Feature:

44 Decisions on a Friday

Tom Doak Golf Course Design Architecture Rock Creek Cattle Club Montana

During a site visit to Rock Creek Club, Tom Doak provides insights into the heart and mind of a Course Architect

By Tom Doak

So when I visited Montana’s Rock Creek Cattle Club for six days in May 2006, I wrote down every decision I considered on the first day. Rock Creek has been under construction since October 2005. It’s a spectacular piece of property, and we had thousands of acres to choose from in laying out the course, so it’s not that great an achievement to come up with a good routing that didn’t require much earthmoving. Still, millions of rocks had to be screened out of the soil so golfers wouldn’t break their wrists on opening day.

In the weeks before my visit, my lead design associate for the job, Eric Iverson, and three shapers have been working on finishing the 2nd through 7th holes and “roughing in” No. 1 and holes 8-13, so I could make adjustments on this trip.

I arrive in Missoula at 1 a.m. after a thunderstorm in Denver delayed my flight. I have been on the road for 10 days and am tired, but excited to come back, because Rock Creek will be one of the very best courses we’ve done.

In the morning, one of our interns, Jonathan Reisetter, picks me up at the hotel and drives me out to the site in Deer Lodge, an hour and 15 minutes away. Along the way he provides an update—which greens have been shaped, what he has been working on himself, and what he has learned from the job so far. On the way, we buy sandwiches for the crew so they won’t waste time driving out to lunch.

We meet Eric, Chris Hunt and Kye Goalby, plus the superintendent, Isaac Farabaugh, in the middle of the 1st fairway, eat on the hood of the car and visit a bit before starting the work. We’ll look at all 18 holes today—although I have several more days on site, I want to see everything so I will have as much time as possible to deliberate on the toughest decisions.

After the routing, which took several months to complete because we had so much land to choose from, the green shaping and contouring are, in my opinion, the most important components of a great course. On any given visit, there are four to six greens actively being built; some already have been approved, while we haven’t gotten to others.

Today, I find three places where I want to extend the green a few feet to accommodate another hole location, two where the shaper needs to soften a contour for playability, one where I shift the position of the green about 20 feet, and another where we lower the elevation of the green about a foot so the chipping areas to the sides of the green are a bit softer.