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    Course News

    Gil Hanse discusses his new public course coming to the Midwest

    January 30, 2025
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    If you are a person of certain means with access to private jets and destination club memberships, the last 10 years have been a golf revelation. Exclusive private clubs have opened in remote, difficult to get to locations in Nebraska, California, South Carolina and south Georgia, and new velvet-roped doors continue to open in off-the-beaten path locations in Florida, Minnesota, Texas and beyond.

    Fortunately, if you’re the kind of person who flies commercial and can’t join elite clubs, you haven’t been left out. In the last decade, multiple new courses have opened at the country’s best resorts, including Bandon Dunes, Sand Valley, Pinehurst and Big Cedar Lodge, and more new courses have been announced at Streamsong and Gamble Sands along with standalone public-access developments in Colorado and Florida.

    Forest Dunes, in northern Michigan, is the latest to stay in the conversation of the new upscale resort course game with the announcement of a new Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner-designed course called SkyFall.

    SkyFall is expected to break ground late 2025 or first quarter of 2026 with an anticipated opening in 2028. The model for the course is a bit of a hybrid between the jet-setting fly-in club and more traditional resort courses. The club will be heavily membership oriented, though some tee times will be reserved for guests of the resort. It’s a model similar to The Lido at Sand Valley, the Golf Digest Best New Public Course for 2023.

    Hanse and Wagner will have over 300 acres of land to work with in an area just north of the original Forest Dunes course (Tom Weiskopf, 2002) and The Loop, Tom Doak’s reversible course (2016). The narrow, forested property spans nearly two miles east to west and will feature mirrored nines that move out and back, Whistling Straits-like, in each direction, traversing elevation changes of over 70 feet.

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    SkyFall is the vision of Rich Mack and Tom Sunnarborg, who acquired Forest Dunes in 2021. Both men were the executives at the Minnesota-based Mosaic Company and spearheaded the development of Streamsong across its former phosphate mining sites in Florida.

    In 2015, they hired Hanse and Wagner to build the Black Course there, a brawny, muscular design with some of the largest fairways and borderless greens ever created.

    Design-wise, SkyFall will be about a far from Streamsong Black as Hanse and Wagner can get.

    “The vegetation looks a lot like Boston Golf Club, with a very similar tree palate with sweet ferns,” Hanse told Golf Digest. “The other course we did that it reminds me of presentation-wise is Les Bordes (in France). Though (SkyFall) is hillier than that, it moves through the trees and through the vegetation, and it’s not going through a big open landscape. Each hole will be through a corridor of trees except for a few places (holes three through five) where there will be a more expansive scale. But for the most part it’s going to be a more intimate, northern Michigan tree-lined golf course, which we are excited about.”

    Both nines will extend out from a ridge at the midpoint of the site where the clubhouse will stand, moving away and then back. The ninth is patterned after the second hole at Pine Valley with an approach shot over an exposed sand barren to a green benched atop the ridge. That’s the same setup Hanse and Wagner used for their 17th hole at Ohoopee Match Club, a private destination in the Georgia backcountry that’s ranked 34th on America’s 100 Greatest Courses.

    “The course was hard to route in one way because we were trying to get that change of direction on each nine,” Hanse says, “but in another way it was easy because you were limited. You couldn’t go in 50 different directions. The land informed us of how it had to be.”

    Coming off large scale, open-site projects like The Park West Palm and Kinsale in Florida, and Ladera in southern California, Hanse and Wagner are embracing the opportunity to work in more forested close quarters.

    “The space is there, but we’re also trying to build something not as big as what the standard is right now, for us as well as everybody else,” he says. “The fairway widths will be maybe 35 or 40 yards rather than usual 60- or 70-yard wide fairways.”

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    The SkyFall course will be built in the high, forested terrain north of the original Weiskopf design.

    Working in the sand and gravel soils at Forest Dunes should ease the burden of having to do too much in construction, and the original challenge will be clearing and grubbing away the organic layers of soil that have built up in the understory.

    “Sometimes when you clear in a forest you’re left with these trees that are like toothpicks because they’ve been growing straight up,” says Hanse, “and you don’t get the beauty of the trees that have been growing and expanding on the edge of a clearing. I think we’ve tried hard to identify clearing corridors where we’re going to have nice full trees along the edge.”

    Hanse and Wagner aren’t new to designing premier public access golf, though their courses in this category have been limited to the South and Southeast. Streamsong Black is ranked 178th on the Second 100 Greatest Courses list, and their remodel of Pinehurst No. 4 ranks a few spots higher at no. 171. Mossy Oak, in Mississippi, is listed at no. 70 on America’s 100 Greatest Public courses, and two newer designs, Fields Ranch East in Texas and The Park West Palm in Florida have yet to be ranked.

    Mack, the co-owner of the resort, says that SkyFall will occupy the most compelling piece of land at Forest Dunes. He thinks it will hit the perfect middle ground between the parkland, lake- and bunker-sculpted original Weiskopf course and Doak’s lay of the land Loop.

    “For Forest Dunes, this course will have some intrigue,” he says. “It has natural elevation changes and you’re not going to be able to see it from the other parts of the property.

    “You’re not driving by it, it’s not visible from Forest Dunes or from The Loop. So, it’s kind of that course that’s ‘up there’ and I think people will be talking about it. And from a design perspective it’s not this huge expanse. It’s going to be a Gil Hanse design in a secluded northern Michigan environment, and I think that’s going to be different.”