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Revisiting Bandon Dunes on the Golf Resort’s 25th Anniversary

The Oregon property is home to five championship golf courses, two stellar short courses, a putting course, and more

Pacific Dunes Course / Photo: Courtesy of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort/Nathan Kahler

In 1999, a national golf magazine sent me on a road trip four and a half hours from my home in Portland to review Bandon Dunes, a new resort on the Oregon coast that seemed particularly destined for obscurity. I rolled my eyes at the press release describing the property and booked a cheap motel, which was the only place to stay in Bandon at the time.

The backstory is of interest: Recycled-greeting-card visionary Mike Keiser invested several million dollars of his own money to buy a gorse-covered sand hill located far enough from any population center to discourage travel to it. He constructed a traditional links layout with minimal lodging, limited food and beverage options and few amenities. Keiser deemed the course walking-only—a virtually unheard-of form of financial suicide at the time. Upon completion, Bandon hoped to someday put out a modest 10,000 rounds of golf annually (they hit 25,000 in the first year). The optimistic far-future build-out called for room for 121 guests.

Main Lodge / Photo: Courtesy of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort/Nathan Kahler

Today I think about my first Bandon visit in terms of what the music critic Jon Landau said when he encountered a certain band in 1974: “I saw rock-and-roll future… and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Not overly given to superlatives, I wrote in my original story:

“When a new golf course such as Oregon’s Bandon Dunes comes along—as they do every hundred years or so—it’s difficult to describe them because folks have already exhausted all the superlatives in characterizing other, far lesser courses. A layout such as Bandon Dunes calls for an entirely new vocabulary. Just looking upon this collaboration of nature and design makes you want to wave your arms and run wildly down the fairways yodeling nonsense syllables into the air.”

This year I attended the 25th anniversary of Bandon Dunes—a much-changed property from my first visit, when the only structure on-site was a construction trailer with two inexperienced course managers and a puppy inside. Bandon is now home to five championship golf courses (all of which have been included in a variety of top-100 course lists), two stellar short courses, a rollicking putting course, ten different lodging options for up to 822 guests, ten dining possibilities including a food cart at the practice range, and the greatest living teacher of the game—a veritable golf Yoda—in director of instruction emeritus Grant Rogers. In the resort’s Bunker Bar—a sublime and raucous cigar enclave—patrons inexplicably encounter old friends they haven’t seen in years.

Shorty’s Course / Photo: Courtesy of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort/Nathan Kahler

A popular discussion at the bar is which of the Bandon courses is a favorite. If the original course launched the career of David McLay Kidd, one of the deepest-thinking golf architects working today, subsequent courses employed and turbocharged the reputations of architects including Tom Doak and Coore & Crenshaw.

I always like to respond that although I think Doak’s Pacific Dunes—featuring a muscular, quirky configuration among giant sand blowouts—is the best of the layouts, I still prefer Kidd’s original Bandon Dunes, a more natural, easygoing venue reminiscent of some of my favorite courses in Ireland and the British Isles. Old Macdonald, created by Doak and Jim Urbina, delivers a fun romp through features recreated from some of Charles Blair Macdonald’s greatest links courses, and Coore & Crenshaw’s Bandon Trails is a stellar parkland layout routing through Pacific forests that still manages a linky attitude. But it also includes the worst hole on the property, which may have inspired one golf journalist to hurl a rake into a tree after chipping back and forth over the green six times. The final full-length course, Sheep Ranch—built partly on a promontory jutting into the Pacific—boasts frequent high winds (a positive, in my mind) and no sand bunkers, and would be the best course on many other golf properties but doesn’t deliver the drama or challenge of the other layouts here.

Bandon offers two courses that make for a perfect second round for players who are tired from their first round but eager to get back out on the sublime terrain. The Bandon Preserve and the brand-new Shorty’s—13-hole and 19-hole par-three courses perfect for 90 minutes of play—may offer some of the most beautiful landforms on-site.
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