Northern Exposure (Design case study)

A retired medical doctor builds a minimalist golf course in Alaska for the community, not profit.

Haines, Alaska, a community of 2,500 people, is a popular stop for tourists visiting the southeastern part of the state. The city is north of Juneau and south of Skagway. It doesn’t have a strong demand for golf, and the terrain isn’t exactly conducive to building a golf course.

But that didn’t deter Stan Jones, a retired medical doctor, from building The Valley of the Eagles Golf Course and Driving Range. Jones’ golf course was built to provide an alternative source of recreation for tourists and provide them an opportunity to experience the native environment and surrounding scenery.

The 74-year-old Haines resident, who retired from practicing medicine in 1989 and is now a commercial fisherman, thought a golf course would be good for the city because it has no industry other than a bit of tourism and commercial fishing.

“I thought the golf course would attract some people from other parts of Alaska,” he says. “I had the property and thought it would be good for the environment and kind to the earth because we’re not using herbicides or pesticides to maintain the course.”

The 50-acre site is low and flat, has little topographic relief and is just above sea level. Natural drainage channels run through the site and feed into a primary stream. A portion of the site is influenced by tide activity and experiences partial flooding during high tides. The surrounding views from the site are of coastal mountain ranges. The majority of the property is open and vegetated with low native grasses growing in sandy, silt clay loam soils. Stands of willows and evergreens border the existing waterways on portions of the site and serve as natural vegetative buffers between some of the fairways.

Jones walked the property many times to get an idea of how to lay out the course. He also visited several other golf courses to see how they were laid out. Jones decided to lay out 18 holes, but then scaled back to nine holes because of cost and the amount of land. He applied for a permit and 7.5 years later received one from the Army Corps of Engineers. Then, in the fall of 2001, he contracted golf course architect Mark Miller to help him lay out the golf course and make it more professional.

There are no golf course architects in Alaska, according to Miller, so, out of the blue, Jones flew to Seattle and stopped in Miller’s office to show him aerial photos of the site.

“He said 100 percent of the site is a wetland,” Miller says. “I had just finished working on the Creek Course at Moose Run, which is on the Fort Richardson military base in Anchorage and dealt with wetland issues there, but nothing like what’s in Haines. I told him not to waste his time, but he continued to contact me, and eventually, I agreed to look at the site.

“On the way up there, I met people who spoke highly of Stan and said he was going to build the golf course to benefit the city,” he adds. “When I found out his intentions and the type of person he was, I got more excited about the project.”

When Miller visited the site for the first time, it flooded three- or four-inches deep at high tide at 1 a.m. The next day, when the tide receded, the site wasn’t that wet, Miller says. The site is inundated with water from the high tide only two or three times during the golf season for less than two hours and drains promptly.

“A few times a year a high tide will flood 90 percent of the course, but as the earth continues to rise, the flooding won’t be as big an issue,” Jones says. “There are very few tides that flood the course during the summer, and when that occurs, it’s usually in the middle of the night.”

Schematics
Jones had some idea about the routing of the course, but there was no way to develop a regulation golf course, Miller says. So, Miller tweaked the layout and helped Jones with distances and the separation needed between fairways. Miller says a golf course always should be routed in a clockwise rotation so golfers slice into the course, not out of it.

“The only way to obtain the permit was to show the Army Corps of Engineers how we weren’t going to impact the site,” Miller says.

The intent of the design wasn’t to have emerald green fairways and perfectly manicured bentgrass greens, but a naturally inspired, playable nine-hole golf course that’s in harmony with the native environment, according to Miller.

One thing Miller insisted doing while designing the course was to research the artificial turfgrass that was going to be used on the greens and tees. He visited three places that had artificial turf to see how the turf reacted to a golf ball landing on it that was hit from 150 yards. Eventually, Miller decided on and Jones purchased artificial turf from Dalton, Ga.-based Universal Industries.

Raise ’em up
Construction of the course started July 22, 2003. Jones hired Haines-based Turner Construction Co. to shape the course, which still isn’t completely grown in but improved tremendously last summer, Jones says.

“I was there every day moving dirt,” he says. “Turner had one or two people to run the equipment. During construction, Mark had been here three or four times to suggest changes. For example, he didn’t like the steepness of the greens.”

The biggest impact to the land took place at the green and tee sites, which were contoured as much as five feet above the existing elevation. About 1,000 yards of dirt was moved to build each green, which took two years to form and shape. Most of the work shaping the greens and tees was done with a backhoe/excavator and earth shaper. Jones says the soil underneath the greens was mushy, and because of that, Miller and Universal Industries wanted a well-compacted area. But Jones didn’t want to use any foreign soil because he says it’s impossible to run equipment on the soft ground without building a major road to haul in the material.

“We wanted to raise the greens and tees so when the high tide came in, they’d be safe,” Miller says. “We used fill near the greens to build up the greens and tees.”

During high-tide conditions, these areas might be inundated with water, however, water will always recede back to within the banks of the existing drainage channels, leaving few pools or isolated water pockets.

The course includes a practice putting green, 27 separate teeing areas and a driving range tee. The tees are all 10 feet by 12 feet. Some of the greens are 100-feet long, and some are 60-feet wide.

“They’re not all that big,” Jones says, adding that he purchased 36 1,500-square-foot rolls of artificial turf for the greens and five 720-square-foot rolls for the tees and driving range.

He has two or three rolls left over.

Working with limitations
Because of the minimalist approach to designing and building the course, it has no fairway grading or changes to the naturally existing topography. However, the existing surface for the fairways was leveled and grass was planted.

“We wanted to till the surface to smooth out the land and plant native turfgrass,” Miller says. “One of the big hurdles was to till the land but not change the grade.”

Presently, the height of cut of the turfgrass on the fairways is experimental.
Because the course has no man-made underground irrigation system, a native grass blend of Arctar red fescue, Bering hairgrass and Kentucky bluegrass was selected for the fairways by a professional agronomist familiar with the region.

“The Army Corps of Engineers wouldn’t let us put underground drainage or irrigation in because the site is a wetlands area,” Miller says. “But the site gets enough rain that it doesn’t need irrigation, and there are wells nearby in case above ground irrigation is needed.”

Work in progress
In addition to the nine-hole golf course, the facility features a driving range and maintenance building. Eventually, a clubhouse will be built. The driving range tee, which is about 6 feet by 125 feet, accommodates 13 to 15 golfers and is covered with an open roof structure. A small building structure for dispensing golf balls is located next to the tee. The driving range “fairway” was prepared the same as fairway preparation for the rest of the course. There’s also a practice putting/chipping green that’s part of the range.

The maintenance building is a 40-foot-by-60-foot, barn-like structure that’s designed to be as visually nonobtrusive to the entrance as possible. Native trees will be preserved around the building and wherever possible around the entire entrance and clubhouse for screening and site aesthetics.

The proposed clubhouse will be a two-story building that will be located in an area overlooking the ninth green and first tee. The clubhouse will contain a small pro shop, snack shop, office space, living quarters for the superintendent and possibly a banquet room.

Not driven by profit
The first round of golf played at The Valley of the Eagles Golf Course was in late May 2005, and there were between 200 and 400 rounds played last year, according to Jones.

“We only had six holes that could be played, then we cut three holes in as the summer progressed,” he says. “It’s been pretty much the way I thought it would go.”

Jones says he has spent about $750,000 on the project so far.

“I did it on the cheap,” he says. “I didn’t build this course to make a lot of money. I built it because I wanted to. I don’t know if the golf course will ever pay for itself, but it has kept me involved and thinking. It’s a labor of love. I had a lot of support from the community. The golf course will bless this community forever.” GCN