Wine Valley Golf Club

Following the success of his debut design at Bandon Crossings, self-taught architect Dan Hixson has surpassed expectations with his second solo project at Wine Valley Golf Club. The result of his endeavours at Walla Walla is a layout that offers as links-like a golfing experience as you could hope to find without playing next to the sea.

Minimalism was the watchword when Hixson laid out the fairways here over an expansive property with the Blue Mountains as a dramatic backcloth. It’s firm and fast golf played on a grand scale, where broad fairways offer multiple lines of play and heavily contoured greens present all sorts of putting conundrums.

The 535-yard 7th is the pick of the holes on the front nine, played to a very deceptive punchbowl green. On the inward half, the favourite hole for many is the 470-yard short par five 15th, where the slightly uphill fairway leads to a shallow, offset green.

The following edited extract by architect Daniel Hixson is from Volume Six of Golf Architecture: A Worldwide Perspective. Reproduced with kind permission. To obtain a copy of the book, email Paul Daley at fswing@bigpond.net.au.

“Located in Walla Walla, Washington, the experience of building Wine Valley Golf Club was truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The extent of this magnificent site is in excess of 700 acres, comprising former alfalfa and wheat farmland, with great soils, gently rolling valleys and wonderful long vistas of the surrounding area.

Plainly, any golf architect would have given their eye-tooth to work upon this site; the easiest thing, and most embarrassing outcome, would have been to screw it up and build something ordinary. The owners, being Jim Pliska, John Thorsnes and myself, did not want anything ordinary. Everyone who was involved in the project was willing on a great result.

From the first trip, until construction started, the project had been five years in the making. I had spent around forty days walking the land, and produced at least as many routing plans over that period. John and I has staked out a course numerous times, hashing and rehashing the possibilities of each. With great topography and no trees, the possibilities kept growing.

The land is a series of valleys, swales, ridges and hills formed millions of years ago during the Ice Age. The deep soils are called loess: fine silt, deposited off the bottom of glaciers, with the valleys formed by the receding waters from ice dams and wind blowing it into almost dune-like ridges and hills. The great soils in the region make for very good farming conditions.

Eventually, I decided on a routing plan that we all agreed best-suited the circumstances. It consists of two nine-hole loops: the front nine moving counter-clockwise, and the back nine describing a ‘figure eight’, but generally moving counter-clockwise. The plan required about 100,000 cubic yards to be moved, mostly to build two drainage-retention ponds and our irrigation lake.

Three main shapers were hired: Kye Goalby, Brian Cesar and Dan Proctor. We hired Rexius, a general contractor, to install irrigation, build our ponds, attend to the mass excavation, and anything else we needed. I can’t say enough about Kye, Brian and Dan and what they did for this project. They each brought 20 or more years’ experience of shaping and building courses (and) I learned a heck of a lot from these gentlemen.

Wine Valley taught me a lot about designing and building golf courses. It reinforced the fact that an important industry skill, critical even, is one of assembling a team of talented and passionate people to build a course. I learned to always try to hire people that are smarter than you, at least in some areas, and to seek out people that you can call a friend.”