Category: Golf Travel–Bandon

Sunday morning we woke up with the excitement and anticipation of a 36-hole day. Sheep Ranch followed by Bandon Dunes. The weather was perfect. It was cool in the morning, and there wasn’t too much wind.

We drove to the Sheep Ranch clubhouse, which is a good ways away from Lily Pond. On the way, you pass the main Bandon Lodge, Pacific Dunes, the Practice Center, and Old Macdonald.

There is a lot of commentary online about the order in which Bandon’s courses should be played. I’m not sure we had much of a choice, but Sheep Ranch was a wonderful start to the trip. It is wide open and very playable–you can get away with some loose shots here and there and still not make blowup-type numbers. I loved Sheep Ranch. The drone footage of Sheep Ranch on the Bandon website is incredible. It is the newest course at Bandon, and it has a mythological origin story. Mike Keiser and Phil Friedmann originally built it seemingly almost as a hobby or side project, then Coore and Crenshaw refined it, and it opened in 2020. One of the caddies said that it was called Sheep Ranch because someone told Mike Keiser that if he built a golf course on this property, it would become nothing but a sheep ranch. I haven’t read that anywhere else, but it sounds good.

I feel like I have returned from a religious pilgrimage for serious U.S. golfers. Bandon Dunes. Remote Southwest Oregon. Only golfers seem to know about it–I’ve mentioned the name to friends and family and get somewhat blank stares in return. Mentioning Bandon around other golfers, however, evokes hushed, slightly jealous responses like, “Ohhh, okay” [head nodding] and “Hmmm, cool.” If they have been, they know, and they are calculating several things all at once, like how does he get to do this, who is he going with. And if they haven’t been, they’re probably thinking, just what is Bandon, again? Well, Bandon is fantastic and fun and overwhelming all at once. Return trips are definitely a necessity.

Going into the trip, I feel like I did more than your average amount of research. I heard and read a lot about the difficulty in getting there, the size of the property, the purity of golf (no carts!), and, of course, the golf course architecture. After returning home, I feel like I just barely scratched the surface. This will be the first of a few posts on Bandon. I have a lot of thoughts on the subject now.