Bandon Trails

Favorite Hole

No. 8, par 4, 321 yards

This beguiling short par 4 runs along the crest of the property’s main ridge. From the tee, the hole has an inviting appearance, especially for right-handers who can draw the ball. The fairway, framed by bunkers, curves gently from right to left, the land tilts in the same direction, and everything flows into the green’s broad, open front. Longer players will have a hard time keeping driver in the bag. While this aggression might be tactically sound, especially since approaches from the safe section of the fairway 100 yards out can be fiddly, those who go for the green and miss will face difficult recoveries from various bunkers, swales, and native plants.

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Overall Thoughts

The genius of Bandon Trails lies primarily in its routing. Its strategic design is excellent, too, as is the shaping of the greens and bunkers. But what’s most impressive about the course, and what helps it compete with its seaside neighbors, is that its 18 holes unfurl over a vast, varied property with the easy coherence of an ancient walking path. This is a testament to Coore & Crenshaw’s mastery of routing—that is, their understanding of where to locate greens and tees, how to maximize the best features of a site, and how to connect all 18 holes into a single story with a beginning, middle, and end.

These tasks were immensely difficult at Bandon Trails. The property that Coore & Crenshaw ended up using was so intractable that, initially, Mike Keiser couldn’t imagine a functional golf course being laid out over it. On the architects’ first visit, Keiser took them straight to the upland rainforest where seven holes currently sit; he assumed that the entire course would have to be built there. Right away, though, Bill Coore saw a different possibility: a routing that started in the dunes below, climbed through a beautiful meadow of huckleberry and kinnikinnick, visited the woods at the top of a large ridge, then came back down. This concept would be far more likely to hold its own against Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes than a pure woodland layout. But it would require a lot of skill to pull off.

Coore & Crenshaw are more than capable of lending an awkward site a natural-seeming unity. They are longtime students of Alister MacKenzie’s routing at Cypress Point, which moves from grassland to forest to dunes to seaside cliffs without ever feeling disjointed. Just a year before Coore & Crenshaw began exploring the Trails property, they had finished a design at Friar’s Head that linked up big sand dunes by the Long Island Sound with a dead-flat potato field. Yet Bandon Trails represented an even greater routing challenge. Until well into the construction process, Coore & Crenshaw weren’t sure whether they could make the course feel like a single, organized whole.

Ultimately, they did. Their bold plan to connect dunes to meadow to woods worked out, and here are three reasons why:

1. Crossing points. C&C’s main practical difficulty at Bandon Trails was getting over the massive ridge running through the center of the site. (The same ridge borders the 18th hole at Pacific Dunes and divides Old Macdonald’s four inland holes from its seaward 14.) For the course to be walkable—as it would need to be, given that Bandon Dunes is a walking-only resort—C&C would have to create functional crossing points between the lower and upper sections of the property. They found an easy one at the par-4 seventh hole, which sneaks up a less severe part of the ridge. The exit from the high forest is more complicated, requiring a long, hilly commute between the 13th and 14th holes. But the land is so beautiful, the trail so well designed, and the reveal of the top-of-the-world 14th tee so dramatic that the transition becomes a pleasurable feature of the round rather than an annoying distraction from it. I recommend hiking, if you can, instead of taking the shuttle that the resort provides.

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2. Segues. The connection between the 13th green and the 14th tee is one of many at Bandon Trails that gives coherence to what, in less capable hands, would have been an unpleasant hitch in the routing. Just as a writer uses segues to move between disparate ideas, C&C use trails to link up different chunks of land. The transition between Nos. 2 and 3 is a good example. Here, the course moves from dunes to meadow, and this change occurs step by step along the path from the second green to the third tee, as linksy marram grass gradually gives way to thicker vegetation and trees. Then the trail passes under the branches of a large conifer, and the transition is complete: the expanse of the third fairway, rolling through a meadow environment, is revealed. What could have been a disorienting smash cut is instead a smooth dissolve.

3. Structure and balance. The primary reason Bandon Trails hangs together as well as it does is that C&C’s routing uses the property’s three different environments in a structured way. The course begins and ends (Nos. 1, 2, and 18) in the dunes, creating a sense of departure from and return to the dominant ecosystem of the resort. The rest of the round unfolds in three phases: four holes in the meadow (3-6), seven in the upland woods (7-13), and four more in the meadow (14-17). Compare this precisely balanced organization with the unevenness of Robert Trent Jones’s Spyglass Hill, which spends its first five holes in the dunes and never returns.

(Sidebar: in a podcast discussion with Andy in 2022, I compared Bandon Trails’ routing to a narrative with a “frame story.” Think of the movie The Princess Bride: the scenes featuring Peter Falk reading to Fred Savage are the frame story—the “real world” events that ground and give context to the fantastical exploits of Westley, Buttercup, and Inigo Montoya. That’s how I think of the first, second, and last holes at Bandon Trails. Situated in the standard landscape of the Bandon Dunes resort, they serve as bookends for the mystical adventure through the meadow and rainforest. A bit of a stretch? Maybe, but if any golf course demands comparison to literature and film, it’s Trails.)

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The strength of Bandon Trails’ routing conceals, even compensates for, the weakness of a few holes. The first and 18th sit on gorgeous, tumbling ground, but they don’t have much strategic substance; tee shots tend to settle in similar places. The ninth and 10th are by no means the worst holes at the resort, but they might be the most forgettable. And the par-5 16th is a straight-uphill slog, albeit one that connects a superb par 4 with a dazzling par 3.

Many players also criticize the 14th hole for its severe green, which has been softened in recent years, and the extreme difficulty of avoiding the big slope in the fairway that kicks balls toward oblivion on the right. But I think No. 14 is sufficiently playable, if exacting. Besides, I enjoy its provocative character, especially considering the rest of the course is mostly friendly and scoreable.

The criticisms of Bandon Trails’ lesser holes raise a question, however. Is the highest purpose of a golf architect to build 18 of the best possible individual holes? Or is it to take the golfer on a journey that reveals the beauties of a particular piece of land? Coore & Crenshaw prioritized the latter objective at Bandon Trails, and I’m glad they did.

2 Eggs

Of course, great holes and a great journey aren’t mutually exclusive, and Trails does falter occasionally on the former count. The course has also gone through agronomic struggles recently, with poa annua invading the fescue greens. As a result, playing conditions aren’t quite fiery enough to allow golfers to make consistent use of the ground-game options Coore & Crenshaw built into the greens and surrounds. Still, Bandon Trails is an obvious masterpiece—21st-century golf architecture at its peak.

Course Tour

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