Rustic Canyon Golf Course

Favorite Hole

No. 1, par 5, 460-540 yards

A gentle-handshake opener. The landing zone for drives is 75 yards across, and the only fairway bunker sits 160 yards from the back tee—more a visual hazard than a strategic one. Two non-disastrous strikes to the widest parts of the corridor will yield a wedge into the medium-sized green.

But things get hairy when you try to go for the green in two. First, to gain access to the short-grass approach for a long second shot, you have to hit your tee shot uncomfortably close to Happy Camp Canyon Road. Second, while the hazards around the green—OB left, sand and scrub everywhere else—aren’t threatening to reasonably skilled players with wedges in their hands, they’re certainly within anyone’s fairway-wood dispersion pattern.

The earthquake fissure cutting diagonally in front of the green is an unforgettable hazard. Some golf architects would have bulldozed this strange landform, or perhaps massaged it into a creek. Leaving it alone was an inspired choice.

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Overall Thoughts

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A Philadelphia native, mentored by some of the most forward-thinking golf architects of his day, comes to the Greater Los Angeles Area. Most golf courses in the region lack naturalness and a sense of place, concealing the landscape rather than accentuating it. The newly arrived architect wants to buck that trend. He gets excellent, if tricky, land to work with, teams up with construction whizzes and local insiders, and creates golf holes that blend with their surroundings and pose strategic puzzles. His work raises the bar for golf architecture in Southern California.

That’s the George Thomas story, circa 1920-1929.

It’s also basically what happened when Gil Hanse built Rustic Canyon in Moorpark, California, in the early 2000s.

Pathbreaking golf course designs arise from a confluence of talent and luck. There’s no doubt, for instance, that George Thomas was a gifted architect. But there’s just as little doubt that he was in the right place at the right time. He moved to Los Angeles right as film, real estate, and golf were about to boom. He joined a club in the midst of an ambitious renovation and expansion. He had access to properties and clients that architects in other regions and eras could only dream of. Sure, Thomas made the most of these opportunities, but they were damn good opportunities.

Gil Hanse’s luck came in two stages. First, he met fellow architecture geek Geoff Shackelford around 1997, while Hanse’s crew was finishing up Inniscrone Golf Club in Pennsylvania. It was Shackelford who heard about the Moorpark site and introduced Hanse to the developer. Second, the environmental obligations of the county that owned the land happened to align with the architectural preferences of Hanse and his partners. The government officials wanted the golf course to disturb the sensitive terrain as little as possible. To their surprise, the architects wanted the same thing.

It was, in every way, an unusual project. For two decades, golf development in Southern California had been dominated by real-estate interests that sought to transform arid landscapes into lush, luxurious oases. Golf was a means to that end. The motives behind the Rustic Canyon project were completely different and, in that pre-Recession era, exceedingly rare.

In standing apart from its own time, Rustic Canyon took inspiration from the deeper past of Southern California golf. The course seems especially influenced by George Thomas’s work in the 1920s—not only his famous designs at Bel-Air, Riviera, and L.A. North, but also his unbuilt concepts, as illustrated in his book Golf Architecture in America.

Like nearly every significant Thomas design, Rustic Canyon starts with an easy par 5 and a hard par 4. This opening sequence creates a balance of forgiveness and toughness, and it gets golfers away from the clubhouse quickly, helping with pace of play. The first hole, which I analyzed above, allows players to spread out and take their hacks. On the 457-yard second hole, only a strong tee shot that favors the left side of the fairway, where a boundary line lurks, opens up a view of the green. The green itself has a mean-spirited hummock in the middle, reminiscent of the speed bump in the 15th green at L.A. North.

Another aspect of Thomas’s style that Rustic Canyon incorporates is his penchant for gettable yet ferocious short par 4s, like the 10th at Riviera and the sixth at L.A. North. Nos. 3 and 12 at Rustic are in this vein. The 315-yard third hole has a double fairway with a berm and clusters of gnarly bunkers along the centerline. These hazards don’t need to be in play, but if you hunt a good angle along the left side or attempt the drive the green, they will be.

The 12th hole—flat, wide, and just 336 yards long—initially appears to be almost devoid of danger (and interest). But if you aim for the pin and hit a less-than-perfect shot, you may find OB left, bunkers short, or a short-grass runoff long. For most players, the smart target is well to the right of the green, where you’ll be left with a simple pitch.

Perhaps the clearest example of Thomas’s influence at Rustic Canyon is the use of diagonal fairways and hazards to create both conservative and aggressive options. Take the short route along the inside of a diagonally oriented corridor, typically near a waste area or barranca, and earn a chance to attack and make birdie; play safely along the outside and make, at worst, a stress-free bogey.

At Rustic Canyon, the par-4 fifth hole typifies this long-hole geometry. The fairway sits on a left-to-right diagonal in relation to the tee, and the green opens to the right. Hugging the inside right edge of the corridor, near a dry wash surrounded by scrubby waste, allows for the shortest route to the green and the ideal angle to reach in two. A more risk-averse player can follow a zigzag strategy: a tee shot to the outside left, a layup to the outside right, and a short-iron or wedge approach.

Rustic Canyon reintroduced Golden Age design principles to Southern California golf. Along with Dave Axland and Dan Proctor’s Wild Horse in Nebraska, it is, in my opinion, one of the two best modern American courses that anyone can play for less than $100.

2 Eggs

Rustic Canyon isn’t perfect. The routing has some clunky moments (e.g., the jammed-in par-3 eighth hole and the awkward green-to-tee walks between Nos. 12 and 13 and Nos. 17 and 18), and while the property has beautiful textures and views, some of the topography is rather dull. However, between the firm, appropriately rustic presentation and the sheer ingenuity of the Hanse team’s hole designs, Rustic Canyon deserves a place in the two-Egg bucket alongside its moderately-priced brethren in Green Lake, Wisconsin, and Aiken, South Carolina.

Additional Content

A Sense of Place: Rustic Canyon (article)

Course Tour

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