Restored Mira Vista reopens
Mira Vista Golf & Country Club in the San Francisco Bay Area has reopened after several years of effort to restore the historic course.
Mira Vista was originally designed by architect Robert Hunter in 1920 and is the only solo design by Hunter, author of The Links, one of golf architecture's most important books. While Willie Watson is often credited to the work, it was Hunter, a professor at nearby Berkeley, who led the formation of the club and mapped out its hilly routing.
In 2007, club members of the club undertook to restore the course as part of a long range master plan overseen by golf architects Forrest Richardson and Mark Fine. In preparation for the restoration, Richardson and Fine conducted a painstaking study of Hunter's original design and approach. They researched photo archives and studied original drawings and plans for Mira Vista, and spent countless hours taking in-depth looks at each hole and each stand of trees. No detail was overlooked in their effort to return the club's rich legacy of golf architecture.
The golf course remained open for the past six months while the restoration work was completed, which included extensive irrigation upgrades, new greens complexes, new bunkers with drainage, the levelling of several tee complexes and the implementation of an tree management program to improve the overall health of both of the trees on the course and the health and playability of the turf.
Hallmarks of the restoration include reclaiming 17 lost fairway bunkers, restoration of the famous risk-reward seventh hole, and rebuilding a series of bunkers on the eighteenth that had been removed during World War II. Panoramic views from Mira Vista’s four prominent ridge tops have also been reopened. Today, grand of downtown San Francisco and the North Bay greet golfers at more than two dozen points.
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