A view of "The Monument" from the 11th green as I first saw it last April.
For whatever reason the previous builders liked to do things the hard way; like swimming with lead weights on your ankles.
They left us with a prize we began to call “The Monument”. It was the product of excavating the 8th green site. A mountain of red clay some 8 meters high and 30 by 30, this mass of material looked from some angles like it was robbed from Monument Valley in Utah and dropped from the sky onto the golf course.
They should have excavated the material and driven it away in one shot, but they had other plans. Doing it the hard and expensive way. Moving material twice. I'm glad they did it this way, (Ideally I really wish they would have done nothing) because it saved us from having to figure out what to do with even more inferior material piled up throughout the golf course.
During the summer we chewed away at the monument. Driving masses of it to The (buffer) Wall on 5. Today Chechek knocked what was remaining, still some 30 meters by 20 meters by 4 meters down about 1.5 meters. It still has a ways to go before it will fit seamlessly into the landscape; the idea is for it to reflect the plateaus that make 8 fairway, 18 fairway, and the plateau left of 8 green. Its final shape will be not be rounded, but something angular, squarish, to fit with the nature of the native landscape.
Some homeowners will have a unique setting; a view of the golf course, and some seclusion from it. It’ll be a nice place for a home.
Tony Ristola
agolfarchitect.com
+1 (909) 581 0080
