Design Notebook: Fire Threatens a New DMK Course in Nebraska

Welcome back to Design Notebook, where we’re proposing that the “Bear Trap” be renamed the “Bear Spa.” Seems like a relaxing spot these days!

In this week’s edition of DN, we have an on-the-ground account of a maintenance crew battling a wildfire at an under-construction golf course in the Nebraska Sandhills. We also have some thoughts from Andy Johnson on who might succeed Seth Raynor as the next “it boy” of classic golf architecture. Dig in…

GrayBull Fights Off a Sandhills Inferno

By Garrett Morrison

Michael Sheely saw the smoke around 10:30 a.m. on Monday, February 26, but went on with his workday. Wildfires are common in the Nebraska Sandhills. Most get extinguished promptly by the fire department. Today was different, though: Sheely and a few of his employees were soon in the midst of the blaze, fighting to save their golf course.

Sheely is the Director of Agronomy at GrayBull, a new Dormie Network club northeast of North Platte, Nebraska. Construction of the David McLay Kidd-designed course wrapped up last September, and Sheely and his team have been busy grassing playing surfaces and cleaning up bunker faces. Opening day is set for late summer of this year.

Last week’s fire, ignited by sparks from a farmer’s mower, threw those plans into doubt. Urged on by 40-mile-per-hour winds, the flames consumed 110 square miles of grassland, an area roughly the size of Omaha. One home and five outbuildings were destroyed, but no injuries or deaths were reported. And thanks to the brave actions of Sheely and his crew, GrayBull survived with minimal damage.

Yesterday, Sheely and GrayBull’s general manager Tyler Hadden joined me on a Zoom call to tell their story. The text below has been lightly edited and restructured for clarity.

Garrett: Give me the basics on the GrayBull project.

Tyler: Our location, similar to most Dormie facilities is, by point, away from other things. We’re a destination club and we don’t want to necessarily be downtown. We’re north of Maxwell—what would you say, Michael? Twelve miles on the dot?

Michael: Yeah.

Tyler: And a 2,200-acre plot of land that the Peed family purchased with DMK—David McLay Kidd. They brought him to a number of properties and this is the one they decided to run with. And it is 100% a links-style golf course. Michael’s been boots on the ground since—what, May of 2023?

Michael: Yeah, I was off and on here in March and April last year, full time in May.

Tyler: We’re pretty excited to unveil it here in the coming months.

The seventh hole at GrayBull in June 2023 (photo credit: GrayBull)

Garrett: How much of the overall facility had been built before the fire hit?

Tyler: In terms of overall construction, still certainly early stages, which probably helped us [in the fire] as much as anything, too. We’ve got incredible barriers with sand and ground that’s been affected or just manipulated for construction. Even in two years, that should be native growth up to the cottages, which would’ve changed our story entirely. We had a bit of a barrier around. And then, of course, what you’ll hear from Michael and those crazies that stayed on site and put the blaze out, it was certainly in the early stages of construction yet, even though we’ve been after it for quite some time. But these cottages remain unfinished and we won’t have walkthroughs yet for a month and a half to two months.

Garrett: Now, Michael, as far as the golf course goes, how far along were you with grow-in when the fire happened?

Michael: So we are grassed out—all 18 holes, putting green, chipping green, and driving range. I’d say we’re probably 80% to 90% there as far as the grow-in goes. I’d say we’ve probably got about two months of some pretty labor-intensive sodding and some more over-seeding to do, and then it’s a matter of getting things dialed in and detailed and the heights of cut we want and get a lot of top-dressing out there to get it smoothed out.

Garrett: Going to the day in question, Michael, what were you doing when you first realized there was a fire?

Michael: I was in our agronomy building that’s still under construction, and we were actually tending some of the interior walls in our chemical bay. We saw the smoke about 10:30 a.m. I didn’t really think much of it because it’s kind of a common sight out here, and we had faith in the fire department—“Oh, they’ll probably get it out.”

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We had other crew members on site that were actually out watering with our winter water system. We were not fully charged yet at that time. So they were out there kind of watching it, getting reports. And then our assistant, Katie Kramer, got a text from the fire chief in North Platte—I want to say it was around 11-ish, maybe 11:30—to turn all of our water on. And so I’m inside the agronomy building with no cell service, and I just happened to magically be in the right spot where all these text messages came through, and it was from Katie saying, “Turn all the pumps on. We’re opening lateral valves.”

So at that point, Tyson [Kramer], our equipment manager, he was with me. It was like, let’s go check it out. We opened up the overhead door and there just was a wall of smoke, and we’re like, we better go see what’s going on, see how close this really is. Went over the hill towards the clubhouse cottage area, and the fire had started on our property at that point. There’s a residential property, maybe an eighth of a mile down the road just to the south of us, and his cedar trees were engulfed in flames. So I think a lot of the embers from that, with 40- to 50-mile-an-hour winds, just kept that fire moving. So by the time I saw it, it was at the construction entrance to the clubhouse, and it had just started getting into some of the materials that were stacked up there. So it wasn’t moving super quick, but it was on fire. It was a concern.

So we flew down to the pump house, turned all of our pumps on, and everyone on my crew was already out there. We were cracking lateral valves and kicking to every single perimeter sprinkler possible on the property. Priority was to water the driving range, which is very near the cottages, and 16, 17, and 18, which are kind of on the west side of the golf course where the fire was coming towards. So those were the first ones that we started watering, and then we just kept going after that. And we’re fortunate enough, we don’t have a satellite system. We have an IC [Integrated Control] system, no satellites. So we’re fortunate in that regard because none of those burned. So we could operate our radios from safe distances to kick all the sprinklers on, and we’d run them for 30 minutes, and we’d just keep cycling through during that whole period.

Not normally how we roll or come out of the winter, that quickly, but when panic sets in, you just do whatever it takes to get it going.

Plane dousing the fire on GrayBull's perimeter (photo credit: GrayBull)

At that point, the fire started creeping up over the hill, and there’s an employee house on property that I’m staying in now. It was creeping towards us, [so I] evacuated, my wife, our animals, two of my employees—our irrigation tech [Ted Simmons] and our spray tech [Courtney Kohl]. I evacuated them, told them, “We’re good, you guys. Get off the property, get somewhere safe.” And they led my wife back into town for me. They had to take some back roads because the highway was closed down.

Tyson and Katie were the two on site with me. We made the decision just to protect the structures. The golf course will be fine. It’s really easy to grow grass.

So first we started plowing firebreaks around the employee house to save that, and then we turned focus—it was creeping towards our temporary maintenance yard, and we had a lot of fuel barrels out there and fertilizer and stuff. So we started creating a firebreak there and then around our pump station.

Garrett: How were you creating the firebreaks?

Michael: We have a couple of tractors here on site with buckets. One of them has a box blade. And then we have a skid-steer [loader]. So what we do is just get out in front of the fire a little bit and start literally plowing up that grass, anything that could fuel that fire, to slow it down or stop it.

Garrett: You’re trying to create a path of dirt, basically?

Michael: Yeah, yeah. It’s just like a natural break.

GrayBull crew member clearing a firebreak (photo credit: GrayBull)

And then I went up to the cottages, and our general contractor Sampson has had a 2,000-gallon water truck on site for the duration of construction. They’ve used it to wet footings down when they’re pouring concrete and maybe wet some paths down to stop some of the blowing sand. So a Sampson employee named Ben [Boehm], he stayed, and he was running the water truck up there, just up and down the paths and hosing what he could. He’s actually a volunteer firefighter—

Tyler: I think for like the last 31 years or something.

Michael: Yeah, so it was just lucky. He knew what to do. And we have a truck fill that’s tied off of our mainline near our agronomy building, so we can fill those trucks up really quickly. It’s basically a 2,000-gallon Ford F750 tanker truck. And he’s got nozzles that’ll spray in the front and the rear, and then he’s got a hose nozzle that he can get out and use manually.

So he kept going up around the cottages, wetting all that down, doing what he could. And then I’d have him come out to the course and he would—we don’t have cart paths, but we have maintenance paths—he would wet those down, just to help the natural break that we already had there. Just basically wherever we had some flare-up start, he’d go tackle those. But I’d say his main priority was the structures up at the clubhouse area.

And I went up there in a skid steer and started creating firebreaks around 1 and 2, which are really close to 17, where the fire was getting really close. And then I jumped out, had a couple hoses up there, and I plugged those in and just started watering what I could as it started creeping towards the turf and the buildings. Tyson and Katie, they kept fighting the fire lines and starting to open more lateral valves as it creeped more towards the east side of our property. Before I know it—this was all from noon to 4—it’s dinnertime, and I’m just like, “Wow, what a day.”

Garrett: Tyler, how did you hear about the fire?

Tyler: The funny thing is, I got a call from our soon-to-be head professional. His family lives out here, and he called me and said, “Just got off the phone with my grandpa. There’s a fire north of North Platte. He says it could be heading towards GrayBull.” So I called Michael right away and was like, “Hey, do you know anything?” And at that point, he had probably received enough texts or calls. As I kept saying, he was the hot girl at the bar real quick. At that point, I think it was eight to 10 miles away. Then it wasn’t—shoot, it seemed like 30 minutes—and he sent me a picture of a plane dumping water. And I was trying to see where the plane was, and then in the corner of the photo I saw the ranger that we have on property, and I realized Michael was in the ranger and that was the road on site.

So then we knew that the fire was pretty much on property. I tried to get a hold of Michael a couple of times, and he obviously was too busy fighting the dang thing.

I was flying to Texas the next day, going to two of our other properties on a golf trip with a handful of members and guests. I was going to fly out of Omaha. But as this started to turn into a bigger story, we canceled that trip, reloaded the pickup, and drove directly back to North Platte, coming in late that night. So the fire was gone [from GrayBull] at that point. As it got dark, you could see the flames out on the hill.

At any rate, we got into town, spent the night here, and then went on property early the next morning and met with Sampson, met with Michael, and just looked at the carnage of what was, and really how lucky we got. I mean, it’s pretty astonishing when you see everything around, whether it’s the photo from above or the cedar rows from the gentleman just to the south of us. It was just like a boneyard. It was just nothing but the tree trunks and limbs and absolutely nothing. I forget the term Michael used when we got there, but it was—

Michael: Apocalyptic.

Tyler: Yeah, apocalyptic. I mean, the ditches were still smoking, the fence posts were still burning flames. I mean, it was like nothing I’d seen before. And the fact that they were in the middle of it is just a bit crazy.

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In terms of damage, as that fire crossed into the construction area, some of the materials up by the Sampson offices got burned. That’s kind of where they staged everything. There were some shingles on fire, just kind of a debris pile, just slowly smoldering. And then to come on site and see everything that had burned from west to east, and then everything to the south side, absolutely torched. And then as [the fire] kind of back-burned into 1 and 2 up the hillside, you can tell where Michael and those folks had just disrupted that turf and got the native away. We’re talking 30 feet from the cottage; it might’ve been closer. When we say we very narrowly avoided the absolute worst-case scenario, I mean, it’s that close to being a really, really bad situation.

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We have a little bit of smoke damage in the cottages, but that’s as easy as hopefully washing the walls, putting a machine in there to cut the smell. And that literally—aside from a few trusses, some roofing materials, shingles, and such—that’s about it. We were extremely fortunate.

We’re lucky to have Michael. And it’s exciting to know that we’ve got like-minded people on his team that are willing to, kidding aside, risk it all to save our facility. I had talked to him initially, when it was starting to get hot and heavy, and pretty much said, “If it gets too bad, you get the hell out of there.” And as I’m watching the live feed, I see the sprinklers light up, and I’m going, “You son of a gun, you did not leave.”

The Next Raynor

By Andy Johnson

Over the last 25 years, no golf architect has enjoyed a greater rise in popularity than Seth Raynor. The advent of internet enthusiast communities, the publication of George Bahto’s seminal C.B. Macdonald biography The Evangelist of Golf, and increased access opportunities at private clubs have helped Raynor become a household name in golf course design. This is especially remarkable considering how he started in the profession. Famously, before meeting Macdonald during the planning stages for National Golf Links of America, Raynor barely knew what golf was.

Recently, I’ve noticed that Raynor, like other giants of the Golden Age of golf architecture, has ascended to “one name” status. Avid golfers say things like, “I just played Lookout Mountain—it’s a Raynor.” This is rarefied air for a golf architect, just as it is for professional golfers (“Tiger,” “Jack,” “Arnie,” “Seve,” etc.). Certainly it’s a far cry from where Raynor stood in the 1990s, when many of his designs had yet to be discovered, let alone revered or restored.

As further proof of Raynor’s new status, we’ve seen an influx of “Raynor-inspired” new builds in the past few years. The most recent is Kinsale Club, Gil Hanse-Jim Wagner design in the Naples area that is scheduled to open this year. Such projects only amplify the popularity of Raynor and his “ideal holes.”

All of this raises a question for me. Will another past architect experience a similar rehabilitation in the next decade? The likes of Macdonald, Ross, Tillinghast, and MacKenzie are already in the “one name” category, alongside Raynor. So who’s turn will it be?

My money is on Walter Travis, whose quirky mounds and eccentric green designs are as bold and memorable as Raynor’s templates. Yet I doubt that Travis or any other architect will rise as quickly as Raynor did in the last two decades. The charisma of the “ideal holes” is hard to replicate.

Chocolate Drops

By Garrett Morrison

Sunningdale hires Hanse. Sunningdale Golf Club in Berkshire, England—home to two legendary 18-hole golf courses—announced on Tuesday, February 20, that it had hired Gil Hanse as consulting architect. In an email to members, the club said that it had conducted in-person interviews with four firms, and after “months of meetings and much deliberation” the green committee had given the job to Hanse, whose massive renovation résumé mostly consists of stateside projects. Hanse has designed two courses in Scotland (Craighead Links at Crail and Castle Stuart at Cabot Highlands), but this will be his first consulting gig in Great Britain. His initial brief will be to create a 10-year master plan for Sunningdale’s courses—the Old, designed by Willie Park, Jr., in 1901 and extensively renovated by Harry Colt in the ensuing years, and the New, designed by Colt in 1923. Both are regarded as among the best inland courses in the Kingdom.

Johnson goes solo. Following in the footsteps of his former Arnold Palmer Design Company colleague Thad Layton, Brandon Johnson has founded his own firm. APDC closed its doors in late 2023, after several years of operating under Layton and Johnson’s direction in the wake of Palmer’s 2016 death. I sent some questions to Johnson, and he plans to respond in time for next week’s DN.

The newest new course in St. Andrews. As first reported by Bunkered, Alvarez & Marsal Golf submitted a new proposal to build an 18-hole golf course on a site overlooking the city of St. Andrews, Scotland. Plans to develop this property date back nearly 25 years.

Sherman takes on a Dye resto. Scot Sherman, lead architect for Love Golf Design as well as a solo designer, will soon break ground on a “sympathetic restoration” of Delray Dunes Golf & Country Club, Pete Dye’s first design in Florida. “Some of what Pete built originally can be re-created,” Sherman told Golf Course Architecture, “but some things just cannot due to changes made to the layout over 50 years…. The course will be a combination of these original features, some restored green contours, and inspirations from Pete’s other designs built in the late 1960s and early 70s.” This project, along with Gil Hanse’s recent renovation of the Honors Course and Tom Doak’s upcoming work at Crooked Stick, suggests that the Dye renaissance I promised is well underway.

Birdie Bill. File this under “things I’ll try to understand better in the coming weeks”: a new Congressional bill, sponsored by U.S. Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Jimmy Panetta (D-CA), would extend copyright protection to golf courses. Fitzpatrick and Panetta seem primarily concerned with digital likenesses of golf courses being used in simulators and video games, but no doubt they also have an eye on terrestrial replicas such as The Lido. Would the “Birdie Bill” give golf courses reasonable authority to defend their intellectual property against advances in reproduction technologies? Or would it suppress architectural creativity by making golf construction unbearably litigious? I’m not sure, but given how things work in America, I find the latter outcome somewhat more likely.

A Course We Photographed Recently

Desert Forest Golf Club (Scottsdale, AZ)—designed by Robert “Red” Lawrence in 1962; renovated, with completely redesigned green complexes, by David Zinkand in 2013

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Quotable

“‘You Americans have made the game so bloody mechanical and plodding. You’ve made these mechanical courses, where all you do is hit the ball from point A to point B. Target golf, aye, they got that name just right. The best of your countrymen have become good golf robots, outstanding golf robots, all swinging the club the same way. You’ve made us change the way we think about the game. As a result, there’s virtually nobody left playing golf in the old Scottish manner: fast and unschooled. Not that long ago, Scottish golf had a style all its own—low, running hooks into the wind; quick, flat, handsy swings; wristy putting; bunker play where you nipped the ball cleanly; putting from twenty yards off the green; bump-and-run shots from anywhere. It was great fun, great sport, to play that way, but it wasn’t very efficient. You could be impressive, but it didn’t necessarily result in low scores. Of course, for a very long time we didn’t care much about scores.’” –Michael Bamberger, quoting John Stark, in To the Linksland