The Loop At Forest Dunes: Start and Finish of the Right Hand Loop

These two photos are an example of the brilliance of Tom Doak’s design work on The Loop at Forest Dunes.

In the top photo, I’m standing on the teeing ground of the first hole of the counter-clockwise loop.  In the second, I’m on the first green looking back up the first fairway. It’s also the fairway of the eighteenth for the clockwise loop. The teeing ground is to the left of the photo, and you can just make out the eighteenth green in the distance. The teeing ground for the first coming toward this green is just to the right of the treeline on the distant left.

In Doak’s design, the ninth and eighteenth greens are the same for either loop. On any given day, a player will tee off to one side or the other of the 18th green, and play out, to eventually finish the round coming into the eighteenth from the opposite direction.