Rustic Canyon Golf Course
15100 Happy Camp Canyon Rd.
Moorpark, CA 93021
805-530-0221
www.rusticcanyongolfcourse.com
Design: 4 stars
Difficulty: 4 stars
Maintenance: 4 stars
Value: 4.5 stars
If you spend enough time stuck in traffic on the freeways of Southern California, you may get the impression that golf courses in this part of the country are always wedged between an office park, strip mall, and the noisy highway. Luckily, though, even some of the most densely populated areas have undeveloped pockets where it’s still possible to achieve that away-from-it-all feeling that golfers enjoy so much.
Rustic Canyon Golf Course is such a place. Though it’s only a few miles from the busy 101, the course is layed out along the base of a rugged canyon without a housing development or a box store anywhere in sight.
Elevated tee shot at Rustic Canyon.
This was all part of the plan for architects Gil Hanse, Jim Wagner, and first-timer Geoff Shackelford. Shackelford recorded the unique process they used to design and construct the course in his excellent book on golf course design, Grounds for Golf. Aiming to create a course that would remain interesting and playable again and again while not distorting the local flavor of the area, the architects let the land dictate the layout, moving minimal dirt, and adding no artificial lakes or imported palm trees. They used native plants, left a wildlife corridor intact through the middle of the course, and basically created a course that looks like it actually belongs in a dusty Southern California canyon.
In addition to these general themes, they did some really cool things with bunkers and greens. The bunkers are grungy, filled with gravelly material rather than imported sand, and have that look of bunkers that may have been created by the eons or by herds of burrowing sheep (in the Scottish tradition). Having read Shackelford’s book, however, I know that each one took an inordinate amount of time, with the architects themselves (among others) hand crafting them to achieve this appearance.
It’s the greens that are the most surprising aspect of the course, however. Most of the approaches are open, inviting run-up shots rather than demanding high soft shots, like most modern courses. The low approach is not easy at this course, though. The areas surrounding all of the greens are mowed just a bit longer than the greens themselves, so holding the greens with a low shot (or a high shot for that matter!) is difficult. Meanwhile, many of the greens are elevated, crowned, or multi-tiered, so shots that land a bit hot and would be caught up in the fringe or first cut of rough at most courses, are here deflected way off the green. Interesting, maddening, but fun.
12th green from the native waste area.
The par-3 15th possesses such a green. The hole plays only 147 yards from the back tees, but it’s uphill all the way (and into the winter wind on the day I played) and the green has three distinct tiers. My playing partners and I had a pin cut on the top, back tier, and nearly every one of us had a chip or a putt that ran up to the tier before falling all the way back again. One of my partners took three putts to get up the hill. Crazy.
But it’s not all about the greens and bunkers. Players benefit by thinking about (and successfully executing) their tee shots. This is not just a grab-driver-and-go kind of course. The par-4 14th plays from an elevated tee, across a waste area to a fairway that runs perpendicularly right to left to a distant green. Players can bite off as much as they can chew, but coming up short results in an OB (there are few lateral hazards on the course, and so few stroke-and-distance penalties) or a shot from a tough fairway bunker.
Rustic Canyon was a course that I’ve been wanting to check off my list for a long time. However, not that I’ve been around once, I just want to play it again. That’s the mark of a good course, and for Hanse, Wagner, and Shackelford, it’s a mission accomplished.
-Bryan Fryklund
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