Havre Hills Golf Links (Survivor Course Design Contest)

[jivesinator]

Hello and welcome to Big Sky Country! My entry for the Survivor contest is located in Havre, Montana, a town in north-central Montana with a population of just under 10,000 people. Havre Hills is an American links style course, much like recent U.S. Open venues Erin Hills and Chambers Bay, and is heavily inspired by those courses, the courses at the Bandon Dunes site, and Ballyneal, among others. The course plays up to 7,994 yards from the tips but is a tough yet fair experience for golfers of all skill levels through the use of wide fairways, multiple options off the tee, and greens that are tough all around without many examples of extremely difficult putts (unless you hit to the wrong part of the green or short side yourself).



Here are the specifics of the course:



Par: 72



Distance:



Gold: 7,994 yards

Black: 7,600 yards

Blue: 7,163 yards

Green: 6,658 yards

White: 5,959 yards



Fairway Firmness: 0.92



Green Firmness: 0.85



Green Speed: 7.8/173 ft


Fun: If I did my job right, off the charts!

Note: Be careful on the tee shots of 9, 10, and 12 due to frames. I did my best to take away as much grass away from these spots but I couldn't do a perfect job without messing with the aesthetics of the shot. Sorry for that. Other spots might lag a bit as well but it shouldn't be enough to mess with tempo. I would suggest if you run into lag troubles at other points that you reduce settings within your advanced graphics settings, particularly the Object Detail, Shadow Quality, and Sky Quality. I tried something new for me with planting and it isn't optimized as well as I would want. Anyway, hope you enjoy your stay in Montana!

[jivesinator]

Here are some pictures that I took inspiration from while trying to replicate the Northern Montana environment:

[sharky21]

Really nice course. Those mountains look great. They were a great back drop. Tough course played from the tips in the high winds great challenge. 12 hole was a great hole design.

[Celtic Wolf]

Great course, excellent job on the sculpting, lots of contours throughout the course. I think the only flat surface you'll find is on the tees, so there's always something else to take in when playing. A few tight landing areas on approaches which if I was playing in a tournament I'd probably avoid, but on this round I went for it with differing results. Not much eye candy but to be honest it didn't need dressed up, I could learn to try and make the course look good without the dressing up. When I seen 5 tees I was going to play from the 2nd back with player clubs but when I seen the yardage I thought best and played from the middle.