I bought a 25 acre piece of property that was so thick with vegetation that we couldn't even walk through most of it before committing to buy it. We knew it had some great oak trees on it though and some nice elevation changes, so we bought it on a leap of faith, hoping that we could put a couple of courses on it, as well as all of the infrastructure needed. If your property is like this, here's what worked for us.
- Start big and work down to the details. Where will the electrical lines go? Septic lines? Where will the parking lot be? Where will the access roads and utility trails be located? Where will the pro shop and bathrooms go? What will be the boundaries for the courses? Make sure the big things are decided on before starting to design the courses.
- Google Earth (GE) was our main design tool. You can easily add graphic elements (lines, boxes, text, etc) on top of the map and then change them easily as your design changes. GE keeps a history of all of the photos taken of a property. By reviewing these at different times of the year, we were able to find the locations of our big oak trees. We didn't have a topographical map for our property, so we used the elevation profile in Google Earth to get a pretty good idea of the topography.
- Find the things you want to design around and add them to your GE map. The main features on our property were the oaks and elevation changes, so we made field trips, hacking through the dense vegetation to locate them. The GPS coordinates of these and any other useful design features were noted and then added to our GE map.
- Before starting the design, decide on your main design requirements. In our case, we wanted to (1) include as many of the oak trees as possible in key spots like the tee pads, greens and fairways where they can shape shots, (2) take advantage of the elevation changes to get a good variety of uphill, downhill, cross valley and flat holes, (3) have two nine hole loops, one clockwise and one counter clockwise, (4) try for a variety of dogleg left, dogleg right, and straight holes, and (5) include at least 3 par 4 holes in the design.
- Using the features noted on the map and your design requirements, create some high level designs for the course. Start by adding 18 lines to your map to represent the fairways. Tee pad and basket locations, hole lengths, elevation change for each hole, etc can be added to the map later as the design progresses. When you get a course design you kinda like, save it and make another one and another one and another one. I must have made 50 or 60 versions before finally settling on one. This took some time to do, but I was lucky in that we had already decided on the location of hole 1, so most of the high level design work took place while we were also clearing hole 1.
- Get out your chainsaw and start clearing the holes. With the overall design finalized, you can start on any hole. This takes a leap of faith though, because at this point we knew the general boundaries of each hole, but still needed to find its "identity", look for something that makes it unique, while incorporating any design features already noted on the map. We started cautiously, only cutting saplings and bushes that we knew wouldn't be needed. At some point, enough was cleared that we could walk the fairway and start thinking about how to clear and prune the remaining trees to make challenging and interesting flight paths, greens, and tee locations.
A couple of random things we learned while clearing:
- Save as much as you can. We ended up with several thousand cedar poles and a dozen oak trees killed by the oak wilt fungus. We're using the cedar poles to make fences and arbors. The oak trees are being used to make some unique and inexpensive benches.
- We tried to handle the debris and the thousands (millions?) of rocks that covered our fairways as efficiently as possible. Instead of hauling the rocks off, we used them to line the fairways and make bunkers in some strategic locations. We tried a variety of things for disposing of the debris, but the method we used the most was to just drag the debris into piles in the middle of each fairway where it could be burned. It took about a year for grass to grow back where the burn piles used to be.
