A 12-foot-high bunker? A 12-foot-high bunker.

The Pulpit Club in Caledon, Ontario, has built a new revetted bunker using the synthetic material EcoBunker. The bunker was constructed over six days by contractor KCM Construction and is now one of the tallest revetted bunkers in the world.

The bunker is on the fourth hole of the Pulpit course and has a 12-foot-high back wall. It was supported using railroad ties for over 30 years after its construction in 1990, but decay on the ties necessitated renovation. The course was originally designed by Dr. Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry.

“I had seen the EcoBunker product at the Golf Industry Show, and it occurred to me it could be the right solution for the bunker on the fourth,” superintendent Rob Wright said. “I bought a full container of EcoBunker, about 20 skids (pallets). This one bunker took about nine skids, and we will do two or three bunkers on the Paintbrush course this summer with the rest of it. The new wall looks great – it was previously at about a 35- to 40- degree slope, and now it is up to 65 degrees, so it looks much more like our other revetted bunkers.

“We have 108 revetted bunkers on the Paintbrush course. They have been rebuilt three times in the course’s life, but the revet doesn’t last very long, and we have a lot of dirt faces. One of the really appealing things about EcoBunker is that the lines are never going to disappear, and so we will always keep that traditional look.”

EcoBunker inventor and CEO Richard Allen said the bunker could not have been constructed using his company’s original revetting methods. His new recipe for the material modifies the backfill with cement. This mixture relieves active soil pressure and possible hydrostatic loads from becoming too heavy on the bunker’s back wall.

“In my original invention of synthetic sod walls, all the stability was provided by the tiles,” Allen said. “This monster bunker at the Pulpit could not have been built using the original method: the active soil pressure and potential hydrostatic loads would have been too high.”