West Palm Golf Park - West Palm Beach, FL (Redesign by Gil Hanse, 2021)
Before starting up at Lake Merced, Gil and partner Jim Wagner had me out for a couple months to help with their municipal revival project in South Florida. An old city course designed by Dick Wilson and laying fallow in recent years, The Park is an all new design on that same piece of sandy and surprisingly undulating ground.
For this project, I was just helping with some bunker shaping and their tie-ins to native-covered sand-scrapes and dunes. What was particularly fun and fulfilling was the ease of making those transitional tie-ins and how, with careful transplant of plants with the excavator and tapering down bunker edges to zero, you could instantaneously make things look natural. This was my first time back working in sand in a number of years, and it was a blast to do so.
I will be excited to see this course open and immediately offer perhaps the best public golf experience on the Gold Coast.
A large deep dune bunker on the 16th hole at the West Palm Golf Park. The sand line on the top of the horizon was a complete departure from other projects of the year like at Teton Pines and Wente and shows the importance of both variety and adhering to the given nature of a site.
Instantaneous blending of bunker and surrounds at The Park
Layered bunkering bleeding out to the right on the 16th hole at The Park
Looking down the 8th hole from the 6th fairway
A detailed look at the revetted edge typically preferred by Hanse and the Caveman team. This pair was my first time working out this style, in which varying the thickness of the edge and carefully moving it around to break up smooth lines was a stylistic focus.