A Romantic Notion for the Right Group of People
Brambles, although only an hour and 15 minutes north of downtown Napa is really a world away. On your way to Brambles (not The Brambles, just Brambles) you pass through the beautiful upper Napa Valley and leave the Valley itself at Calistoga, a super cute town known for hot springs and mudbaths. After that, the two lane Highway 29 twists and turns for about 20 miles up and over Mt St Helena and into Middletown, population 1114, so named because it is about half way between Calistoga and Clear Lake. After another 10 minutes of sparsely inhabited country you pass Brambles on the right. If you go another 25 minutes north of Brambles you get to the largest natural lake entirely in California, Clear Lake, which used to be a very popular destination for Bay Area getaways. There was a concert venue, Konocti Harbor that hosted A-list musical acts. The 49ers held a reunion golf tournament nearby every year. In the early 1900s, in an attempt to gloss up the area, they named several of the towns after European cities. Nice and Lucerne for example, are small towns around the shores of Clear Lake. However, something changed in the 90s and 00s and the Clear Lake area became much rougher. Drug use and addiction hit the area hard. Local mines dumped mercury tailings in the lake. Bay Area people who had vacationed here turned to Lake Tahoe for their vacations. Old resorts became run down and shuttered. Wildfires devastated whole towns. There also have been regular algae blooms that close the lake to boating and swimming during the summer high season further cursing the area. There are still semi-upscale neighborhoods and wineries on the West side near Kelseyville (named after notable Native American torturer Andrew Kelsey) but a drive through the town of Clear Lake is a real eyeopener to the poverty that has taken root.
20 miles south of Clear Lake and right next to Brambles is Hidden Valley Lake, a public18 hole championship course surrounded by a housing development of single-family homes established in the late 70s. Undeveloped 1/3 acre view lots can be purchased for as little as $10K. Lakefront 4 bedroom homes can be had for $700K. The Brambles itself is located in a large flat valley with irregular upslopes and large deposits of volcanic rock. The design was rooted in sustainability and using the land as naturally as possible. Also given the area can be a furnace in the summer, the use of Zoysia turf was a choice to make the course as drought resistant as possible. There is really only one hotel near Brambles, at the Twin Pines casino which is about a 10 minute drive. I had heard about the Brambles for a few years. There were cryptic posts on Instagram about a milking parlor and Zoysia turf but little other information like when it would open, would it be public or private or how much it would cost. Apparently, there were people involved, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, who, along with Tom Fazio and Tom Doak are on the Mt Rushmore of golf course design.
I have this theory that if one sends a super polite email to an elite private golf course and request to play, there’s a chance they will actually let you. I’ve done this a few times and one of four things happens.
- They ignore your request.
- They send you a reply that starts with regrettably.
- They say no but you might like our sister property.
- They say sorta yes.
The idea has had mixed results. Sand Hills in Nebraska said regrettably, etc. But I sent an email to Brambles and six months later I received a reply that the Brambles was potentially available for guest play. Could I please fill out a form, return it with our tee time availability and we’ll let you know. I promptly got back to whoever was behind this email using very proper language. I used Mr Lastname/Ms Lastname when addressing them, probably unnecessarily. I threw out a possible Monday tee time when our friend Roger was going to be in town. To my surprise and delight, they got back to me promptly confirming the tee time.
I have three buddies that have joined me for 6 trips to Bandon and I sent a text to the group letting them know we have the time. It’s a good group. We get along, we travel well together, we bet for pride only (or maybe a round of drinks). It’s also perfect because it’s only a foursome. Large group golf trips easily become very loud, drunken, blotchy red-faced sausage fests in which everyone seems to have a story to tell at way more decibels than is necessary. Then whoever is hearing the story has to laugh even louder because it’s the funniest damn story they ever heard even though it’s not, and then that guy has to tell his story because it’s probably even funnier than the original story but must be told as loud as possible so everyone can hear how funny it is. At that point I just head back to my room and watch whatever’s on the Golf Channel.
After I sent the text, Josh and Roger both reply quickly they are in. One guy in our foursome, we’ll call him Mark, was wondering maybe the price is a bit too spendy. It was too spendy. Guest fees would be $425 and we also needed to each hire caddies but since his 60th birthday was coming up Roger and I thought it be a good excuse to pay for him. He still thought it would be a waste of our money but said he was in.
The plan was to stay Sunday at the Twin Pines casino, play Monday, stay Monday at Twin Pines and drive home on Tuesday. When we arrived, the temperature was in the mid nineties and I was looking forward to a refreshing dip in the pool. The check-in lady said I was out of luck as the property, inexplicably, does not have a pool. From late spring through mid autumn the area gets no rainfall and is regularly over 100 degrees, how does this place not have a pool? I decided to mollify my pique by taking a gummy and doing some gaming. We ate at the casino restaurant which thankfully was open on a Sunday night.
Yep, This is the Place
We drove over the next morning and the turnoff from the main highway is a lightly maintained paved country road. Then you make a right onto the road Brambles is on and it’s just a gravel road. The “signage” is a large poster board tacked onto a piece of faded plywood. It’s like they’re advertising a yard sale. The road winds for about a mile or so and then you get to a gravel parking lot. That morning there were 2 or 3 other cars in the lot. There’s a caddie that meets us and grabs our bags from the car and directs us to the driving range, which is just a four practice mats and a net.
The Driving Range
They switch out my cart bag for a carry bag and I grab a few balls and my glove. I leave my range finder since the caddy says I won’t need it. We check in at Milking Parlor which serves as the pro shop, restaurant and bar. It’s about the size of the private dining area at my home country club. There are bathrooms and a semi open air locker room and shower in the back. The pro, Thomas is there to greet us along with the chef/bartender. Everything is included for the day except for caddies. We can eat and drink as much as want and play as much as want. We can use the showers and changing rooms in the back if we want. There is another tee time at 10:30 but other than that we have the course to ourselves.
The course itself sits on mostly flat prairie land that also has an old airport adjacent to the golf course. A seasonal creek, waste areas, mounding on the edges of the valley, scrub and century-old oaks provide obstacles and visual interest. The setting is prototypically Northern California, green hills in the spring turning to golden hills in the summer and fall, dotted large and small with green oaks. The Zoysia grass they used is a water-saving turf that is intended to allow this to play firm and fast. The theme here is a course attuned to the environment and the environment is hot in the summer and windy in the afternoon. The signature 9th hole, called the Airstrip, has a Road Hole template near the green. The relatively narrow fairway parallels the old airstrip on the right and the creek on the left. The approach is to hit over and left of the creek onto the green. If you bail out to the left of the green on the approach to avoid the creek on the right, there is a bunker that can swallow that bail out and then you’re left blasting out towards the creek, aka the Road. The morning had very little wind and everything was fairly straightforward.
My caddie was a local high school sophomore who has some golf skills; he won our impromptu caddie/player closest to the pin contest on Hole 8. Alas, I found out after we hit our drives on the first hole, he did not have a rangefinder and he had to ask one of the other caddies for distances. I had left mine in my cart bag thinking he would have one, so that kind of sucked. But that was about the only thing I could complain about. We finished up our 18 with this picture and had preordered cheeseburgers that were ready when we arrived back at the milking parlor. After an hour or so we decided to go out for some more golf. The wind was up from the west about 15-20 MPH and that called for a whole different strategy than the morning round. The holes play in a number of different directions with slight doglegs and angles that challenge you so much more when there is a cross wind or a partial facing wind. Areas that were easy to play from in the morning became impossible angles in the afternoon. A doable bailout in the morning became a bogey or double in the afternoon. It occurred that this was the defense of Brambles and the level of interest went up considerably. Mark and I played the front nine in the afternoon and called it a day. Roger and Josh continued on to complete the 36.
Call it a Day
“A romantic notion for the right group of people” is the first thing you read on the website. When I got back to the Milking Parlor, I grabbed a beer and took a shower. After the shower I sat on the porch with a gin and tonic, observing the whole of Brambles and a cooling breeze in may face. Yes, it’s in an odd location, pretty far from other upscale amenities but maybe that’s the point. It’s just for the golf and for getting away from everything that’s not golf. At that point I felt that I may want to be part of this right group of people.
