Playing Through the Northwest’s Golden Hours of Fall
by Crai S. Bower
In lacrosse, fall ball is the casual schedule, a time to play a few matches before the meaningful spring season. Fall ball in football translates to 100,000-seat stadiums filled with ardent alums.
Golf-wise, fall ball may be the off-season professionally, but for a Pacific Northwest amateur, it’s the best time of the year to play. Whether it’s the sublime light refracting through the clouds, temperatures that make you layer like an onion, or the glittering embrace of golden cottonwood and alder leaves, time stands still playing here. That is, until the sun (and temperature) dips behind the Olympic Mountains.
Of course, the clock hardly remains idle in the 40th latitudes; three minutes slide away like an amateur’s putt below the hole. For golfers, teasing sundown is as much an autumn ritual as receiving candy from strangers at Halloween.
At Chambers Bay in September, I couldn’t believe the minute hand had passed 6:00pm as we walked sharply downhill on the 14th hole, aptly named Cape Fear. My playing partners from Fairbanks likened the massive risk-reward test with a gaping waste area to golfing beside (or, should you mishit your drive, upon) the moon.
There was no way, I thought, we’d complete our round before the late September sun ducked behind the Olympics. But the hustle was on for our foursome and, fortunately, for those in front of us. I avoided the moonscape and the deep and fanged central fairway bunker that lingers like a sandworm in “Dune” to card a par and scooted on to Lone Fir, the iconic par-3 15th hole on this “pick your signature hole” postcard.
The isolated 40-foot Douglas fir is, famously, the only tree located on Robert Trent Jones Jr.’s design. Players on this marvelous links-style track won’t find golden swaths of autumn leaves, but this doesn’t mean autumn here is anything but brilliant. Though it was 33 minutes past official sundown, the “Open” (pun intended) landscape allowed me just enough light to decipher my line on the green at 18. Afternoon play on every hole at Chambers illuminates a surprise element of Pacific Northwest fall ball: lighting worthy of a John Ford movie set.
From scratching the clouds on the par-5 eighth to plopping a wedge off the 17th tee box, sunlight casts golden hues upon the fairways, bold shimmers across the Sound, and desert pinks, Pinot reds, and violet sprays across the sky.
Like Chambers Bay, the layout at Wine Valley in Walla Walla, Wash. provide a subtle example of autumn’s influence. Grasses turn to gold against the fairways, an homage to the Palouse prairies to the north. The portrait is subtle but no less beautiful.
Though shadows creep farther in the forest, sunlight comes out to play too, filtering through the trees and adding a wattage boost to our region’s golden deciduous trio: cottonwood, aspen and alder. If you want to see these foliage displays as you play, head to Black Butte Ranch in Sisters, Ore.
The Glaze Meadow course was once surrounded – some would say suffocated – by ponderosa pines. John Fought’s 2013 redesign thinned the pines to open Mt. Washington and Three Sisters vistas, provide sunlight nourishment for the water birch, and reintroduce quaking aspens along the creeks. Black cottonwoods, their ebony trunks offset brilliantly against their golden crown, complete the golden halo effect on many greens.
Not far away, Sunriver’s Crosswater course follows the water, in this case, the Deschutes and Little Deschutes rivers and their surrounding wetlands. Not only is this aquatic environment a source of the arid region’s watershed, but it also supports hydrophilic plants, including cottonwoods, alders, and willows. Vine maples add red accents to a design that, like a fashion runway, is enhanced by rising mist, which, in this setting, are provided by vapors that rise off the river as the temperatures shift dramatically in the emerging and diminishing sunlight.
Wetland habitat comes into play across many courses in the Pacific Northwest, a mental challenge for easily distracted avian biology majors like me. As often as I play Eagle’s Talon at Willows Run Golf Complex in Redmond, Wash., I never tire of hearing the resident osprey call, catching sight of an immature bald eagle or spying juvenile wood ducks prepare for their fall migrations.
I recently had seasonal peregrinations on my mind when I stepped up to the first tee at Whitefish Lake Golf Club in Montana. I’ve only visited Whitefish in winter to ski and play hockey tournaments. Perched at Grouse Mountain Lodge, I’d always imagined what style of course lay beneath the snow-covered cross-country ski tracks. I was not disappointed. Largely devoid of homes, the course straddles the lake on several holes, a natural mirror for the quaking aspen grove that lines the opposite shore.
Whitefish introduces more challenges than the par-5 sixth, a first-timer’s hard-to-figure-out marsh carry that tantalizes you to hit the driver in lieu of a yard-clipping 7-iron. Nor is it the North Course/South Course debate. The decision-making dilemma is Whitefish itself, one of North America’s great outdoor adventure hubs. It’s rare when I say I “squeezed” golf into my fall schedule, but with kayaking, mountain biking, and hiking, the latter in Glacier National Park, I admit tucking in golf is exactly what I did.
Fall ball differs in Central Oregon and Montana, where snow descended on the Going-to-the-Sun Highway at Logan’s Pass. Winter doesn’t stop us Puget Sound duffers, but as the incessant rain soaks through my Gore-Tex, I’ll be dreaming of autumn days when the sun saturates the green in all its serene, if fleeting, glory.
Crai S. Bower writes scores of adventure travel articles a year for over 25 publications, including golf stories for American Way, Hearst Media and Journey magazine, among others. He appears regularly on the American Forces Network as a travel commentator. Visit his site at FlowingStreamMedia.net.
