With five 18-hole courses, two short courses and a putting course, Bandon Dunes Golf Resort is a golfing smorgasbord on the southern Oregon coast. And there’s a long line at the buffet.
Reservations book up quickly.
But once you’re in, you’re in for all the golf that you can eat. Out at sunrise, wrapping up a dusk. Bandon tradition calls for all-day feasts.
Come nightfall, though, there’s time to digest as you argue with your buddies over which parts of the property are best.
Ranking the courses. That’s another fine tradition. Everyone has an opinion, and no one’s wrong (though if you go by GOLF magazine’s rating system, the order goes like this: Pacific Dunes, Bandon Dunes, Bandon Trails, Old MacDonald, Sheep Ranch).
And if you’re really feeling feisty, you can get more granular by ranking the holes.
That’s what happened during a recent episode of the Destination Golf podcast, which was devoted entirely to Bandon Dunes and included a back-and-forth on the holes at Bandon that are closet to my and Simon’s heart.
My list leaned heavily on short par 4s. I’m partial to the 6th at Pacific Dunes, with its narrow, angled green, draped over a dune and guarded by yawning bunker, as well as the 16th at Bandon Dunes, a seaside beauty that rightly ranks among the game’s most photographed holes. My list also included the par-5 3rd at Bandon Trails, which starts at the edge of the dunes and spills into what feels like an enchanted forest, its fairway pocked by strategically placed bunkers. If you think of golf as a journey through a landscape, this hole fits the picture perfectly.
I ticked off others, as did Simon, whose first choice came from The Preserve, the older of Bandon’s two par-3 courses. Simon is particularly fond of the 9th hole, 130 yards to a green backed in the distance by the Pacific and shadowed on the left by the shoulder of a dune.
You can listen to the entire Bandon podcast episode here and come back with commentary if you’d like.
What’s your favorite hole? Maybe your answer is the same as that of Grant Rogers, Bandon’s longtime director of instruction.
His response, when he’s been posed the question, has never varied: “Whatever hole I’m on.”
