Known for dairy, and now golf, too
ALDO Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is an environmental classic. First published in 1949, a year after Leopold’s death, it chronicled and celebrated the natural life amid the changing seasons around his scruffy weekend retreat and family farm, in a dirtpoor region of Wisconsin that starts an hour’s drive north of Madison, the state capital.
The area is still dirt-poor, particularly once you get away from the honky-tonk tourist attractions and water parks surrounding the Wisconsin Dells. The nearest big city is Milwaukee, more than 340 kilometres away. But nestled near the tiny towns of Rome and Nekoosa, about 160 kilometres from Madison, hidden away for decades under vast rows of red pine trees planted to produce pulp, was something extraordinary: a stunning section of the exposed sandy bottom of a prehistoric glacial lake that, geologists say, flooded a large area of central Wisconsin about 18,000 years ago, when an ancient ice dam collapsed.
Mike Keiser, who made a fortune in the greeting card business, is known to avid players for creating the golf mecca Bandon Dunes on the Oregon coast. He found his way to this off-the-beaten-path spot in Wisconsin in 2013. What the land has, in spades, is immense tumbling dunes, some 15 metres high or more.
Last year I learned about the ambitions of Sand Valley, and that it would be open for limited preview play that summer. As it turned out, my wife, Lisa, and I were planning to drive to Minneapolis from our home outside New York last fall so that I could attend the Ryder Cup golf tournament and we could visit Lisa’s sister and her partner. Sand Valley was not far off our route.
When we drove toward the course, on the last Monday morning of September, I didn’t know what to expect. A couple months earlier, I had made a reservation by email to play that afternoon, spend the night at one of the new rooms that were supposed to have opened, and then play again the next morning before moving on to Minneapolis. Where we would go for dinner was an open question.
Our GPS device led us astray, and as we wandered around the countryside of farms, cottages, cranberry bogs and lakes, we came upon a roadside bar with an original Pabst Blue Ribbon logo, passing numerous lawn signs for the Trump campaign. Eventually, having stopped to call for directions, we found a small sign directing us onto a gravel road, and entered what looked a lot more like a sprawling construction site than a golf resort.
In the strong wind, sand was blowing everywhere across an unpaved parking area. The future clubhouse was a hole in the ground, with a foundation in place and not much else. We found the check-in desk and golf shop, in a nearly windowless converted 12-metre shipping container. However, as soon as we saw the immense landscape of wide green fairways, golden-coloured prairie grasses, low shrubs and acres of washboard sand dunes, we knew we had come to someplace special.
At first blush, though, this didn’t look like Aldo Leopold’s vision. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” Leopold wrote in one of his most famous passages. “It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Could a sprawling golf development really reflect his conservation ethic? Maybe it could.
Keiser’s son Michael lives in Madison and is responsible for carrying out the project. In an email after our visit, he said that Leopold’s words “inspired us to rebuild a forgotten world in Adams County”, where Sand Valley and Aldo Leopold’s shack, now a designated historic landmark, are set. “The pine barrens of central Wisconsin are as rare as they are beautiful – we’d like to help them flourish.”
That afternoon, when I stood on the first tee, at a high point that the developers call the “Volcano”, the endless landscape of rolling hills and emerald green fairways, interlaced with waving grasses and ripples of sand, seemed to be dancing in the wind. I was thrilled.
The course is for walkers, except for those with disabilities that require a cart. My caddie, Mark Schroeder, a retired teacher, urged me to play from the middle “Sand” tees, which made the length of the course a modest 5,570 metres. He pointed to a distant spot on the right side of the first fairway and we were off. I don’t remember that much of the individual holes, perhaps because I rarely got into too much trouble and I was having too much fun. I almost never break 80, but that day, despite the wind, I shot a 77, with one birdie (on the fourth hole, a par 5) and no double bogeys.
Despite the nearby construction, wildlife was thriving. Birds were everywhere, and we saw two foxes and a family of deer.
That evening was the first presidential debate. We were offered an excellent dinner, served in a common room with a big-screen TV, shared with other guests. Bill Coore, the course co-designer, was staying there, too, with his wife and two friends from France.
Coore, in a later telephone conversation, said Sand Valley was one of those relatively rare sites that “feels like golf in a natural state. You can lay it out pretty quietly on the land to bring the golf course to life”.
The next morning, I couldn’t wait to play a second round. With Schroeder as my caddie again, I teed off early from some longer tees. It was tougher, and the best I could manage was an 85. If anything it was even more exciting, and I was able to truly appreciate the natural features of the land.
“Mike gave us a great gift, a really spectacular site for golf,” Coore said. “And I remember he told us, ‘If the first course is not very good, there won’t be a second or third course, so don’t mess it up’.”
They didn’t.