We’re visiting family in the Austin area, and I met my cousin driving up from San Antonio in rural Blanco, Texas, for a fun round at this Texas Hill Country beauty just after noon on Thursday, 3/22/18...
Continue »
We’re visiting family in the Austin area, and I met my cousin driving up from San Antonio in rural Blanco, Texas, for a fun round at this Texas Hill Country beauty just after noon on Thursday, 3/22/18. The course was built through what will eventually be a growing bedroom community that’s spread over a large area – right now there are only scattered homes built and you don’t see any on many of the holes. The course plays up and down gently rolling terrain benches, with scattered oak and mesquite trees lining fairways and playing sentry at doglegs and hole approaches.
Greens are large and firm, barely showing ballmarks but with some scattered old marks. Most have multiple levels and back left or right plateaus, some with very significant slopes. There are very few flat or gently sloped greens here. Only a few greens have fronting bunkers, but greens are also guarded by trees, drop-offs, and lakes/creeks. Repeated plays are needed to best know the right angles to approach greens, and knowing the pin position is critical to being on the right portion or level.
Fairways were firm and tight, just coming out of winter dormancy – fairway lies were mostly green and most often good. Rough was dry/dormant and very low – it could be patchy or bare; the margin between fairway/rough was usually only distinguishable by subtle color changes. Around greens the rough could be bushy/wiry and challenging for controlling pitches and chips.
Sand – there are not that many bunkers overall on the course; they are generally large, with conditions varying from very good depth/texture to almost no playing layer above packed mud/grainy sand with small rocks. Tees were flat, cut low, and gave good footing – par-3 tees were pretty torn up and the dormant grasses were not able to keep up with the divot damage.
The course has a prevailing open aspect off the tees, with fairly wide fairways. Hole 10, a twisting uphill par-5, showed a very different visual aspect compared to other holes; a 2-level fairway split by a vegetated rock slope (marked as a hazard, probably to discourage golfers from risking injury looking for balls), a pond in front of the tees, a creek along the right side of lower fairway, then crossing the fairway diagonally beyond tee shot range and going up the left side to a pond left of the green, The fairway on the second shot is lined with trees on the right, but sloping to the left into a large bunker fronting the pond. This hole is seriously visually intimidating all the way through, from the tee to the blind second shot to the approach tucked behind a bunker with a steep drop-off to the pond on the left. The hole begs you to take chances, but can also be played safely with 3 straight 7-irons!
The area had a very dry winter and many of the water features, a big part of the course aesthetics and challenge, were dry – this definitely affected the visual appreciation of the course and surroundings. GPS on the carts, and a yardage book is available – the GPS is small but interactive, but the hole position was wrong on all greens on the front nine, and distances were also occasionally very wrong – we noticed this mainly on the par-3s (but errors were 20+ yards!!).
This course is out of the way, but a fun and challenging play and definitely recommended.