At Granite Bay Golf Club, Mark Parsinen and Robert Trent Jones Jr.
have reaffirmed the value of the game’s basic principles: sound routing,
clubhouse designed for golfers, old-time feel to the bunker shapes and grasses,
greens designed for thoughtful approach shots and the short game, dramatic
setting.
In 1990 Parsinen, who later went onto co-design highly regarded
Kingsbarns outside St. Andrews, happened upon a rolling, 190-acre site east of
Sacramento, California. It lay in the eastern edge of the Central Valley, at a
point just below Folsom Lake that brought the snow-capped Sierra Nevada
Mountains into view from the higher ground. The only drawback was that deep beds
of granite rock undergirded the topsoil.
Yet Parsinen was enough of a student of modern design to realize
that with a clever routing, there would be enough room for a solid golf course.
Indeed, he even sketched out a routing on a rough contour map of the grounds.
Not bad for a neophyte, eight holes of that proposed plan were eventually built
in place.
The bunkers at Granite Bay have been carved with the same
attention to flow and contour normally devoted to putting surfaces. Instead of
keeping the sand down low, or merely flashing sand up a wall to face the player,
the design group at Granite Bay sculpted bunkers with curved sand beds. As a
general rule, the farther away from the green, the lower the sand profile—this
to allow opportunity for advancing the ball. To accentuate the contours, the
high edges of many bunkers have been planted with fescue grasses, which conveys
a carefully controlled appearance of scruffiness.
