Forest Dunes Golf Club (The Loop - Black)

Situated in northern Michigan’s lower peninsula, around nine miles from the small town of Roscommon, Forest Dunes Golf Club began operation at the start of the new millennium as a private facility, with members playing an 18-hole layout designed by Tom Weiskopf. Acquired by Arkansan businessmen Lew Thompson and Sam Mathias in 2011, the golf facility is now fully open to the public.

The original Weiskopf course was joined in 2016 by a new 18-hole layout that came straight from the drawing boards of Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design Company. Called The Loop, it’s the realisation of a long-held “dream concept” project for the architect, featuring eighteen distinct fairways and greens that are fully reversible, allowing golfers to play the same course in two different directions on consecutive days.

“This is a concept I have thought about for 30 years,” Doak said. “You need the right site and the right client to understand the appeal of it. At Forest Dunes we finally have both. The appeal of a reversible course is people would want to play it both ways. You are getting two golf courses in one.” The clockwise routing is called the Black Course with the anti-clockwise routing called the Red Course. Both play to a par of 70 with five par threes on each scorecard.

The property was perfectly suited for such a unique project because of the gently undulating nature of the landscape, with no dramatic changes in elevation, and this allowed Brian Slawnik, one of Doak’s senior associates, to develop the course in one direction whilst he designed the other.

The Black is said to be the more difficult of the two 18-hole layouts, with the right doglegged par four 12th earmarked as a potential “signature hole”. The par four 6th on the Red doglegs left to a raised green and it’s also a hole that’s worth looking out for when you play the layout in reverse.