it's a little bit off, I can make him switch it before he's even out of that bunker moving on to the next one. And I and so we can really get the details down when you're there just pretty much every day, you know, I would leave for another project for a
day or two and miss something. But just that day to day element is is really important and so working local you can kind of do that. And that's the you know, I had no idea when I got into this business that the construction side would be so fun and rewarding and exciting, you know, just.
To watch it happen.
Even you know, I'm working at Oswego Lake Country Club right now.
Another channel regan, and.
We're you know, three quarters the way through of a big bunker project, a lot of new tea work, a lot of surrounds of greens and stuff like that, and you know, it's just fascinating to watch it come and to think it through and say, you know, this isn't working.
Let's do this.
And and if you're there every day, you can you can dial that in.
If you're there once every two weeks, you have to approve a lot of stuff.
Otherwise the thing falls by schedule and and oh and if you change it, it gets off off budget.
You know, you start spending wasting money. You just have to say good enough.
Yeah, and sometimes yeah, I mean yeah, it'd be great to say, hey, I built two courses in New Zealand.
And one and you know, somewhere else and all that. But I got it pretty good. You know, I'm pretty content.
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All right, so let's talk about the first big new build project of yours, at least that I became aware of, and that is Bannon Crossings, which is the local public course in Bandon, Oregon, not associated with the famous Bandon Dunes golf resort, but it is the course that all the caddies play that you know, everybody who lives there loves this course, plays this course a lot. How did
this project come about? Like, what is there a connection to the resort that I'm not aware of that you know produced this golf course or is it just unrelated unrelated?
But backtacking just a little bit, So when I did start the business, I did have a little bit of a marketing concept in mind, and that is through because of my dad and my brother being golf pros and myself being a golf pro.
I knew all the golf pros in the.
Northwest, or they knew my dad or my brother, or they certainly knew our name because dad was a very good player, my brother was a very good player regionally, and so I knew through the golf pros that a lot of times the golf pros in that room of a board, a director or a greens committee when they say, hey, we want to remodel something, does anybody know an architect Well, nobody really knows architects.
Most in Oregon, there was.
Only a Nope, there wasn't a plethora of them. But everybody sort of knew that this guy left Columbia Edgewater in the golf in the golf pro business. He left Columby Edgewater started business on his own to do something he's never done. You know, they kind of thought I was crazy, but they remembered that. So going forward, all my early projects really came through golf pros. In that section well happens to be for the Bandon Crossing Ones.
One of my good friends, Mark Keating worked at Shadow Hills and some of his members, the Rex and Carla Smith, were going to develop a golf course because of his love of Bandon Dunes, and they wanted to talk to me, and so they sent me a packet from the American Society Golf Course Architects to list all my former projects and how many courses I'd build on the coast and all this experience. And the only thing I could answer
was put my name an address in there. And I couldn't say yes to any other question on this three or four page backet. So I just called Carla up and told her. I said, hey, I would give my left leg to do this project, but I have zero experience. I told her exactly. I mean I'd built some stuff, I hadn't build a full course. And she said, well that's okay, just put on there what you can. And I said, well, what you know, what are you guys
doing right now? Rex will be home in an hour And I says, well, I can be there in about an hour and a half.
They were in Eugene, and so.
I literally grabbed my keys and got my car and met them that day and they hired me that day, and with a few stipulations that I could you know, I could get a routing for him and so on and so forth. But yeah, it was just a shot in the dark, one phone call and there it happened.
And most of them happened that way.
It just suddenly you get a phone call and it's like, hey, we want to build a course and come and talk to us. And you know, fortunately I haven't lost any of those I get those projects.
So what are some of the basics about that course for people who haven't heard of it or know about it? What's the course?
Like, well, it's it's inland about a mile and a quarter or a mile and a half from the ocean, so it gets quite a bit warmer weather than actually the resort does because it's right on the it's right on the shore line basically.
So that's nice.
It's a bit warmer, a little bit less wind. It's kind of half basically nine holes. The first three or four and the last four or five are kind of in pasture lands, and then the other holes are kind of in the forest or this bottom land that divides the property. It was old, ancient sand dudes that we build on, so we were able to build it with on site sand. We could kind of mine in those dunes a little bit and build our greens out.
Of that sand.
Had just a beautiful plethora of plant life on it, from all these native pasture grasses to it had a little bit of gorse on it, which is great at the resort. It's kind of a nice it's kind of a maintenance sore, but we had mans anitas and rhododendrons and firs and pines and cedars and just tons of underbrush.
So it was really a it was visually. It was so fun to work on it because there was just so much of stuff.
And kind of really nice piece of ground as far as the basic contours with the difficulty of going down through this bottom land where it drops down, you know, fifty sixty feet and dividing the course.
But no, it was just a great project. I'm so thankful they hired me for that.
Yeah, it turned out really good, obviously. I mean it's I think it's one of those things where people can go to that town many times over the years, go to the resort over and over, and then finally, you know, on their fifth or sixth trip, somebody says, you really need to go out to Bandon Crossings and they go
out there. I'm like, wow, this is a truly excellent golf course, and so it's kind of kind of need in that way where it's it's almost like a hidden gem, except it's in one of the most famous and over exposed golf towns in the in the country. When you were building it, I mean, were they building bandoned trails around the time that you were building across.
Yeah, we were a year behind.
Trails they opened one year before us, and I was able to go out to trails because we used Tony Russel, a local contractor that had built most of the Bandon stuff was ours, and so we would go out there and that's when I first met Bill cor for the first time and able to walk some of those holes with him when they were making some modifications and stuff. But no, the resort was they were very friendly with us, and like you mentioned earlier about the caddies have just
been a huge deal for us. And now a lot of them go to bar Run, which is about ninety minutes away the course I just opened last year, and they sort of have that same feeling.
I have a little Bandon Caddy fan base. Without sounding cocky or.
Anything, but they really support those clubs and so I'm very thankful for them. I should send them a bunch of beer or something. I'm sure they would like that exactly. Yeah, the caddies do like to mention Bandon Crossings to guests who are like, Okay, so where do you play? Do you play out here a lot?
Well, yeah, they get to play the resort courses a lot, but you know, they really the Bandon Crossings is kind of the spot where they have their matches and their series. A lot of them are really good players. Yes, So that's that's kind of the vibe out there.
All right.
So the next course of yours that I'm really keen to talk about is Wine Valley. This is out in Walla Walla, Washington, Okay. Now, Walla Walla is a neat little town. It's very remote for you know, being the kind of size and significance of town that it is. I mean, it's not big, but there's a college there, Whitman College that that is well known and well regarded. About a four hour drive from Portland, slightly more than that from Seattle, though not much more, you know, three
hour drive or so from Spokane. So it's out there. How did this projects come about?
Why?
Why did they decide to build this kind of golf course out in Walla Walla.
Well, it again started with a golf pro friend of mine, John Thronson Thorstness Excuse me. John Thronson was a golf course architect, John Thorstness. He had this idea and he found a landowner out there that had the same idea and same thing. They said, do you know an architect? And John says, well, I've played a lot of tournament
golf with Dan. He's starting to make his way in the business and let's just have him come out, And so I did, and I drove home after being spending a night there and walking the property, which wasn't actually
the property we built a course on. But I came home and did a whole bunch of drawings that very night and stayed up real late and made all these pretty drawings and went to the post office next day and sent it to him, and basically they said, you're our guy, just based on you know, one day on the site and make in these pretty drawings. You know, being able to draw helps too, especially when you use color. That cap that gets people's mind racing to the good.
Yeah, we're at your drafting table right now. Actually, so there's some of Dan Hixon's are sitting around here.
And so that actually was before Bannon Crossings.
That conversation happened, and I hadn't even talked to the people at Bannon Crossings.
So we started to move forward.
We actually switched to a different piece of land where we actually ended up building, and then suddenly Bannoned Crossings came in and it took a long time for the city of Walla, Walla to change their regulations because nobody had tried to build a golf course there since the sixties, I think.
And there's Walla Walla country club in town. But yeah, and then that's Memorial.
Yeah, the country club is in the twenties or thirties probably, And so it took the city a while to figure out how they could approve it, and so eventually they did and yeah, and so that.
Was really great.
So I sort of broke her to deal for Jim Puliska, who is the owner of Emerald Valley that I'd known many years before that through amateur golf, and kind of brought him into it. The reason I say a broker to deal is that that's probably not even the right term.
We had a development group based out of Denver that was going to help us raise money and put it together, and that kind of fell through, and so the project looked dead, and I talked to Jim and he was interested in a second course, and so he jumped right in once he saw the land and the deal, the price and everything, and so we went to work within probably six months of him seeing the site, and we built the thing in fourteen months. From the first time
we shovel hit the dirt. We were open in fourteen months. Which helps because there's no trees on it. It was alfalfa field made it a lot quicker and easier.
Right, And when you say a fell off field, I want people to envision the right thing. This is not a flat piece of land. This is a broad, rolling, pretty dramatic piece of land that has landforms that are smoother and larger than you would find in dune land. And so it's not dune land by any means, but it has some of that. Look if you if if a golfer shows up at this site, they might be
reminded of a dune type of landscape. And so, you know, lots of those kind of native grasses and quite a bit of topographical movement across the site.
Great soils, low soils which were deposited there back in the in the Ice Age when the when the Missoula floods would break through millions.
Million years ago. I forget that.
I wasn't manorgiologists, but it's you know, you're talking about low soils like fine, silty, yes kind of soil. It's not sand, but it's you know, it's pretty good for golf.
And it was deep. They're well drillings.
It was eighty feet deep before they hit anything other than lose, and so it was like playing in just in a sand dune, except it was loose. Technically, it's not the Polue Country. The Poluice Country is a little bit north of the Snake River and in eastern Washington, but the characteristics are identical. It just doesn't fit in their geographic area. Really good. Jim really wanted a top notch course. He's a tournament player still is today. Wanted
tournaments there. So we built a pretty pretty stout golf course, you know, not super super hard, very playable for people that knock it along the ground, but you know, some severe greens and the ability to play it really long and play tournaments was really fun.
He let.
We brought in some first class shapers in Ky Gobi and Dan Proctor and.
Yeah, and if people don't know those names, I mean, if you're in golf architecture, you know about Kai and Dan. But Dan Proctor, a great architect in his own right, has teamed up with Dave Axlan to build some of the best public courses in the country, including a wild Horse out of Nebraska, and ky Golby has worked on numerous projects with any architect that you can name, including Tom Doak and all the firms that you would imagine. Dan Proctor has a long association with Corn Crenshaw. So
these are aces, right that you're bringing in. I assume part of the reason that they were available, you know, not that they wouldn't want to work on an exciting project like this, but it was around the financial crisis, right, and so did their schedules open up a little bit around this time?
Basically yeah, you know.
And it was funny because you know, thinking about being a golf course architect, and you know, say in the mid nineties, it's like, yeah.
America is building three hundred golf courses a year.
It's like, well, I can find that I can get one of those, right, And you know, then a few years later, America is building two hundred and fifty. Then America is building two hundred, then they're building one fifty, and by six is I think when we started on that or seven, you know, America is closing fifty courses a year, right and building ten. And so it was very fortunate timing that was, and that was the year it really tanked. But unfortunately, you know, fuel costs went up.
It cost is quite a bit more to build it. But Jim Pullisko own service stations and he's in the fuel business, and so he didn't worry about that because interesting, he was doing fine. And uh, it's probably too much information, but I said it, and here it is, and so but he just loved it. He and his father were involved at the time, and we were. They came up all the time, and you know, he was very involved
in everything. And but it was really interesting, you know, working with guys that are much more experienced than me and I'm in charge. It was you know, there was Kai and I and he and I've talked about it. You know, there was a couple of times where you know, I really had to check my ego because you know, my plan was this, but I would come back after being away for three or four days and Kai built something a lot better. And at first my natural instincts
would say, why didn't you do what I said? But then you know I had to back off enough to say, God, that's way better than I thought of. And so I really learned a lot from those guys. Very inspiring. You know, Kai was just awesome. Dan was awesome. One time we did a Jim and his father were in town and gave him an update schedule and yeah, we've got this done. This done was right towards the end, and I said, yeah,
I think the eighteenth t is ready to see. And we go driving around after this meeting and Kay's just got it blown up with a big dozer, and you know, I have to walk over there and say, what are you doing in front of them? And and his simple answer is that those teams just looked like it was a chop architect built him. I'm building you something really cool. And so there was a lot of passion to buy it and stuff. And so, you know, in front of those guys, I might not have had that, even though
deep down I always had that passion. But you know, it even spurred it on more. I wanted to shape and I wanted to understand and get better. You know, even though that course ended up, you know, it's got a lot of It's been in the top hundred. I think it's slightly out of it right now, but it's been in the down to the fifties or sixties and still is, you know, highly ranked and stuff.
But I even when we finished that, I thought.
I could do better and get a lot better, and I still hope to keep getting better by you know, just opening up my mind different ways to recognize that.
Moment when something has to change. And so that was great working with those guys.
Yeah, And those are the kinds of builders who definitely have enough confidence in themselves to depart from the plan. And certainly that's part of what they were trying to do.
Right.
The both are are coming out of the Pete Dye tree, even if they didn't work with Pete Dye specifically, that is that's kind of the spirit they're bringing to a project. So it's not surprising to hear that that Kai went rogue a couple of times.
Yeah, And you know.
And it was you know, when I saw him a few years after the course and stuff, I brought him a hat and he was like, gosh, I didn't think you'd even like me after that, And I was like, no, it was awesome.
I can I can.
Differentiate you know, those moments and and and like I said, it was, you know, I carry what a lot of that stuff that I learned there. You know, like for instance, we're building at Oswego Lake Country Club, is I have plans, we have square footages and total work areas and all these things that will control the budget, but what happens within those really has to happen in the field. And you know, a bunker is best when you touch it at the very end, not when you just copy a drawing.
And so, and those guys really really helped and opened up my eyes even more for that, even though that's kind of where I was going anyway, and so I learned a.
Lot from them.
So Wine Valley opened in two thousand and nine. Obviously at that point the golf course construction business was slowing way down. But over the past decade or so you've had a couple of really interesting projects. I mean, one of the things about your work in the Pacific Northwest is that it's all sorts of different things. You're not just turning out eighteen whole courses. You have a real variety of projects, and you've gotten to do some experimental
and frankly weird stuff. A couple of those experiments happened way out in eastern Oregon at Sylvie's Valley Ranch.
You built not only a.
Reversible golf course out there, but probably the craziest short course that I've ever seen in my life, and will probably ever, see why don't we start with the reversible course? So how does that work for people who are unfamiliar with it? How does that specific reversible course at Sylvie's Valley Ranch work?
Well, the easiest way to imagine it is just think of a big, eighteen whole golf course that uses a lot of land. There's big nature areas between them, and it's kind of low sagebrush and ponderosa pines between. And so imagine a complete, full eighteen hole, par seventy two golf course, you know, seven thousand yards long, and then kind of forget about it and say we're just going to build the opposite direction, and we're gonna build another one right over the top of it. And in some
cases you use a lot of the same features. A tee that might play in both directions, a green that you come into from two different directions. But because the ground is very diverse, there's lots of elevation change. I didn't want to just use only eighteen green sites. There was better holes. If I said, hey, even though there's a green on the first course over here, it doesn't really work.
Come in the opposite direction as well.
But there's a really great green site eighty yards away, and so this hole may have been a par five one time, this time, this next time, around the opposite direction, it's a par four that's you know, four fifty or something.
And so.
It's hard to get a handle on to even explain, you know, if somebody said, well, how many fairways you got, and it's like, hell, I don't know. They're all hooked together, and there's twenty seven greens. So of the twenty seven, there's basically, think of it this way, there's nine of the greens that are double so there's eighteen of the thirty six holes, and then there's nine for the Hankins course, and there's nine for the credit course that are individual greens.
And so that wasn't a plan that just sort of worked out that way. It could have been seven, it could have been eleven, you know, different ones.
It's just any given day, nine greens are not in use, single greens, and then nine are kind of shared between the courses. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think that if you had gone for a pure reversible course quote unquote, where every single green is in use every day, it would have been hard to do that out there, right, because it is it's a It's not like Saint Andrews.
It's not like the Loop in Michigan, the reversible course that Tom Doak built, where the piece of land is pretty subtle and is that kind of a similar grade throughout the site. There's a big movement on this site. It would have been tough to do a pure reversible course, I feel like, because there's some slopes that you can just play down one direction correct and you're not going to be able to go back up exactly.
And if you made if the big drop off par four t shot, for instance number eight on the Hankins course, if you played up that hill, it would be an awful hole. And so in order to get up top again, we just took a different piece of land and build a par three and a par four to get basically reconnected. And I can honestly say that if you did an eighteen hole peer reversible, just eighteen greens and they all double up, it would not have been anywhere near the
quality of golf that it is today. And I was just so thankful that the owner was just awesome in the sense that he was just a very much not even a golfer, but a little bit part time golfer, but innovative businessman, smart guy, and could see really quickly that building the reversible course. This is kind of a little bit of the background of how it came about. He wanted to build this eco friendly resort and he could build two courses on the land of one plus
a little bit more. That really made a lot of sense in his mind. Instead of having two hundred acres over here and two hundred acres over there.
To have a thirty six sold course.
He knew location stuff that we would be you know, we wouldn't have one hundred and fifty players a day or anything like that. It's going to be a smaller because of the location. And so but he recognized very quickly that that idea made a lot of sense. And yeah, I'm really proud of that work. It was a it was about a seven year experience for me going over there, and I would I would spend from the middle of April until close to the beginning of November during our
construction season building it. And it was really just myself and one or two shaper guys and then a couple of local kids and stuff.
Wow, And so it was it was a lot of work.
We did a lot of stuff, but you know, just a great, great experience, from rebuilding dozers to trimming tree limbs and making big burn piles at the end of the year, to shaping greens and doing all the subtle stuff and growing it in and planting aspens, and it just it's like ten careers right there, you know. And I was sort of doing the job that say, at Wine Valley there was like seven people and I did kind of that thing, and and it really inspired me to work even harder.
Just like the more I work, the more I it meant to me.
And so I've never been afraid to work hard and kind of do extra work because it just means that much more to me.
It's like my wife now says, are you going to be okay?
You got a lot of work. It's like, no, I want more because it just means more, you know. So maybe that's a workaholic, but I hope not.
Yeah, I mean, and part of part of the reason that kind of effort was necessary is that I called walla walla remote. I mean, Sylvie's is remote remote. Yeah, you know, it's it's.
Way the hell out there nowhere. And then you go another.
Hour yeah, exactly. It's you know, once you get if you're going out there from Portland or something, you'd get through the Bend area. You don't pass through the Bend Area literally on your way out there, but you get through where that is central Oregon and just keep going for a long long time and you don't see anybody or anything for ages. And so it's it's beautiful but very much frontier golf. And I like that they've kept it rustic out there, that the cart paths, at least
when I went out there were dirt. Oh yeah, and it was you know, it really felt like you were at the edge of the earth, and the golf courses presented nice and firm and fast and pale.
Yeah, and it's it's a really cool place. Now.
The other course that I mentioned, the short course, Mcveigh's Gauntlet, I mean, you look at that piece of land and it's impossible to put a golf course on it, right, it's too it's way too severe. You've got you've got these greens. I mean, it's like you made it up in a video game or something. I don't even understand, Like how did you build that course? Like were you getting were you getting heavy equipment up there, and some of those green.
Sites we did somehow.
So back to my very first trip to the property for Sylvie's with Scott Campbell, the owner, Doctor Campbell, we looked around and that is such a striking piece of land. He thought we could build the whole golf course up there, and then we weren't even talking reversible at this point. He just thought this could be an eighteen whole course.
And I told him very quickly, I said, you know, this is spectacular, but it's you know, we're going to go a mile this direction and a mile that direction from right here.
And this is just wait, you know, this is sick the acres or whatever it is. And I said, it's spectacular.
You could have a hole that goes out into that property, maybe a little part three and then play out of it. But I said it would be great for a short course, and he filed that away. And you know, as we've started to finish the big course and we built the other part three course, Egan's Chief Egan Course, which is more of a traditional short part three course, lower, simpler ground, he says, well, what.
About what about that one up there?
And you know I hadn't I'd been up on the property many times, being there that many years, you know, just hiking around and looking around, and so I drew up a plan of you know, something a five hole course or something, and he came back a week or two later, and we walked it, and he says, well, you know, why couldn't we just make it a little more And ended up ended up with seven holes, with there's places that we could connect and make even more
spectacular holes, I mean, not just more holes, but more spectacular and turn it into nine or twelve or whatever, and just keep doing it from ridgetop to ridgetop. Anyway, so he approved a plan, and I tried to figure out how to do it, and we just made these very small roads where I could get a dozer up.
In there and shape them myself.
And then but I still had to get a I still needed a dump truck to get sand into the greens, and so we brought these big dump trucks full of sand up there. But you know, kept the pathways pretty small and and trying not to ruin.
Too much of the natural vegetation.
There was a few roads up there that we were able to piggyback off of and you know, it took me a couple of months to build it, and then we had an irrigation company come in there and just you know, water the greens and the tees and big teas are pretty much connected to the former the green before and.
So yeah, it was really fun.
Yeah, you make it sound so simple, but it's yeah, it's it's it has to be. I took some I got some pretty good pictures of it when I was up there, and I'll post I posted those a couple of times. And people always kind of lose their minds when they see where some of these golf holes are. But really it is, you know, like little peaks that greens are just kind of set on and there's nothing around it except for wilderness, and you're just kind of hopscotching from one to the other. So that's a it's
a it's a pretty cool place, all right. So your your latest course opening is bar Run, which is in Roseberg, Oregon, kind of in southern Oregon, south of Eugene. Yeah, but not far from where you would kind of enter the mountains to go out to Bandon Dunes. You know, I played the course earlier this summer, going around looking at some of the shaping, I could tell that you were
experimenting with some stuff out there. You had a piece of land that didn't necessarily have like significant natural features on it to work with, and so some of this shaping that you did, the mounding, the shapes around the greens, all that kind of stuff was really interesting looking. I was wondering where you got your ideas for that stuff or what the thinking behind it was.
Well, it took a while to formulate what it was going to look like, because, like you said, it was a sand and gravel cory and it has these massive rectangular ponds on it and other areas that they had mined before and just sort of abandon and let brush
and trees take over. And we really didn't know what we had until really until I jumped on a big tractor with a with a big brush hog behind it and started cutting through you know, fifteen foot tall blackberries and over you know, kind of willow shoots and all this stuff to be before we could really see the land, and the routing changed.
Forever until right till not till the end.
But you know, we'd built quite a bit of it before we knew where the next holes were going. To go because we were having to fill ponds in and they would get filled. They were to fill sight as well, and so they would get they would excavate these ponds to get the sand and gravel that they would produce concrete and sell the stone and stuff and then have to fill it in with you know, old concrete and
clean dirt and fill and stuff. And so it was there was a lot of well, we need to fill this pond, and it's like, what do you think like ten feet and it's no, like one hundred and ten feet and which takes.
A while to do all that.
And so the sharp edges on the ponds, and there was a lot of between a lot of the ponds were dykes that had really steep edges. And in the site, even though the bigger site is real large, the the golf area is not all that huge because the water takes up so much of it. And there was kind of these natural low areas that we sort of have to stay out of. And uh so the design style
kind of emerged. You know, I was looking at a lot of courses and a lot of things to try to find the right inspiration and loosely Norman Macbeth's course. Wilshire in LA had the burnt the the not brancas.
What do they call them?
They're the kind of the swales next to the green and stuff. It's part of the wash system of Greater Los Angeles City. Yeah, I thought they call themcas. Yeah, maybe it does bran yeah, yeah, and so yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's really just ditches, just interplayable and occasionally when that floods, water rips through them. And we
didn't build anything that extreme, but we use that. You know, as we talked earlier today, the eighteenth Green has a swale that cuts through it and out in front of it. And that's loosely just from I've played Wilshire and watched the LPGA event there every year just to kind of see it, and uh, you know, so that was part of the inspiration. But a lot of times we just would push dirt in a funny way, and you know, we made these peaks instead of mounds to kind of
separate visually between holes, even though they're not continuous. We would push this dirt up as straight as we could make it with a dozer, and then we hydro seated it with fescue and just you know, one's the this is the Andes, and and this is the Himalayas, and and and so yeah, just kind of evolved, you know. The The overall theme is that it's an industrial air. We weren't trying to make a country club or anything
really smooth. We just wanted to have it kind of quirky to fit along with these sharp edges of things. And then, of course I made the crazy decision to copy the pit from North Barrick with a yes rather than a rock wall.
That North Barrick, you.
Know, one of my favorite holes in the world, if not the famous maybe of something that I didn't do.
Decided to copy that and that was almost on a whim.
The hole just kind of reminded me of it, but it needed the wall, and so we build this sixteen inch average sixteen inch high concrete wall that kind of diagonals in front of this green very similar, not an exact copy of the pit, but it's really funny when people play it. They come in and say, what the hell is the concrete wall in front of it? And it's then they tell the story and the people often it's not uncommon, they go, oh, I just love it.
It's just the greatest thing.
Especially that story that's just so cool, right, and it creates this just like North Barrack, or well not just like it, but a certain intimacy when you get behind that wall and you're down by in that pit.
Of the green, it just really feels it's fun and playful.
And that's what to me, that's what golf is. It should be, you know, it should bring a smile to your face. That that hole is kind of humorous to me. I don't know if other people feel it that way, but it's like, why not, Who cares if there's a you know, it is.
A funny hole. Yeah, And there's there's not enough.
You know, serious golf architecture out there that's willing to be willing to be humorous.
And there is a.
Connection to the site. You know that that concrete wall that you built it is it's light like the cart paths that a bart Runner made out of concrete basically from the from the site that the course was built on. And so there's some of that history kind of preserved in the design of the golf course. So that's that's brand new, actually opened just last year and is just getting going, and they're up that whole area. They have an RV resort sort of and when I was there,
they were building a lazy river, they told me. And so they've got a whole deal going there at Roseberg. It's kind of unique and it's you know, as far as I can tell, you know, I can't remember the last time that a relatively affordable public course was built in the Pacific Northwest. A lot of great golf courses have been built, but most of them have been of this high dollar resort variety.
Yeah, probably Bannon Crossings is last.
Yeah, exactly.
And so it's a significant event I think for golf in this area that this course has been built and you can go play it for around eighty or ninety dollars, I believe is the is the green fee right now. So that's pretty cool. All right, So what's the What are some projects that you have coming up or going that you can talk about and that you're excited about.
I got a lot of maybes. Yeah, I'm doing gosh.
I think I have five or six new long range plans that I'm working on at various stages of just going to the site that would be Billingham golfing country Club up in Billingham, Washington, Glendale. I'm about to present a bigger plan to them. We'll see what happens with that. North Shores a public course in Tacoma, much like you described affordable golf course.
I think they're potentially going to We're going to rebuild the whole thing.
It's sixty five years old, no, a little less than that, fifty five years old and still original irrigation, and it really needs to be upgraded. The golf course at Birch Creek, which was formerly Pendleton Country Club. I just started a long range plan with them. I do have a couple of new courses that I'm talking to people, but they're definitely not public for public knowledge.
I don't want people to know until I have.
Them, just to keep people away. But I think those I think one of them's getting real close to being possible.
And I don't know. My board over there.
Is yeah, I've got a board. I was, yeah, yeah, there's the it's probably not out of my line. Yeah, I see, uh, I see a few a few names on there. I'm not going to read it out last, but basically you're you're busy, yeah, right now, things are picking up for you, as they are for a lot of golf architects. So so yeah, it's honestly pretty pretty exciting times. Even though costs are rising, it seems like people are still forging ahead with some golf course projects.
Yeah.
And there I'm working on a little course in Washoogle, which is just east of Vancouver, which is really part of almost part of Portland. It's just across the Columbia River in Washington, a bunker project to a golf course that was built in thirty four. The front nine, the backside was in the sixties, and they've never really done anything other than they put in a new irrigation system
about twenty years ago. And we're redoing all their bunkers and making some surround changes around their greens and stuff, and fixing one green that's too steep. And it's really
a big project for them. It's not on the scale of some of these other ones I'm doing, but it means just as much to them, and so I want to give them just as I want to give them more for their money, almost, because this is a really big project for them, and it's really exciting to We're about a month into it and We've completed the bunkers on.
The back nine, and I get out there.
Roughly every other day during the week, and it's really fun to see them, see their golf course kind of open up with tree removal and this bunker work, and so yeah, I'm in a unique spot now where I have, you know, two projects under construction and just finished two other ones earlier this year, and a whole bunch coming and just starting to dream about new courses, you know, new projects and stead so you can kind of see, you know, from day one to you know, the Muni's
grasped in and growing in getting ready to open. So I kind of have a little bit of everything going now.
So I'm very lucky.
This episode of the Friday Golf Podcast was produced by Matt Rusius.
Thank you, Matt.
If you'd like to do us as solid, leave us a rating and review in the Apple Podcasts area where you do ratings and reviews. Can you tell I don't use Apple podcasts. I use Pocket casts. I think it's a lot better. But you know what, the ratings and reviews and Apple podcasts really help us out. So if you happen to be there, then tell people how much you love the Friday Golf Podcast. Okay, I think that's pretty much yet. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll be back again soon.
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