31 Photo: credit Faceperum velless ecepta del earum eosanimus endel magnihil praecabo dio ium volupta turissit mi, qui ommodis aut pero magnat Photo: credit I was unaware of the Cherry Hills connection to Pine Valley until I read Mark Fine’s comprehensive 2006 report on the course. To me, the most enduring element is the fourteenth hole, which is remarkably similar to Pine Valley’s thirteenth, one of the best holes in the world. Throughout the course, you can see from both Flynn’s drawings for Cherry Hills, as well as the as-built drawings from October 1922, that he had an affinity for breaking up sections of fairways in the same manner as Pine Valley. Some of those remain today on holes like five and seventeen. I’ve heard the term ‘Muirfield routing’ used to describe Cherry Hills, referring to its outer loop of nine holes, with the remaining nine on the interior of the property and, in Muirfield’s case, featuring a clockwise then counter-clockwise rotation. In this case, I think it had everything to do with how the property is essentially bisected, lengthwise, by Greenwood Gulch and to a greater extent, Little Dry Creek. Once Flynn made the decision to play along the creeks instead of crossing them multiple times, the result was a number of holes on the interior that all had water in play. The remaining holes were on the higher perimeter, playing along the hillsides which adds great interest, too. He would deploy this same solution at Huntingdon Valley a few years later. In contrast, Muirfield is routed over rambling links terrain, and I believe the routing there may have been more intentional, whereas I think Flynn arrived at his instinctively, which is genius in its own right. Our restored versions of the third and thirteenth greens represent the biggest impact of the project. It was suggested that we also move the par-three eighth to make room Photo: Evan Schiller Renaissance paid special attention to the impact of the Little Dry Creek, as seen here running between the greens of, from left, the fourteenth, eighth and seventh
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