With 5 18-hole programs, two brief programs and a placing course, Bandon Dunes Golf Resort is a {golfing} smorgasbord on the southern Oregon coast. And there’s an extended line on the buffet.
Reservations e book up shortly.
However when you’re in, you’re in for all of the golf which you could eat. Out at dawn, wrapping up a nightfall. Bandon custom requires all-day feasts.
Come dusk, although, there’s time to digest as you argue along with your buddies over which elements of the property are greatest.
Rating the programs. That’s one other fantastic custom. Everybody has an opinion, and nobody’s unsuitable (although if you happen to go by GOLF journal’s score system, the order goes like this: Pacific Dunes, Bandon Dunes, Bandon Trails, Outdated MacDonald, Sheep Ranch).
And if you happen to’re actually feeling feisty, you may get extra granular by rating the holes.
That’s what occurred throughout a latest episode of the Vacation spot Golf podcast, which was devoted fully to Bandon Dunes and included a back-and-forth on the holes at Bandon which can be closet to my and Simon’s coronary heart.
My record leaned closely on brief par 4s. I’m a fan of the sixth at Pacific Dunes, with its slim, angled inexperienced, draped over a dune and guarded by yawning bunker, in addition to the sixteenth at Bandon Dunes, a seaside magnificence that rightly ranks among the many recreation’s most photographed holes. My record additionally included the par-5 third at Bandon Trails, which begins on the fringe of the dunes and spills into what looks like an enchanted forest, its fairway pocked by strategically positioned bunkers. If you happen to consider golf as a journey by a panorama, this gap suits the image completely.
I ticked off others, as did Simon, whose first selection got here from The Protect, the older of Bandon’s two par-3 programs. Simon is especially keen on the ninth gap, 130 yards to a inexperienced backed within the distance by the Pacific and shadowed on the left by the shoulder of a dune.
You possibly can hearken to the complete Bandon podcast episode right here and are available again with commentary if you happen to’d like.
What’s your favourite gap? Possibly your reply is similar as that of Grant Rogers, Bandon’s longtime director of instruction.
His response, when he’s been posed the query, has by no means diversified: “No matter gap I’m on.”
