Gamble Sands Goes All-In With New 14-Hole Short Course Opening This Fall

Whoever said that more isn’t always better has obviously never played golf at Gamble Sands.

When the destination track on a slope overlooking the Columbia River valley opened in Brewster in 2014, we thought it couldn’t get any better — a fun, fantastic, links-style, David McLay Kidd course that brought the feel of Bandon Dunes or Chambers Bay to one of our favorite destination golf regions, Central Washington. Our readers agreed, and by 2017, Gamble Sands had supplanted Chambers Bay atop our rankings of the state’s top public courses (a title, it should be noted, that Chambers grabbed back in 2019). That same year, Gamble Sands opened The Inn at Gamble Sands and built the 100,000 square-foot Cascade Putting Course, a thrill ride of a green reminiscent of Tom Doak’s Punchbowl at Bandon Dunes. With the No. 1 public golf course in the state, beautiful on-site lodging and an incredible putting course on which to settle those post-round bets, we figured Gamble Sands had it all.

Well, Kidd had other plans. Last year, Kidd returned to Brewster to break ground on Quicksands, a 14-hole short course that will open for preview play later this summer. Built just to the north of the current course, on the slope down from the current driving range (just left of the road as you drive up to the clubhouse), Quicksands promises to be one of Washington’s most enjoyable golf experiences, with a range of par-3 holes that challenge golfers to make creative decisions at every turn — just like the “big” course up above.

“It’s wild,” Kidd says in a video tour of the property that you can watch here. “It’s maybe the best piece of terrain on the whole property. We didn’t use it for the big course because it is wildly contoured; it was pretty difficult to figure out a full-scale hole for it. But, [for] fourteen short holes...it was perfect.”

Kidd hints that many of the holes will have unique features that golfers likely haven’t seen before, including one — Crater — in which the green surface sits down inside a large crater, with only the top of the flag visible from the tee. Golfers will have to drop their tee shots into the crater, then hurry up the hill to see how close they are to the pin. Other holes are named Plinko, Corkscrew, Donut and Boomerang (to name a few), each a hint as to the design of the green. In the linked video, Kidd says that “golfers will be shaking their heads and chuckling to figure out how to get golf balls close.”

In addition, a course-wide sound system will pump music into the course, while a bar will be situated at the center of the property, for easy access from several holes.

Quicksands is the first short course Kidd has ever designed, and the first of its kind in Washington state. Golfers who have made the trek down to Bandon — where Kidd built the resort’s first course, Bandon Dunes, in 1999 — will no doubt be thinking of that resort’s Preserve, a 13- hole, par-3 course designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw that serves as a thrilling complement to the now 90 championship holes on-site. Kidd and Gamble Sands staff no doubt hope that Quicksands will become a similar amenity to Gamble Sands as the resort continues to expand.

And, expand it will. In the video, Kidd mentions that Quicksands is “course two, of the three that are planned so far.” So, stay tuned, golf fans. The best may, indeed, be yet to come.