Giving it the light touch

Redwood trees live in coastal pockets stretching from central California to southern Oregon. Kyle Butler sees the glorious trees whenever he faces the 11th hole of The Preserve Golf Club.

Tucked inside Santa Lucia Preserve, a private 20,000-acre community defined by biodiversity near golf-centric Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, The Preserve comprises 365 of the most secluded golf acres in America’s most populated and environmentally scrutinized state. The operating model — Santa Lucia Preserve is limited to 297 homesites with 142 being completed over the past 25 years — means Butler and his team receive abundant alone time with the redwoods.

Preserving The Preserve represents an enormous responsibility. Butler has his spots where he can reflect on that duty. The 11th hole represents a favorite, because it features redwoods in the background and strategic golf in the foreground. “You’re out here a lot,” Butler says, “and I don’t want to ever stop appreciating the environment and how beautiful it is out here. It’s an exceptional place to call work.”

The Preserve demonstrates that not all green space and efforts to protect it are equal. Looking forward and upward reminds Butler he works somewhere surreal. Looking downward reminds him conserving what allows The Preserve to exist is a daunting task.

Santa Ana Bermudagrass covers the fairway of the 11th and the club’s other 17 fairways. The Preserve is more than 2,500 miles from the equator. The club possesses seven years of agronomic data and member anecdotes proving Bermudagrass can properly grow at 2,000 feet and satisfy lofty expectations in an environment where redwoods also thrive.

From Native Americans, to horse and cattle ranchers, to West Coast elites, to ultimately developers who established the Santa Lucia Preserve as a conservation-minded community in the 1990s, subtle usage of epic land has, for centuries, guided the decisions where Butler works. “Appreciating,” “respecting,” “natural,” “share,” “protecting” “maintaining,” “enhancing,” “natural resources” and “wildlife” are among the eco-motivated terms in the community’s mission statement.

Some missions must be seen to be believed and multiple scenes enthrall during the 10-mile drive from Santa Lucia Preserve’s gatehouse to The Preserve Golf Club. A well-traveled visitor notices characteristics of Wyoming ranchlands, the Texas Hill Country, mountainsides bordering California’s largest cities and the Pacific Northwest. Valleys dotted with hulking oaks evoke the South Carolina Lowcountry. Nothing about the setting resembles Pebble Beach Golf Links, Cypress Point Club, Spyglass Hill Golf Course or The Preserve’s other famous Pacific Coast golf neighbors.

Raised in Colorado by travel and outdoor enthusiasts, Butler first experienced The Preserve when an industry friend invited him to play the course in 2008. He was working as an assistant superintendent at nearby Carmel Valley Ranch at the time. “I thought it was the most beautiful inland golf course I had ever seen,” he says. “It all starts with the drive in. We used to call it Jurassic Park. We’d say, ‘Oh, we’re going to Jurassic Park.’ The gates open up and wildlife starts coming out. I was in awe of the property and the environment up here.”

Butler joined the club’s staff as an assistant superintendent in 2016. He was elevated to superintendent in 2017. Instead of scurrying between holes in a cart or a traditional golf utility vehicle, Butler traverses The Preserve in a Polaris Ranger EV off-road vehicle. Stops to gawk at natural wonders are part of a job where animal sightings can be more common than human interactions.

The number of wildlife species (more than 300) should always exceed the number of homes at Santa Lucia Preserve. Members and employees quickly open their phones to show visitors images and videos of what they have witnessed on the property.

“I have endless pictures that I don’t know what I’m going to do with because I feel like there’s always something beautiful,” director of sales and marketing Jen Anello says. “I’ll stop and see a coyote run by, a bobcat stalking its meal, deer hanging out with the turkeys, and wild boar.” One of the biggest outings on the golf calendar is called The Boar Hunt, a tribute to the pesky four-legged animals.

On an early January morning, Butler parks his EV on the upper portion of the fourth fairway. The par-5 features a downhill second shot and only one home borders the fairway. A wild turkey is trotting through the yard of a modern home gently tucked beneath the right side of the hole. Quail scurrying through the native lands left of the fairway produce the only noise.

“It can be so peaceful out here,” Butler says. “You can hear the bees at times buzzing off in a bush. It’s so quiet … so quiet.”

Forrest Arthur can relate to what Butler experiences.

Arthur arrived at Santa Lucia Preserve on Dec. 1, 1998, as a young superintendent bracing for the first major construction effort of his career. Neither a completed home nor a playable golf hole existed on the property. To temporarily evade the hustle of construction, Arthur headed to the old-growth redwoods behind the 11th hole.

“When I just needed some quiet, I would take my lunch and go to the redwood grove and sit in these majestic hundreds-of-years-old redwoods,” Arthur says. “It was peaceful and tranquil. It’s cathedral-like.”

Designed by Tom Fazio and built by Wadsworth Golf Construction Company, The Preserve was completed during a tight window in 1999, because managing partner Tom Gray wanted the opening to coincide with the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. Back then, according to Arthur, Monterey County only permitted golf construction from March 15 until Oct. 30. The sensitivity of Santa Lucia Preserve and its surrounding land resulted in numerous late-1990s golf construction anomalies such as installing black plastic beneath soil profiles on every green to prevent plant protectant runoff from entering streams where steelhead spawned. Fairways were sand-capped and a herringbone drainage was installed to create what Arthur calls “one big recycling center” for water entering the course.

“The Preserve was done in such a way that it was all about the environment,” he says. “This golf course back at that time was built in a very, very different way than almost any golf course that was being built in the United States.”

Arthur’s role and the environmental complexities facing The Preserve have expanded over the past 25 years. As COO of Santa Lucia Preserve and general manager of the Santa Lucia Community Services District, Arthur works from an office inside a hidden yard where the fire department headquarters borders structures filled with golf course maintenance equipment and supplies. No topic challenges the services district’s management team like balancing current and future water availability and demand with modern lifestyles. “We manage our own water system here, which is something I never anticipated I would be doing in a career,” says Arthur, who transitioned from golf course superintendent to a community-wide management position in 2001.

Anticipation is a major part of Santa Lucia Preserve’s water management strategy. Arthur must anticipate future home development inside a community with a rigid water allotment; Butler must anticipate weather extremes. Santa Lucia Preserve averages 26 inches of annual rainfall. The rainy season begins in October and ends in April. Precipitation is nearly non-existent during late spring, summer and early fall. Arid conditions are the summer norm. “Everything is more extreme up here than it is with golf course life on the coast,” Butler says. “The environment, the wildlife, the weather, it’s all more extreme here.”

Converting from Colonial bentgrass to Santa Ana Bermudagrass fairways in 2016 started a series of projects conceived to methodically trim golf water usage amid extreme weather.

Rough is being constantly evaluated and native grasses are replacing ryegrass where it strategically makes sense. Changes to the playing periphery led to a reconfiguration of the irrigation system to ensure plots previously supporting rough aren’t watered. The system allows Butler’s team to irrigate warm- and cool-season turf differently.

Bermudagrass again emerged as a water-saving solution when the club resurfaced five acres of its range. As crews performed the resurfacing project, they constructed a large basin toward the back of the range to capture additional storm water.

Captured storm water stays on property longer thanks to the installation of 1,178 floating solar panels and around 490,000 plastic hexagonal discs on two of the five retention ponds. Manufactured by Phoenix Plastics, the discs are designed to reduce evaporation. The discs are expected to prevent around three million gallons of water from evaporating from ponds while the floating solar panels, which were installed by Applied Solar Energy, will reduce energy costs. Arthur introduced the idea to The Preserve after learning how the technology helped a Northern California winery.

The Preserve used around 80 million gallons of water annually to irrigate the golf course in the mid-2000s, according to Arthur. The club used 53 million gallons on its 68 acres of irrigated golf turf in 2023.

“All of these things we are doing here are the feel-good things and kind of why I’m still here,” Arthur says. “From the early days, I loved the environmental principles of building a community and it’s not just the golf course, it’s the whole community.”

Arthur is professing his environmental admiration for The Preserve while standing by a retention pond covered with black discs. Neither the golf course nor a home is visible from the pond.

“This place isn’t about human beings,” he says. “It’s about the property. It’s about coming here and looking at something. It’s not the same as it was 100 years ago. You can’t develop something and keep it the same. It has a human touch to it, but how light that can be is the key.”