With five 18-hole courses, two short courses and one putter course, Bandon Dunes Golf Resort is Golf Smorgasbord on the southern coast of Oregon. There is a long line for the buffet.
Booking is quick.
But once you enter, you can eat all the golf balls you can eat. At sunrise, wrap up dusk. Banton’s tradition requires a full-day feast.
However, when night falls, there is time to digest because you are arguing with your partner about which parts are the best.
Ranking courses. That’s another good tradition. Everyone has opinions, no one is wrong (although if you pass Golf Magazine’s rating system, then the order is like this: Pacific Dunes, Bandon Dunes, Bandon Trails, Old Macdonald, Sheep Ranch).
And, if you are really affluent, you can get more granularity by ranking the holes.
That’s what happened in the recent episode of the Destination Golf Podcast, which is exclusively dedicated to Bandon Dunes and includes a closet in the hole in Bandon, which is the heart of Simon and I.
My list is tilted on 4-4. I prefer the 6th place in the Pacific Dunes, whose narrow, sloping green draped over the dunes, protected by yawning bunkers, and at No. 16 of Bandon Dunes, a seaside beauty that ranks correctly in the game’s most popular holes. My list also includes a 5-3 stroke of the Bandon Trails, which starts at the edge of the dune and then spills into what feels like a charming forest, its fairways haunted by strategically placed bunkers. If you think golf is a journey through the landscape, this hole is perfect for pictures.
I ticked the others like everyone else, Simon’s first choice comes from Preserve, Bandon’s older two Par-3 courses. Simon especially liked the 9th hole, 130 yards to the green far away in the Pacific Ocean and covered the positives on the left side of the dune’s shoulder.
You can listen to the entire Bandon podcast episode here and come back to comment if you want.
What is your favorite hole? Maybe your answer is the same as Grant Rogers, longtime director of teaching at Bandon.
When he asked a question, his answer never changed: “Any hole I encountered.”
