Mammoth Dunes

‍Favorite Hole

No. 8, par 3, 198 yards

The stunning par 3 boasts an island green surrounded by sand, with a twist. Island greens are not a great playable feature for lower-trajectory players, but there’s a genius to how Kidd built No. 8. From the back tees you have to hit a properly flighted shot, but the forward tees are off to the left where there are established features that give players the option to bounce the ball onto the green. It’s a wonderful example of how you can create a challenge for the best players while retaining playability for the masses, a strategy and philosophy that probably should have been employed on more holes at Mammoth Dunes.

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Overall Thoughts

Did Kidd design the perfect resort course at Mammoth Dunes? Perhaps. Does that make it one of the world’s greatest golf courses? Maybe not. Is it one of the most fun courses to discuss with friends over a couple of beers? Absolutely.

In its short existence, Mammoth Dunes has carved out a place among the most polarizing courses in the world. On one side are the vast majority of golfers who love the course and reminisce about their round or a friend’s career-low round. On the other side are many architecture aficionados (including this author) who find the course redundant and lacking substance. This dynamic makes Mammoth most deserving of analysis and discussion, so let’s dive into its main features.

Kidd’s design features an exquisite routing that takes golfers on a journey across the most dramatic setting at the Sand Valley resort. The topography is the standout feature of Mammoth Dunes. During the routing process, Kidd and his team of Nick Schaan and Casey Krahenbuhl digitally mapped the entire Sand Valley property. While poring over the land, they kept coming back to a specific area on the map, a monstrous, V-shaped ridge. This portion of the Sand Valley property had been explored by other architects but deemed too extreme. The DMK Team knew if they could figure out a solution to incorporate that ridge, they would have a routing that would be hard for the Keiser’s to refuse.

Kidd’s goal was to lock this ridge into his routing and have it be a focal point, as if it was an ocean. This distinct ridge gives Mammoth Dunes guaranteed topographical memorability, a difficult task for any non-ocean golf course. At 80 feet tall, the massive ridge provides a few benefits for golf as it’s a stunning backdrop and provides dramatic slopes and elevation when you play near it. The other advantage of the ridge is its trees, old-growth hardwoods. Prior to golf, the Sand Valley land was used to harvest pine trees, which aren’t native to the area. The machinery used to harvest pine trees can’t climb hills, so across the resort you see the most stunning trees situated on ridges and rock outcroppings, the areas lumber companies couldn’t pillage for profit.

The size of the ridge created a tall task to navigate not only once, but twice in the routing. Large land features are a blessing and a curse because they deliver one-of-a-kind visuals, but they also can create clunky hole-to-hole transitions, or poor holes that are simply used to climb over massive features. The process took weeks, Kidd remarked on an episode of the Fried Egg Golf Podcast:

“Each part of the V is about a mile long ranging up to about 80 feet high. You couldn’t see it walking the ground. You’d see a hill. But you wouldn’t understand that this was actually part of this giant landform,” said Kidd. “So we decided that we would take this giant, imposing landform and see if we could figure out how to route an 18-hole golf course around it. And that’s when we got out on the ground and we really started to hike. And over a few weeks, we hiked and hiked and hiked and figured out how to get a golf course around it and through it and over it.”

At Mammoth Dunes DMK found elegant solutions to navigate this ridge via two par 3s, Nos. 4 and 13, which each play along the ridge. The fourth climbs up the ridge and features a dramatic fall off to the right side of the hole, while the short 13th plays over a sandy chasm.

In both occasions, the benefits of using the ridge are immediately felt on the following tee shot. Kidd’s design has two of the most dramatic tee shots on the entire property, the 5th and the 14th, where shots play off the ridge back down to the sandy valley. Without finding each of the par 3s to get over the other side of the ridge, Kidd wouldn’t have had two tee shots with memorable elevation changes like Nos. 5 and 14 offer.

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The other advantage the ridge provided DMK was the feeling of departure. Sand Valley is a busy place and when you traverse to the backside of the ridge on the fifth hole at Mammoth Dunes, golfers feel secluded and away from all the shuttles and other players. My favorite holes on Mammoth Dunes all reside on this back part of the property. Whether golfers know it or not, the routing, drama, and serenity the ridge creates is without a doubt one of the most appealing aspects of the Mammoth Dunes design.

While I am unsure if the retail golfer notices the nuance that a stellar routing provides, I am certain they enjoy shooting low scores, and heaps of players do this at Mammoth Dunes. Following his smash hit Bandon Dunes, Kidd admitted to designing a series of golf courses that were difficult in an attempt to appeal to the ranking criteria of “shot values.” This series of courses were not generally well-received and saw him fall out of favor. His design of Gamble Sands bucked that trend and Kidd had an awakening that brought a new design theory: defend birdies, not par. This theory at Gamble Sands has fueled a resurgence in his career and led to his commission at Mammoth Dunes via the aforementioned “bake off.” Kidd basically took the notion of playability and poured gasoline on it.

For the prior two decades, two of the dominant trends in golf architecture were playability and width. This allowed less skilled players to get off the tee with more ease and have a chance to succeed more often compared to the penal courses that largely dominated the post-war era of architecture. At Mammoth Dunes, DMK created abundant width, in fact a startling amount of width. The average par 4 or par 5 fairway at Mammoth Dunes is 66 yards at its widest point, and the total maintained grass acreage of the course is 108. To give some context, I would approximate that is roughly 2-3 times the scale of “regular” American golf courses. As the name connotes, it’s Mammoth. This width makes getting off the tee with success a relative certainty for experienced golfers.

Kidd’s maximum playability theme didn’t stop there, it extended to the greens. At Mammoth Dunes, DMK built 12 greens with gathering features, slopes, and contours designed to corral balls and bring them closer to the target (Nos. 1-3, 5, 7-9, 11, 12, 14, 16, and 17). By pairing extremely wide fairways with a number of bowling greens, Kidd created a course where an average golfer has a great chance to find a number of greens in regulation and shoot low scores. This is a way to create chances for low scores, but it also weakens the course’s strategy, which in my opinion is the substance of the game. My favorite type of golf is where you stand over shots weighing exactly how much risk you want to take on. Kidd’s interpretation of golf at Mammoth Dunes feels far more like throwing darts at an exceptionally spacious board, a simple point-and-shoot exercise.

Friendly greens and abundant width can both be great on their own. I fear when they are paired together it creates a course with too little substance. An example of a course that marries size and strategy is The Park, a Gil Hanse design. This course is geared towards appealing to the same type of golfer as Mammoth Dunes. The fairways sometimes span 70 yards like Mammoth Dunes, but at the Park, the greens create width with consequences. Sure, you can swing away but there are clear good places and poor places to be in the fairway thanks to the varying sizes, shapes, contours, and angles the greens are set on. It is a friendly place for a beginning player, but also one where you have to really golf your ball to score well.

I am convinced that Mammoth Dunes will continue to be the resounding favorite of the general public that plays at Sand Valley. It is absolutely worth it to see the extreme edge of what playable architecture looks like, but I generally feel that it loses its appeal with every additional play. For me, the best courses in the world get more compelling with every loop.

0 Eggs

(How We Rate Courses)

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Additional Content

A Helping Hand: Mammoth Dunes (December 2018 article)

Angles of playability: The 8th at Mammoth Dunes (January 2018 article)

Episode 96: Casey Krahenbuhl (Fried Egg Golf Podcast)