Golf Course Contractors Tee Up

By Adrian McDonald

Golf course construction is more than pushing dirt around. It takes a designer who can interpret the land and an equipment operator with an artistic hand.

"We feel like there's been a golf course lying underneath for a long time and it's our job to expose it," said Jay Blasi, of the California-based golf course architecture firm Robert Trent Jones, Jr.

Blasi was referring specifically to Pierce County's Chambers Bay site in University Place, Wash., on the shores of Puget Sound. Sweeping water views, isolation from housing developments, and an enormous amount of available land combine to give the site the potential to become what many say will be a world-class golf course. Construction on the nearly $25 million course broke ground last October.

Chambers Bay is blessed in this regard by being on the site of a former sand and gravel mine, which ceased operations in the 1980s. In fact, Blasi said, "Historically the mine used to ship soil to be used on golf courses."

Sand, Blasi said, was the soil native to the seacoasts of Scotland where the first golf courses originated. Thanks in part to the soil, the Chambers Bay golf course will be designed and built as identically as possible to those original courses, in a style referred to as "links."

"Hundreds of courses market themselves as links style, but they're not truly," Blasi said. In links, there are no trees and no ponds, just sandy dunes rolling along the coast, covered with different lengths of grasses. The grasses must be fescues, which are coincidentally common to both Scotland and the Pacific Northwest.

In fact, nearly every aspect of the Chambers Bay site is conducive to the links style, Blasi said. There is even a railroad running between the course and the water, a feature common to the Scottish coastline.

These conditions are rare in the US, particularly with the copious amounts of sand to work with. According to John Harbottle III, a Tacoma-based course architect who made his reputation designing golf courses throughout Washington and Oregon, a perennial aspect of building in this area is the vast variety of soil types.

In Medford, OR, the Centennial Golf Club will open this spring on a course built on heavy clay soil, which is widely regarded as the worst draining soil available. "We just thought we could make it work," said course architect John Fought of Scottsdale, AZ. Rather than spend $1 million up front to plate the 170-acre course with sand, developers Rogue Valley Manor and Pacific Retirement Services chose to postpone the operation to sometime over the next 4 to 5 years.

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"They'll just apply top dressing for the next 4 to 5 years and get the same result," Fought said. Within the same time frame, the developers also plan to build a surrounding housing development, and transition from a public to a private course.

Housing developments facing and surrounding a course are a common feature of real estate plans for golf courses throughout the US. One advantage to the arrangement is that residential areas can feed into the course's drainage system to drain stormwater runoff. The result is a sophisticated golf course drainage system that collects runoff from a large surrounding area.

Making the system still more attractive is the fact that golf courses can be designed as ideal filters for cleaning the pollutants out of runoff water.

"Grass is a really efficient filter if managed correctly," said Dr. Eric Miltner, a turfgrass scientist at the Washington State University Puyallup Extension.

On a course like the Centennial Golf Club, all of the surfaces are built at a minimum 3% grade. As water runs off the course, it flows into shallow, grass-covered drainage swales. Pipes set into the swales then carry the water to the course's ponds, or sometimes to artificial wetlands created on the site.

Thanks to advanced maintenance techniques developed by golf course superintendents in recent decades, water pollution is seldom a serious danger in the runoff leaving a course. "Years and years of research have gone into pesticide and nutrient mobility," Miltner said. "Golf course superintendents are well trained, and really good at managing with a high degree of environmental stewardship in mind."

Part of that low danger is the fact that many of the typical features of golf courses act naturally to filter water at every step of the drainage process. Water moving slowly through the grass of a shallow swale is automatically filtered. When that water sits in a pond, suspended solids have a chance to settle to the bottom. In a wetland, bacterial activity combines with vegetation to remove water pollutants.

Even dispersing runoff over the leaf litter of a forest floor is an effective system, said Kevin Goldsmith, a civil engineer who has worked on golf courses around the Puget Sound for the last 30 years. "The myth that golf courses are a significant pollutant is pretty well dispelled," he said.

Goldsmith designed the drainage system for the Rope Rider golf course set to open this spring at Suncadia Resort in Roslyn, WA. The site is at the crest of the Cascade Mountains and surrounded by acres of open forest.

"We were careful in clearing the site to keep a lot of native trees, so it feels like a woodland," said Rex VanHoose, a designer with the course architects Jacobsen Hardy of Houston. "You want to fit into the site like a part of the land."

While Rope Rider will have a housing development associated with it, VanHoose said the houses will not be "double-loaded," meaning they will appear on only one side of the course.

Leaving large stretches of forest butting up to the course is part of the "naturalistic" design philosophy that golf course architects throughout the country have been moving toward in recent decades. On Rope Rider, the stretches of forest often allowed Goldsmith to bypass the ponds, and drain runoff directly to the forest floor.

"Treatment of water doesn't have to be a designed, engineered, edgy pond," he said.

That philosophy applies to earthmoving as well, which Goldsmith also coordinated for Rope Rider. "We want straightforward, simple, rolling land," VanHoose said. "Not goofy tricked up stuff that's a maintenance nightmare. Trick slopes and goofy mounds that require special equipment to mow. It's time consuming, and it's labor intensive to maintain."

Goldsmith carefully planned the earthmoving to be purely cut and fill, mostly centering around the dirt removed for the ponds. No extra soil was shipped in, and none was shipped out. In total, crews moved about 500,000 cubic yards, about half the typical amount.

Still, the soil at the site was the rocky subgrade of the Cle Elum River valley, containing baseball-sized river rocks. While not difficult to move, the soil is not ideal for drainage, and furthermore, VanHoose said, "it's bad for golf clubs." As a result, builders plated the course with 6 inches of sandy loam taken from a sand pit they discovered on the site.

Aesthetically, the designers relied to a large degree on the existing mountain scenery. "You want to pay attention to the land, reveal the cool character of the site," VanHoose said.

Some of that character includes the site's history as a coal mining operation. Rope Rider's name is taken from the nickname of the miners who would ride atop the coal cars in the mine shafts. Old shaft openings appear on certain holes. The centerpiece for holes 16, 17, and 18 will be Tipple Hill, a 120-foot pre-existing pile of coal tailings with trees and native grasses growing over it. "You can see the black coal dust, it's not natural looking," VanHoose said. "It looks spectacular."

For most courses, interesting aesthetic features are the result of highly skilled fine earth shapers working with bulldozers. On the Centennial Golf Club course, shapers worked with Fought to give the sand bunkers a wrinkled, hand-finished edge, reminiscent of golf's "Golden Age" of the 1920s. "In the old days they used horses and oxen with metal beams," said Fought. "Now we use dozers, but it looks the same if you do it right."

"[Shapers] are extremely gifted artists with a dozer," said Chambers Bay's Jon O'Donnell. He said much of the finished quality of each golf hole is the result of improvisation by builders in the field. "Golf course construction is not like building a vertical building, and much more loose for interpretation," he said. "Very few things are set in stone on golf course plans."

On Chambers Bay, the shapers' task is to turn piles of leftover sand and gravel from the mine and turn them into grassy dunes that look created by the wind. In the links style, the sand bunkers are 10 times larger than those on most American courses, and look like drifts of sand blown against a hillside.

The Chambers Bay shaping crews will use bulldozers as large as D10 and as small as D4, along with excavators, scrapers, tractors, and ATV's. Much of the machinery and the survey equipment is guided by computer and satellite technology, O'Donnell said. In the end, the finish work is done by hand.

Soil erosion is a hazard during earth shaping, however, particularly in the Northwest. During the rainy season, golf course construction in this area mostly shuts down, and the slopes are stabilized by short-term plastic or straw. "You have to [build] over two seasons," John Harbottle said. "Your construction windows are shorter."

Planting grass is the last stage in the construction process, and builders can only relax their erosion monitoring when the grass is mature. According to WSU's Miltner, mature turf is an ideal soil stabilizer, thanks to its networking root system.

Water use is probably the most contentious environmental issue facing the golf industry in coming decades. Many golfers in the US expect lush, green courses that require intensive irrigation. At the same time, though, more advanced golfers will often request less watered conditions to create a harder, faster playing surface.

In the Northwest, grass type is often a tradeoff between drought tolerance and playability. West of the Cascades, courses like the Centennial Golf Club commonly choose perennial ryegrass for roughs and fairways, which is lush in appearance and holds up well to high traffic. The alternative, fine fescue, is considerably more drought tolerant, but becomes patchy under heavy use.

Rope Rider, on the other hand, will use Kentucky bluegrass, the typical choice east of the Cascades. This species is known for cold tolerance as well as durability, and holds up mildly well to drought. It grows poorly, however, near the coast.

Pierce County, for its part, is addressing the water use problem by irrigating Chambers Bay entirely with reclaimed wastewater from a treatment plant it built on the site last year. The water system is on a 100% closed loop, meaning that that all runoff leaving the course drains back to the plant.

In keeping with Scottish tradition, all of the grasses used on the course will be drought-tolerant fescues. Like the famous Bandon Dunes courses in Bandon, OR, Chambers Bay will not allow golf carts, in part to help ease the strain on the delicate grass. All of the fertilizer used, meanwhile, will be a biosolid product produced at the treatment plant.

To complete its environmental reputation, Chambers Bay is also being built under the guidance of Audubon International through its Signature Program for golf courses and similar developments. Audubon's position is that golf courses, when built and managed correctly, can tread much more lightly on the land than housing developments and shopping malls.

"We're not like farmers," Fought said. Mature turf, he stresses, is a maintenance crop, and requires considerably less water than growing new plants every year from seed. Golf course irrigation systems also efficiently spot-water the turf, with some 1500-2000 heads.

"Our irrigation system [at Centennial Golf Club] cost $1.8 million," Fought said. "It applies as little water as possible to keep the plants alive."