Paradise along the Pacific

Destination Oregon Coast

Bandon Dunes is all golf all the time and never stops astounding

BY TONY DEAR • CG EDITOR

The Old Course Hotel in St. Andrews, Scotland, looks out over the most famous hole in the game but doesn’t own it. A charitable organization called the St. Andrews Links Trust does, as well as the town’s six other public courses. The Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina offers itsguests nine terrific courses including Donald Ross’s magnificent No. 2, but there are carts and browse theresort’s web site and you’ll see it offers lawn sports and carriage rides, too. The Lodge at Pebble Beach is awonderfully refined place to rest your head for the night and the adjoining golf course is one of the world’s most spectacular, but the spa is huge and offers things like medifusion and body wraps. What’s more, the golf and everything else here is very, very expensive.

All the above, and others like them — the American Club in Kohler, Wis., The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Sea Island in Georgia, the Four Seasons on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, etc. — are beyond special. A trip to any of them is an exciting prospect.

But if you can survive without the silk peels, croquet, juice bars and, in the case of St. Andrews, a potentially long wait for tee-times and some dubious weather, and you are really only interested in playing top-100 golf all day long then wolfing down a hearty meal and savoring a nightcap before repairing to your lodgings for the night and then executing the exact same plan the following day, then there really is only one place for you.

Old Macdonald

Bandon Dunes

Bandon Trails

Bandon Dunes Golf Resort opened in the late 1990s after developer Michael Keiser, a man devoted to natural golf played over and around coastal dunes, found 1,200 sand and gorse-covered acres on the Oregon coast and took a chance hiring a young, unknown Scotsman to build him an unconventional course in a faraway location. It was a ludicrous experiment, frankly, and Keiser’s friends and advisors understandably laughed at him.

But the course that unknown Scotsman, David McLay Kidd, built was so good it recorded double the number of rounds management had budgeted for, and more or less swept the year-end awards. It put an obscure part of the country on the map, and turned Keiser from a curious eccentric into a genius visionary with an asset that would soon start adding considerably to the fortune he had already made as the cofounder of a successful greeting card company.

America had long been familiar with the term ‘linksstyle’ under whose banner virtually every course with few trees and a few bumps was grouped, but Kidd’s eponymous Bandon Dunes was the real deal. The turf was short and tight, the wind a serious factor in club/ shot-selection, and there were a handful of exceptional coast-hugging holes. Above all, it required imagination. Hitting good shots wasn’t enough. You had to think good shots too.

Keiser always said one golf course is a curiosity but two is a destination. So, in 2001, after purchasing an important parcel of land just to the north of his first course, Keiser hired rising star Tom Doak to build a second. Doak and his Renaissance Golf team created an extraordinary follow-up that outdid even the first course in most rankings. Doak discovered or created as many good-to-great holes at Pacific Dunes as any golf course could realistically hope for, and it firmly established Bandon Dunes as one of the country’s finest golf resorts.

He now had his destination, but Keiser was far from done. He’d wanted to hire Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw since seeing the remarkable Sand Hills Golf Club they had designed in Nebraska and which had opened in 1995. He got his chance in 2003 when he signed them up to route 18 holes through part-dunes but mostly-forest terrain in the southeast corner of the property. Coore and Crenshaw did a typically superb job, and though it didn’t sit beside the ocean, Bandon Trails quickly became many people’s favorite after opening in 2005.

Pacific Dunes

Keiser gave himself a well-earned rest now, but it wasn’t too long before he was at it again. He owned another magnificent stretch of dunes land to the north of Pacific Dunes and decided to honor one of his favorite course architects, C.B. Macdonald, in creating a course featuring many of his famed template holes and design characteristics. To build it, he called on Doak and his Renaissance associate Jim Urbina but also sought the expertise of architecture writer Bradley Klein and Macdonald biographer George Bahto.

Old Macdonald

Old Macdonald opened in 2010 and was quirky with a capital Q. Despite its peculiarities, however, the ground was just as firm and bouncy as elsewhere at the resort, the wind just as influential, and the holes every bit as much fun as the other courses. Visitors took a little longer to come to terms with its demands, perhaps, and it has never quite been cherished as much as its siblings, but Old Mac is still a great course that deservedly ranks inside the country’s top 20 public courses.

The exquisite Bandon Preserve, made up of 13 par 3s, was added in 2012 and a 100,000 square foot putting green modeled on the Himalayas Putting Course at St. Andrews, and called the Punchbowl, opened in 2014.

The most recent expansion to the incredible complement of golf courses at Bandon Dunes opened last year when the Sheep Ranch, once a collection of 13 isolated greens and a lot of open space north of Whiskey Run but molded into 18 coherent holes by Coore and Crenshaw, opened to the sort of fanfare typically associated with anything new at Bandon Dunes.

Everything else at Bandon Dunes is first-rate too. The food, whether it be served up in the Gallery, Tufted Puffin, Pacific Grill, Trail’s End, the Sheep Ranch clubhouse or, my favorite, McKee’s Pub, named for

Keiser’s late friend Howard McKee whose legal expertise ensured Bandon Dunes overcame every environmental and political dispute it faced during its formative years, is just what the hungry golfer needs.

As for the accommodations, golf travel expert Darin Bunch, who has visited the resort a dozen times at least, says there really is something for everyone. “You have the Lodge, the Inn and higher-end options like the fourbedroom Grove Cottages,” he says. “Or you could go for the full buddy-trip treatment in the Golf Suite above the Tufted Puffin. And there are others choices that may be more suited to your budget and companions – Chrome Lake units and lofts or the Lily Pond rooms. Some are fancier than others, but they’re all comfortable, wellfurnished, and designed with golfers in mind.”

Bandon Dunes was designed with golfers in mind and it’s a policy that has worked beautifully for 22 years and counting. Keiser’s cockamamie notion of bringing proper links golf to the Oregon coast once seemed a little fanciful. But it’s hard now to imagine a world without Bandon Dunes.

Their website bandondunesgolf.com is one of the finest destination resort portals in the industry. You can plan, shop and book a trip that will be a lasting memory indeed.

Sheep Ranch